Are You an Unbalanced Christian? I Hope So.

“If I spend any more time here at the Oak Street Bible Shop I’ll need to sleep here too”, said Glen. He really did put in a lot of time there.

“Just keep buying books and I’ll put in a cot for you”, said Joy.

“I’ll keep buying and I’ll keep sending people here too. I tell them what great books you have. Have any of them come in? He asked.

“We had a lady the other day” said Gary,”She mentioned your name, but she wasn’t too complimentary”, he added.

“So what did she say, did she call me a prophecy nut?"

“Well not exactly, she said you did have a lot of knowledge, but, but that you were not a balanced Christian.”

“Sounds like a circus act” said Sue in a rare touch of humor. Joy spoke up, “There is a lot of emphasis on being well balanced these days”, she said, I heard Chuck Swindoll give a sermon where he said he hoped , above all, he was a well balanced Christian.

“He can be so balanced he’s boring”, added Gary. Glen put the book he had been looking at, back on the shelf. “I don’t understand Chuck” he said with exasperation. “Chuck can rightly divide the word of truth with the best of them, even in prophecy.” This was a high compliment, coming from Glen. “But he’s taking some kind of social criterion or psychological idea and trying to apply it to individual Christians, and the scriptures won’t bear him out. I mean, was John the Baptist well balanced? Did he like to go to the beach with his wife and kids” Did he grill out? Hell,” he said, and Joy winced when he strayed into the language he once used, “When the people of power and authority saw John coming, they cringed with fear. John just would not compromise, like they all did, including the religious leaders.”

“Especially the religious leaders”, said Sue, with emphasis.

“He knew the truth and he said it, to anyone and everyone. He was set apart from conception to be a prophet and he was a prophet right up until the day they killed him. Is that well balanced? Was Ezekiel well balanced, was Jeremiah? Ezekiel was commanded to lie in the street of Jerusalem on his side for forty days, meanwhile acting out a pantomime of the coming siege of the city and cooking his food with “the dung that cometh out of man, human shit”.

Joy winced again, but said nothing. No one else was in the store and Glen did know what he was talking about.

Sue intervened, “God relented and let him use animal dung” she said,”That’s in Ezekiel chapter four.”

“Okay” Glen said, but that was not God’s original instruction. He wanted him to do something shocking to wake people up. Anyway, manure is manure, and his performance was bizarre, not balanced. God told Jeremiah not to weep when his wife died, not one tear.”

“That was Ezekiel too”, said Gary”, his Bible open to Ezekiel 24:16.

“Yeah, you’re right” said Glen, “I get excited sometimes”. They all looked at him with sympathy, he was speaking of things that they knew meant a lot to him.

“They castrated Daniel when he was a young boy, the Babylonians did. You never see a picture of Daniel with a beard. There was no little Daniel Jr. But look at the visions that God gave to him. All I’m saying is, sure there is plenty of room for regular normal people, I guess.” Glen said this almost grudgingly. “But God still needs so-called extremists, people who specialize, man. They specialize and they know what they are talking about.”

“And what they are doing, too,” added Gary. “It’s not all knowledge, you know.”

“There is a wonderful woman who comes in here” said Sue. “She is a widow and she takes care of women whose husbands have died. She gives them things to read that have helped her. She visits them and prays for them. And what is so neat, she doesn’t do all this and then drop them. She hangs in with them, year after year.”

“She’s a specialist too” said Glen, with quiet admiration. “I wouldn’t have any idea how to help people like that.”

“We all have our callings”, said Joy. ‘God made us to do different things.”

“And” added Sue, “The Holy Spirit gives us different gifts to serve God with. He not only puts the desire into your heart to do some certain thing, he shows you how to do it.”

At this point, a teen aged boy came out of the back room. He was wearing his hat backwards and had three rings in his right ear. We were startled because we didn’t know he was there. He paused with his hand on the brass door knob, and looked back.

“You people are weird”, he said.

Joy spoke up, “We’re weird all right,” she laughed. “We’re so weird we’re unbalanced!”

For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it not therefore of the body? I Cor. 12:15