CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY continued:
If you were to go to a concordance and look up the word “character” you would find that the word is listed approximately 5 times in the NIV Bible. Although the word character is not found as the word “character,” the thought and teaching of what character means runs throughout the Bible.
The idea of character in the New Testament is a sense of being proved, tested, tried and basically found trust-worthy. We find an example of this in the Old Testament when the children of Israel came out of Egypt. It says in Exodus 13:17-18, “When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, “If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea. The Israelites went up out of Egypt armed for battle.”
This is an interesting Scripture that brings out the need for character. God did not take them into a place where there would be conflict, although that would be a shorter route to the Promised Land but took them instead where they would not have conflict. What is interesting to me in this passage of scripture is to see how God knew that they did not have the character, they had not been tested, tried for war, but we read that they went up out of Egypt armed for battle.
In other words, they had the external things for battle: swords, shields, spears, etc., but they did not have the inner fortitude to be able to press on. They didn’t have “character.”
So much of what we face in the Christian life today is just like this. We have people who have the external things like diplomas, degrees, the right words, etc., but do not have what it takes inside to not only face the enemy, continue on in the midst of the battle and finish the task. In other words, they do not have “character.”
In the early days of the church when Paul was giving instruction to Titus and Timothy to appoint elders in the churches that had been established, he told them what “an elder must be…” (Titus 1:6) and then went on to tell them what that “must be” is: character. Our problem today is that we have turned “must be” into “that would be nice.”
An example of character is a man I’ve mentioned before by the name of William Carey who started what is known as the Modern Missionary Movement. William Carey was a man of perseverance. William Carey said, “Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.” This was over two hundred years ago in the early part of November 1773, when William Carey (along with his wife and four young boys, his wife’s sister and fellow missionary John Thomas) traveled east. Obstacles were numerous when they arrived in India.
They were unknown, had no influential connections, no means of livelihood, they entered India as illegal immigrants, they faced life threatening diseases and the language and culture were largely unknown to them. In forty years William Carey had translated the whole Bible into Bengali, Oriya, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit and Assamese, the New Testament and other portions of Scriptures into 33 other languages. He started Serampore college, which later became a university. He started a net-work of more than 125 village schools. He pioneered the education of women. He brought the modern printing press to India. He founded India’s first newspaper: Samachar Darpan (News Mirror) which is still published today. Even the oldest English newspaper in India today, THE STATESMENT, traces its roots back to Carey.
William Carey, like Elijah was a man like us, but he prayed and took steps of faith. When we see what is happening around us and the doors that God has opened, can we do anything less?