A word to those who want to follow Jesus

Here follows the testimony of a precious brother in the Lord, for whom I have the utmost respect, regarding how we who follow Jesus can live in this world without becoming of this world.

Jesus is coming again soon, and we will all stand before HIM. Then we will know in a more real way how much He had loved us and how we had reciprocated HIS love.

As a brother has often exhorted us, “It is not how close I can walk near the edge of a cliff without falling, it is how closely I want to walk with Jesus.”

Am I caught up with the things that the Lord is caught up with?

There are so many things that I know nothing about, so many places I have not visited and I have but one life. I see the great men of God who walked the normal Christian life, for them it was making every moment count for God.

I heard another man of God say, “Thank God that some of the great men of God were not caught up with football or sight seeing.”

When a piece of work is silent about the existence of God, when God's role is substituted by magic or human bravery or anything else, it is surely as same as idolatry.

“Well, it is only a story,” one might say, but doesn't it propagate unbelief in the world?

God, teach us to pour out ourselves for You just as You did for us!

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19-21

The testimony quoted above was first published as comment number 13 here, but there is also a further word on this topic by the same brother, which I'd like to append.

The central issue is about denying the existence of God and substituting the need and role that only God should and can fill, by magic or human bravery or luck or something else. To an unbelieving world it is adding one more option to the clutter.

The question is no longer right or wrong, the question for the great men of God has been to increase in their service for the Lord, in the pursuit of which, even legitimate things were often given up.

What then can we say for all the good intentions that conjure up a story drenched in witchcraft!?