Our own little christian world...

For the past few days I have been wondering and thinking about what you should do and what you shouldn't do as a christian. Do you have to follow rules and act like a good christian or just live your life & do whatever you want to do.... Do you have to stay in your own safe circle of christian friends or is it better not to? If I look around me a lot of my christian friends & family members are coming up with rules. But did God & Jesus really intend those rules? Isn't it all about having a relationship with Jesus? And shouldn't you be out there in the world and see what's out there, but not belonging to the world? I find it hard....I talked about it with a friend of mine and she came up with the story about the firstborn children in Egypt. She heard this story during a churchservice, I would like to share it with you. This story is part fictional and part non-fictional:

• During the time the Hebrews were in Egypt and were slaves for the Pharaoh of Egypt. God told Moses what he intended to do to get the Hebrews out of Egypt. There were several plagues and one of them was that all the firstborn children were destroyed. God told Moses what the Hebrews would need to do if they did not want their firstborn destroyed. God said that they were to consider a certain day as the beginning of the first month of their year. The first month of our year is January, but the first month of the Jewish year is called Nisan, and it is in the springtime.
  On the tenth day of that first month every family of the Hebrews was to take a young sheep, or lamb, and keep it until the fourteenth day. Just as the sun was going down on the fourteenth day they were to kill these lambs, and the blood was to be sprinkled on the doorposts of their houses and over the tops of the doors. That night they were to roast the lambs and the families were to eat them during the night.
  If a family was small and couldn't eat a whole Iamb in one night, then the family next door could be their guests, and in that way one lamb would do for two families.
  None of that lamb was to be left until the morning. If they couldn't eat it all, then what was left over was to be burned inside the house.
  While they were eating the lamb, the Hebrews were to be dressed, all ready to leave Egypt, for God knew that the next morning Pharaoh, the king, would insist they must leave right away.
  That night when the power of God destroyed all the firstborn of Egypt, wherever the blood of the lamb was found on the doorposts of the houses, the firstborn child in that house was not destroyed.

• It happened to be that a man, who thought he was very religious and lived in God's law didn't listen to Moses orders from God and didn't sprinkle the blood on his doorpost...His firstborn was killed... But his neighbor, who was a sinner and didn't act like God's law, listened to Moses and obeyed God's commands and his firstborn was saved.

• Now the question is: How could God not safe the firstborn of this man who believed in him and obeyed to His law ? And why did he safe the firstborn of that other man?

The answer is that we are all sinners, although we might try to be good christians we always sin no matter what... That man who was a big sinner he listened to God and obeyed his command! Although he didn't live and obeyed God laws all the time he did listen to God in a crucial moment. Sometimes we are so caught up in our own little world, with our own christian friends and our own christian dvd collection, cd's and books, and sometimes we just don't hear God speaking to us! I don't say we all need to sin more because it doesn't matter what we do or how we act, it does! We are called to love, like Jesus said in John 15:17 This is my command: Love each other. We should live for Jesus, live like him and have a relationship with him. But we must be aware of the fact that we don't start to become isolated from the world and be caught up in our own little safe christian world because well...we might miss a crucial moment!