In this article, I would like to talk to you about something that should be one of the most important things in a Christian’s life but is something that I think most of us don’t pay nearly enough attention to. I want to talk about standards. More specifically, I want to talk about “The Standard” of God’s Word.
My dad was in the carpet business in West Tennessee for 53 years. At one time, I had planned to follow in his footsteps and I spent a lot of time around his carpet store when I was growing up. I learned a lot of things about a lot of things. One of those things was the importance of standards. There were quality standards, financial standards, standards of professional conduct, standards of measurement.
Let’s talk about that last one, standards of measurement. I remember that, once, someone came into one of our stores in Memphis carrying a string. They said my room is 10 strings wide and 20 strings long, or something similar, and they asked roughly how much it would cost to carpet that room. I thought that was kind of funny at the time, because they had used a string to measure the room instead of a tape measure. However, I have to admit, at least they did use a standard of measurement (the length of the string) and it did serve the basic purpose of letting us know how big the room was, at least close enough to give them a rough estimate of the cost involved, though I’m sure we did send someone with a tape measure before we actually installed the carpet.
Why did this work? Because there was a standard being used, allbeit an unconventional one, and because that standard was constant. The string was the same length at the customer’s house and at our store. If the string had changed length from one place to the other, it wouldn’t have been useful at all, for obvious reasons. When it comes to standards, consistency is important.
Standards of measurement don’t change from place to place and they also don’t change over time. The study in which I am now sitting is 12 feet by 14 feet. It was 12 by 14 the day construction on the house was completed, it is 12 by 14 now as I type this, and it will be 12 by 14 ten years from now. That means the same thing today that it did the day construction was completed because the length of a foot doesn’t change with time.
You know what else doesn’t change with time? God.
Malachi 3
6 “For I am the Lord, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.
Hebrews 13
8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Because God doesn’t change with time, you know what else doesn’t change with time? The meaning of His Word.
As time goes by, sometimes perspectives change. My dad used to have a farm. We had a very large John Deer tractor on the farm we called Big John. When I was a small child, this thing seemed about as big as a ten story building to me. As it happened, my dad no longer really did much of anything with the farm and I wasn’t around Big John for a period of at least ten years. One day, when I was about 17 or 18, my dad and I were out on the farm. I walked up to a tractor and I asked my dad which one it was. He said “that’s Big John”. I said that it couldn’t possibly be because I remembered having had to look up at the hubcaps of Big John and the tractor I was standing beside was big but it wasn’t nearly that big. My dad laughed and said “you were a whole lot smaller back then so your perspective has changed”. Yes, my perspective had changed but Big John had not. It was the same size it had always been. It was very understandable that my perspective had changed. I was much bigger and so Big John seemed much smaller. My perspective was valid and made sense, given the situation. However, that did not change the reality of Big John’s size.
The Bible was written a very long time ago and it’s easy to think that some of it may no longer apply in today’s world. After all, times change, don’t they? Yes, times do change but God does not. His standards are the same today as they were two thousand years ago and they will remain the same forever. So, today’s culture may make it hard to understand some of the standards set forth in Scripture but it does not lessen the relevance of those standards. A change in our ever-shifting human perception does not change God’s constant reality.
Let’s go back to physical measurements and floor covering. Let’s say that I want to change the flooring in my study from hard wood to carpet, in order to improve the acoustics. As I said before, my study is 12 by 14, which is 168 square feet. What if I can’t afford 168 square feet of carpet. No problem. I will just say that a foot is now, in my study, twice as long as normal. Great. Now my study is just 6 by 7, which is only 42 square feet, one fourth as much as before. I will just go to Lowe’s and get 42 square feet of carpet and that will work out fine. Right? No, of course not. Just because I declare that a foot is now different in my study, that doesn’t mean that it is actually different and it certainly doesn’t mean that this standard that I say I have defined for my study also applies at Lowe’s. A standard that can be redefined at will is not actually a standard.
But we do that all of the time with God’s Word. Our situations change. Our prospectives change. What we want changes. What we think we need changes. But God does not change. We have seen that He Himself has said that. And we have His Word. If He does not change then the meaning of His Word does not change. That is as it should be because any standard that changes is not a standard. His Word is not just “a standard” but “The Standard”.
He has set forth many standards in the ultimate standard of His Word. There is one God and it is Him. He is Who He is (Exodus 3:14) and so we do not get to define Him. We are not to place anything before Him (Exodus 20:3). We are not to take His name in vain (Exodus 20:7). We are to honor our parents (Exodus 20:12). We are not to murder (Exodus 20:13). We are not to commit adultery (Exodus 20:14). We are not to steal (Exodus 20:15). We are not to lie (Exodus 20:16). We are not to be jealous of others (Exodus 20:17). We are to always submit to the government (Romans 13:1) unless the law of the government directly contradicts the law of God (Acts 5:29). We are to truly love God and love others (Mark 12:30-31). There is much more Scripture and thus much to say about each one of these things and how these things should be lived out in all of our lives. These are only a few of God’s unchanging standards and failing to meet even one of them even once is sin.
Look at what Jesus said here.
Luke 6
46 “But why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do the things which I say?
47 Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like:
48 He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock.
49 But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell. And the ruin of that house was great.”
Jesus asks why we would call Him Lord and then not do what He says. That’s a really good question for Him to ask. The word “Lord” means master. For Him to truly be our Lord, we must submit to Him and that means submitting to His Word as the ultimate standard. He says that we are to do what He says and what He says is found in His Word. He is consistent and so, naturally, the meaning of His Word is consistent. We must ground ourselves in this consistent standard if we are to truly follow Him, if we are to not just call ourselves Christians but actually be Christians.
We live in a culture that tries to define right and wrong moment by moment and situation by situation. We don’t like consistent standards because there is accountability in consistency. But there is also stability in consistency. We try to let what we believe define God’s standards instead of letting God’s standards define what we believe. We humans are fickle beings. What we believe and feel changes from person to person and situation to situation. A fluid standard is not a standard. No wonder our culture has become so unstable. We have built our society on the shifting sand of the world rather than on the rock of God’s Word. The stream is now rising and that sand is eroding from beneath our nation’s feet. Each of us had better make sure we have a solid rock to stand on beneath all that sand or we are going to be in trouble.
I think one issue we have with this is that we tend to look at all these standards in God’s Word and say “I can’t do all that” and so we don’t really try all that hard. God knew that we could not perfectly meet these standards and so He met them for us. Salvation is the most wonderful gift that anyone could ever receive but we do have to reach out to receive it. It isn’t just automatic.
I’m going to talk about the plan of salvation here. This is something that many Christians have heard taught all their life but, no matter how familiar you may be with it, I ask you not to tune me out. I think this is something that even many Christians don’t have a really good handle on and a good understanding of salvation is key, not just for becoming a Christian in the first place and making sure that your salvation is genuine but also for understanding how we should live as Christians.
How are we saved? Can we be good enough? Romans 3:10 says that no one is righteous and Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So no, we cannot be good enough because we all sin.
What do we deserve because of that sin? Read Romans 6:23. The first part says “the wages of sin is death”. What are “wages”? They are what we get for doing something, like getting paid for doing a job. So, what we should get for our sin is death. In this case, what does “death” mean? It means eternal spiritual separation from God. After physical death, it also means going to Hell, an eternal lake of fire. So, for our sin, we deserve to be eternally separated from God and to forever burn in Hell.
So, that’s it? No! What does the next part of Romans 6:23 say? It says “but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”. How did Jesus pay for this gift of eternal life? 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that Christ never sinned but he took our sins on himself and Romans 5:8 says that He died as punishment for those sins. So, the son of God paid for the most precious gift that we could ever receive with his own blood.
This absolutely is a gift, in that there is nothing we can do to earn it and Christ paid for it, but, as part of this deal, He does get something in return. In exchange for this payment, He gets our life.
Look at what Paul said here.
1 Corinthians 6
19 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?
20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
So, you see, Christ purchased our freedom. In so doing, He purchased us. As Christians, we are free but we are free in Him. We are not free to just do our own thing. We are supposed to follow Him, to apply to our lives the standards we have been talking about which are found in His word.
As part of receiving the gift of salvation, we have to repent, which means to turn from our sins. This doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect. We cannot be perfect, we cannot meet God’s standard of righteousness (see Romans 3:10 and 3:23, as noted above) and this is still true, even after salvation. After all, that’s why Jesus payed the price for our salvation, because we couldn’t. However, I think we overly tend to down play the importance of repentance in living the Christian life. The importance of repentance to God is a theme that runs throughout scripture in both the Old and New Testament. In fact, it is one of the very first things that Jesus preached about when He began His earthly ministry. In Mark 1:15, Jesus said “Repent, and believe in the gospel”. Submission is necessary for salvation and without repentance there is no true submission. Even Christians still struggle with sin but we must see our sin for what it is, an abomination before a completely holy God. We must truly be remorseful to God and always strive to turn from sin. We must also realize that we are not going to do that perfectly and the only way that we can be reconciled with God is through the sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf.
How do we get this most precious of all gifts? Read John 3:16.
For God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotten Son (Jesus)
that whoever believes in him (whoever means everyone)
should not perish, but have everlasting life (not die spiritually and be separated from God)
To get this gift from Jesus, you have to ask him to save you. Romans 10:13 says that “whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”.
You have to pray and ask Jesus to save you and that goes something like this:
“Jesus, I know that I am a sinner and that I deserve to be separated from God for eternity. I know that I don’t deserve forgiveness but I also know that you suffered and died to save me from my sin. I know that you then rose, victorious over that sin. I repent of my sins and I want to ask you to come into my heart and save me and I give my life to you.”
I pray that you have done or will do this but don’t do this flippantly. This is the most important decision you will ever make. If you are to truly be saved, if you are to truly become a Christian, these can’t just be words. You have to truly give your life to Him. It is that act of submission, not the words, that save you.
We should be baptized after we are saved (Matthew 28:19). Baptism does not save us. It symbolizes Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. This testifies to the world that we have given our life to Him.
Did you pray the prayer we talked about a minute ago or something similar? If you did and you were sincere then your name is now written in the Lamb’s Book of Life and your life belongs to Him. If you have never prayed that prayer, if you do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, then I urge you to give this your full attention. Nothing is more important.
I have talked a lot in this article about changing prospectives and constant standards. One of those changing prospectives concerns religion. We have come to the point where many people believe that any religion is fine, as long as you have one, and even not having one is OK. Some professing Christians even believe this but this prospective is completely at odds with the basic tenants of Christianity. God’s unchanging standard clearly says that this is not so. In John 14:6, Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father, except by me”. Do you know Him?
If you don’t know Him, then you can take care of that right now. If you do know Him, then start spending time with Him regularly in His Word and in prayer, getting to really know Him. I’m going to tell you something. Who He really is is not at all who popular culture would have you believe He is. Study for yourself and find out who He really is. Start doing your best to do what you find out He wants you to do from studying His Word. Jesus met God’s standard for us so that we don’t have to be perfect but that does not mean that the standard doesn’t matter. If you call yourself a Christian, then dig into the Word and find out about the one you profess to follow and start living like you believe what you say you believe. If we will all do that, then a revival like this world has rarely seen will sweep this nation. If we do not, then I fear that this nation will not last much longer. It is not too late but, if change is to happen, it will come by God working through us. If that is to happen, we must ground ourselves in His unchanging standards.
No matter what does or does not happen to this nation right now, this nation is not eternal because this earth is not eternal. God and His Kingdom is eternal. You were created in His image and so You too are eternal. In this ever-changing world, where it seems that nothing is constant, wouldn’t you like to have one good and unchanging thing you can cling to that is also eternal? It’s right there. It’s His Word. And It is a life changer and a world changer. It has always been and It always will be. Check it out.
