Are you on the map?
Just now I’m collecting the free maps the UK that come with my daily paper—well, you know me—I can’t resist maps!I’m gradually building up the country—yes, I know I’ve got it already in one map form or another, but these are free!
However, while the maps are good for an overview of an area, showing the main roads—whether motorway standard, dual carriageways or single, the important ones in red, those of lesser importance in yellow, and other roads in black & white—there are things missing, villages dismissed, no doubt as too small or insignificant for inclusion.
If these maps are intended for people touring on holiday, I suppose the reasoning is that no one would be interested in visiting places like Barns Green, Warninglid, Pease Pottage, Rowhook, Ashurst, Small Dole etc., all missing from the map. But to people who live in those villages they are home, and just as important as Horsham, Crawley, Brighton etc.
It takes me back in thought to two places in the Bible that were virtually ‘off the map’ and yet were used by God for the birth and nurturing of his own Son:
Bethlehem – ‘small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me One who will be ruler over Israel’ (Micah 5:3)
‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’(John 1:46). Well, yes, what good indeed came from those small towns!
It doesn’t actually matter where we live physically. What does matter is who lives with us. What is significant is whether our life is in Christ. The apostle, Paul, who, though realising his unworthiness, stated ‘Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’ (Gal 2: 20)
And to think that for us too, who are, it might be said, ‘off the map’ so far as importance or achievement in this world is concerned, have been chosen for the life of Christ to be seen living in us—that royal life of the King of kings.
Do you have that life in you, through trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation from sin? Then you’re on the map of God’s Kingdom, because, through his grace, you’re important!
Steve Piggott
Elder
August 2011
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