Ashamed of His Party

It’s election time and if you’ve turned on your TV or radio in the past few days, you’ve heard about lots of bad things that lots of inexperienced people with horrible voting records and money-driven interests have done. It’s mud slinging and it’s difficult to come out clean if you’re in the political arena. And then there are the ads by those candidates who are afraid of the negative effects that party affiliation might have. In one Huntsville, Alabama ad, a candidate for a local office included this line: “It doesn’t matter, for this office, what party you belong to.” This man obviously is a member of one of the two major parties. He obviously is afraid that his party membership might be a vote-loser for him. But he also obviously wants to remain aligned with his party. He is, rather transparently, wanting to retain membership in a party of which people in Huntsville are currently largely unsupportive. But he wants to win in Huntsville. He wants voters to think they can vote for him without endorsing his party. In short, at least for the moment, he wants to separate his membership in the big party from the local activities of this week.

But we know that membership in any organization is an implied endorsement of the platforms and ideals of that organization. If you are a member of The National Right to Life Association, it’s safe to assume you are pro-life. If you’re a band booster in the local high school, I might assume that you are interested in the success of that band. If you are a member of the NRA, I’m thinking you are against more governmental gun control. And that’s how it should be.

Now, let’s put that principle in a spiritual context. Sometimes people have a membership in the body of Christ. They like to wear the name “Christian.” But if membership in the body requires some personal risk or entails some loss of prestige, then they would like to “separate” their membership from the “real world”. They might not say the words, but their lifestyles reflect a similar statement to that of the local politician: “It doesn’t matter, for this particular job, relationship, decision or activity, whether I am a Christian or not.”

Sisters, we must not compartmentalize our Christianity. Christianity is not merely a piece of the pie. It is the hub of the wheel in our lives. Everything else we may do in life is just a spoke in that wheel. Every aspect of life must be affected powerfully by the fact that Christianity is our hub–the center of our very beings. We cannot afford to have one single area of our lives to remain unaffected by our Christianity. We hold a membership that is very costly. It required the blood of the Son of God. That membership is recorded in heaven–our headquarters. May we never be ashamed of that affiliation and may it be relevant in all of the “local activities” that make up our heaven-bound lives.