We need to be someone like Gaius who shows their faith in doing things for others. We must be the ones who set the examples and people will recognize this. People that we’ve never met will see God working in our lives, so we need to show it proudly. In verse 11, it says do not imitate what is evil but what is good. We should be getting what is good from others, then imitating it so other people will see and they might imitate us. Other believers will see all of this and tell the church or other believers what God is doing in our lives. Then the imitation of our good works will spread kind of like a virus because people recognize good hearts. So, let us be the ones who show proudly what God is doing for us in our live.
We must be careful who we associate with. Anyone can be a deceiver, but we are the followers of Jesus and with the Word we can know who the deceivers are. By following Jesus’ teachings, which are in the Word, we will be able to know who is following Jesus based on if they know his teachings. We need all this knowledge prior because if we associate with these people and bring them into our homes, we are just like them. Luckily for me, my dad has carefully chosen who he has invited into our house, so we can use him as a good example. We must be prepared with the Word and we need to watch carefully who we associate with. As long as we know the Word, we will be able to find these deceivers and not come close to them.
This knowledge is what we should have when we go to God. When we ask something of God wholeheartedly, God hears us no matter what. It doesn’t mean he respond right away because his timing is perfect. This reminds me of a scene in “Bruce Almighty” where the main character, who received the power of God for a while, comes home to a lot of mail/emails portraying prayers. The picture I see for us is God receiving millions of emails and he knows exactly when to respond back to us. But people who do not know Jesus or are not asking with a pure heart, their prayers go straight to junk mail or spam. Even though God may take years to respond back, we have to know that he will get back to us no matter what. He will give us his answer when we need it most because it will all be according to God’s time.
The world is always trying to tempt us to break God’s commands. We have to be strong not to be influenced by the world, so we keep his commands and like it says here, his commands shouldn’t be a burden to follow. We as Christians have already done the hardest part which is believing in Jesus as the Son of God. Once we believe truly in that, we can not be overtaken. We have victory in Jesus, and he will guide us through every single hurdle that we come across. The world will always try to tempt us into many things, but we do not have to worry because we have Jesus on our side. So even if we’ve been uprooted by the world, Jesus will help us to grow new roots so that we will be even stronger in the future.