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grassroots

LIFESTYLE

ANGUS BUCHAN

In this day and age in which we are living many people are put off by Christianity because of the way that we Christians
conduct ourselves.
Obviously, the Lord has convicted me of this very thing and that’s why I’m sharing it with you. We need to put on the char-
acter of the new man. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV), “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old
things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”
And yet because of the pressure of this life in which we are living at the moment, some of us are literally living in a pressure
cooker that is about to explode, and we tend to RETALIATE. We retaliate towards our fellowman and we give back what
we receive. That is not God’s way and that is why being a Christian is not for sissy’s. In fact, it is the very opposite.
A wonderful evangelist by the name of Gypsy Smith lived in the UK many years ago, and he said: “It takes a live fish to
swim against the current and it takes a dead fish to flow with it.” My dear Christian, we need to be different and if we look
at Colossians 3:12-17 we will see that the Lord says: we have got to become kind, humble, meek and patient. We have got
to bear with one another and forgive one another. We have got to actually exude the peace of God out of our very per-
sonalities, so that we can be called ‘different’. People should come to us and want to be like us. We should not be trying
to persuade them, but they should come to us and say: “We want the joy, peace and patience that we see in your life.” If
we are bad-tempered, critical, cynical and sarcastic no one would want to be near us, or to be like us.
That is why we need to spend time on the mountain every single morning with Jesus, because the more time we spend
with a person the more we will become like that person. I have been preaching the Gospel for almost 40 years now and
I can listen to a man preach The Word of God, and in 5 minutes I can tell whether that man spent time on the mountain
with Jesus Christ, or whether he is just warming up a meal that he presented the Sunday before.