BREAKING UP THE PARTY

Lord, You sent Your Son to save and not to condemn The world that am in. I need tell my friends about this. They left too soon, and didn't get to hear the whole story.

The world that I am in, Lord, is a world where materialism is slowly numbing us. We want more and more of things that will be useless next season. More dangerously, we want these things to fill up our longings - and even Your children are led to believe that these will save us.

The world that I am in works hard and parties hard. We love to spend countless hours at work for months on end, at times nearing burn-out. Then to reward ourselves, or even to somehow self-medicate, we party - hard.

The world that I am in wants to get ahead in life. There's an obsession with excellence or highest standards. We would even do or give up anything for the sake of these. Excellence and high standards are great, but only if they are coming from the one who authored them, You. Apart from You, we destroy our own lives, the lives of those around us, we destroy Your creation.

The world that I am in is really in need of You, Lord. Blindly, we believe in substitutes because of this need - that's why we look to sex, and cars, and homes, and diplomas, and money, and food, and... The searching goes on and on and on - so does the striving.

This is the world I am in - the world for whom You sent Your Son to save and not to condemn. Help me, Lord, to tell my world about Your Son, because right now, they think that He has come to condemn them.

Now that I described my world, perhaps the reason why it thinks You've come to condemn is because it is so different from Yours. It is somehow afraid that You've come to call the cops on us, order everyone to clean up, and break up the party.

But we know what goes on in these parties - Solomon called vanity. Could this be what You're saving the world from?