Confront or Conform

CONFRONT OR CONFORM : YOUR CHOICE

BY CAMERON MCKENZIE

Life is full of choices. Everyday every person has to choose if they want to get up, eat breakfast, go to work, or not do any of those things. Those are the mundane choices we deal with in our lives. Now, if you are keeping up with my articles, last month we learned about how we are free in Christ. How Christ broke our chains and opened our cages, and how often times we choose to sit in that cage and do nothing about it. Taking a step out of the cage, walking free from our sin. That’s a decision I hope each and every person made last month, as it will change your life tremendously.

Now what? We are free from our cages and have allowed Christ to renew our minds and change our beings, but what do we do with that knowledge? Well, this month in student ministry, that is exactly what we’ve have been teaching our students. We now have a new choice to make, a new decision

to wake up too. WE GET TO DECIDE IF WE WANT TO BE BOLD IN OUR FAITH AND SHOW THE WORLD WHO WE ARE. Have you ever been bold in your faith and done something that people noticed? What about a time when you could have been bold and decided against it? I’ve got some of both. We probably all have those moments in life when we saw an opportunity to be bold, a chance to stand up for our faith, and choose to conform, choose to do nothing to show that Christ has made us anew. Those moments will stick with a person forever, and I think they should, but they should also empower us to never make that mistake again.

Throughout scripture, people made choices like this. We know the story of Peter, choosing to deny Christ three times that day. Peter! The rock Jesus would build his church on, deciding to conform to the world and not be bold in his faith. I don’t want to focus too much on those stories though. I’d rather share a story when a person decided to show his faith in a bold way, and that leads me to the book of Daniel. The story I want to reminisce on isn’t Daniel when he is in the lion’s den, or even the three friends in the furnace. It’s from before both of these stories when Daniel was still with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. King Nebuchadnezzar had taken over Judah with his armies and was trying to assimilate the Israelites into Babylonian culture. These four men were, among others, chosen to be trained for three years in the kingdom. They were given a certain allowance of food and wine from the king’s finest. These four stood up to the officials and asked if they could only eat vegetables in order to not defile themselves before their God. The officials begrudgingly said yes, and the four men surpassed all expectations and were the best of the best among those chosen to live in the king’s service. This was their chance to fit in, this was their chance to show their new king how obedient and willing to follow orders they were. but they decided instead to be bold, they decide to follow God in all things, including what they were to eat and drink.

Now, this decision might not seem like a bold statement in today’s society. Plenty of people choose to go on special diets. For them though, it was their first chance to stand up for their God even in a rival’s palace, and they did. This allowed them to see God’s favor in their lives, and gave them courage for future choices to be bold. Later in Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego make another choice and decide not to bow down and worship this king. What a decison to make in front of everyone, especially people ready to kill you for it! I don’t want to pretend that choosing not to eat the king’s food wasn’t a hard decision, but it wasn’t as bold of a choice as not worshiping him when commanded to.