conspicuous

con·spic·u·ous

[kuhn-spik-yoo-uhs]

adjective

1. easily seen or noticed; readily visible or observable.

2. attracting special attention, as by outstanding qualities or eccentricities.

I had some people over to the house today, and was talking with them when a couple of my cousins showed up unannounced. They were there for a short time and then left. Once they were gone one of the guys that was there said "I've got a lot of family just like that ... scumbags". It was comical, accurate, and offensive all at once. At the end of 1 Timothy 5 is a section about promoting people to leadership and how it shouldn't be done quickly without proper vetting, then (after a famous alcohol related verse that I'll decline to comment on at this time), Paul states:

24 The sins of some men are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later.25 So also good works are conspicuous, and even those that are not cannot remain hidden.


This doesn't even really need necessarily to be in the Bible. Most anyone would accept this concept as true. Much of the bad and good that there is to a person can be readily seen, and some of it cannot be. What a simple truth. It is stated to Timothy as reminding advice as he chooses who he will lay hands on to help him lead. Thinking about it I realized how much we choose leaders in our Christian culture based on what we don't know instead of what we do. Even now as I fill out job applications I adjust my resume to fit each different job and make myself sound more qualified; a perfect fit. If it's a job in the Christian sector, call it a ministry. If it's a secular job, call it a program. Slide this in here, tweak that part there, do what you can to conceal the bad and accentuate the good. It makes me sick. 


When I came to Calvary I believed that I had been "saved" at 7, lived  a complacent, self-focused life until around 20, at which point God "woke me up". I honestly believed that to be the truth. After years of seeking my God and learning about him in his word I understand the true reality of my personal history. I began my real relationship with God at about 20 years of age. Everything before that was rubbish. Would I have been hired at 23 had I known that and admitted it? It's a question that can't be answered, elsewise I wouldn't have asked it. My point though is that they didn't know me. Few people really know anyone. So unless you are like one of my cousins, who rode in on their Harleys with long hair and tattoos, joking about drugs and chain smoking the whole time, people seem to assume the best, especially in a church setting. I talked with a guy who I barely knew the other day and it turned out he was a volunteer youth worker. In our first conversation he talked about some past issues and mentioned that he had a DWI arrest in his past. It was refreshingly honest. 


We need to ask ourselves what we really know about each other. How do I KNOW that they love God? Do I see their passion for the kingdom? Do I see their sacrifice? Is it apparent that they are more concerned with the next world than this one? Do they love others in a way that is nonsense to the common way of thinking in our culture? I can answer these questions about only a handful of the scores of people that I would say I know well. Why? The Bible seems clear that we should know each other much more deeply that we do, much more deeply than our Christian culture requires us to. The superficiality of it cripples us from accomplishing what we should. This is why we're so shocked at the divorce, or the arrest, or the sudden falling away from the faith of people we thought were "fine". We always assumed they were ok EVEN THOUGH WE NEVER REALLY SAW THEM LOVE GOD. 


The point of this passage is that we should be seeing the goodness of God in each other is we are really his children and called according to his purpose. Not that we should be arrogantly promoting it and displaying it and manipulating it (like my resumes), but that it should be the conspicuous nature of our lives. I write this at my parents dining room table and across from me stands a display cabinet my dad and I rescued from a college that was closing. It was a college my dad attended. The cabinet bears special meaning to my dad because of the plaque that is mounted on the face of it just above the doors. It reads:

IN MEMORY OF

JAMES LAUREN HOLLISTER

Oct. 30, 1949-Sept. 30, 1970

FROM HIS FRIENDS

WHO SAW JESUS CHRIST

IN HIS LIFE

I obviously never met this man, he died of cancer at 21 years of age nearly a decade before I was born. He was my dads college roommate and by all accounts his truest friend. I wish I could have met him and known him. What an incredible epithet if it is true. But it should not be incredible. Not at all. We are all children of God. We have the mind of Christ. It is the duty of every follower of Christ to live a life where someone should be able to say that they saw Jesus Christ in our lives. The fact that this is so rare serves as a condemnation to the way we live. We must become active participants in the effort to change our culture. I want people to think of Jesus when they think about who I am and what I did with my life.