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Is My Love Covered with Wax?

and so be sincere and blameless in the day of Christ.
Philippians 1:10b

A story is told of a zoo that was noted for their great collection of different animals. One day the gorilla died, and to keep up the appearance of a full range of animals, the zookeeper hired a man to wear a gorilla suit and fill in for the dead animal. It was his first day on the job, and the man didn't know how to act like a gorilla very well. As he tried to move convincingly, he got too close to the wall of the enclosure and tripped and fell into the lion exhibit. He began to scream, convinced his life was over..until the lion spoke to him: "Be quiet, or you're going to get us both fired!"

The world we are living in, is such a world. We all live with different masks for different situations.

The Greek word used for pure/sincere has a couple of derivations. Literally in the original language it means, to judge by sunlight. In the first century in ancient Rome, fine pottery was very fragile, and it easily developed cracks. And people would cover up those cracks with wax and sell them in a marketplace. The only way to judge the condition of a fine pottery would be to hold it up to the light and judge it by the light to see if there are cracks that are being covered over with deception.

So in simple terms, to be sincere means there is no cover-up in your life. There are no cracks that you are trying to hide in your life, and there is integrity and wholeness about your life. There is genuine wholeness about your life. They aren't in different components.

In other words what Paul is saying is that we cannot be one person on Sunday, and someone else on Monday. There are no cracks that make divisions and separations in your life, but there is completeness  and wholeness. So, if we are to be sincere in our Christian lives, then we must be growing in our love for God and for one another, and demonstrating that love. And if we do, then we are sincere. If we do not, then our life becomes segmented into components, and there is a differentiation between what we say and how we live.

The word blameless is another interesting word. It means to live your life without stumbling. The word also has the idea of not causing others to stumble - which means we are to live the kind of life that doesn't cause other people to stumble as well.

This is the result of loving others. We love without our lives being like a cracked piece of pottery, that there would be need to cover-up things in our lives to give appearance of piety when in reality we are not, and it would cause us also to stumble as well.

In this small verse Paul also tells us how long we should love like this and seek to grow in our love? It is until the day of Christ Jesus. This means the Philippians were to be always moving forward in pursuing love and that there would never be a time of rest, or that they had arrived, but they were to pursue love in greater and in large capacity until the day of Christ Jesus. In other words, they must be always pressing on in loving God and in loving others, abounding still more and more.

This should challenge all of us no matter who we are or where we are, no matter if we have been a Christian for a few years or for several decades, whether this is a time in our lives where we are strong in our devotion towards God, or perhaps we have drifted away from the Lord. No matter where we are, there needs to be yet more love until the day of Christ Jesus.

Sometimes our life, sometimes our love, sometimes our prayers can be insincere. There's wax inside. The best example of insincere love is Judas Iscariot. He betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. What did he betray Jesus with? A Kiss. A kiss as we all know is an expression of love. Judas walks up to Jesus in the garden, and kisses him. Jesus even remarked and said, "you betrayed the son of man with a kiss. That was insincere and impure love.

Dear Friends let us examine our lives whether we have been sincere and blameless. The same person inside and outside. The same person at home, church, school, college and work place. If not, let us ask God to give us the strength.

God Bless you.

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Location: Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

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