Will you ask God for grace to be a contagious Christian of sacrificial submission, like Jephthah’s daughter and David Livingstone? You may say, “This all seems so impossible for me. You have set the bar far too high.” The bar is high, for two good reasons. First, too many of us today who profess Christ set the bar too low. We settle for mediocrity. We live far below our privileges as Christians. The worldly sprinter strives for excellence as he runs his race, but we Christians too often sit on the sidelines, seldom making anyone jealous of our Christian life and seldom witnessing to anyone of the joy of knowing Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Shame on us for making the gospel so banal, so mediocre, so distasteful! The second reason for setting the bar high is that God can give you the grace to live this way because of his Son, who is the supreme and perfect example of sacrificial submission. 

…the real issue is not how many afflictions we experience but whether those sorrows bring us into sweet submission before God as we surrender everything to him. Would you sacrifice your most cherished hopes and dreams if God asked you to? Jephthah’s daughter did and set an example for thousands of Israelite girls after her. This young woman’s willingness to give up marriage and sexual relations in submission to her father and to the providence of the Lord was contagious; successive generations of young Israelite girls looked up to her as an inspiring example. By the Spirit’s grace, she inspired many to dedicate themselves to God’s service.
If God sanctifies us, we will be most influential to others when we are most afflicted. People will watch us most closely then to see if and how faith sustains us.
David Livingstone (1813–1873), the great missionary, geographer, linguist, and campaigner against slavery, is a notable example of contagious Christian living. When Livingstone was a young boy, he had a close friend. The two of them spent much time together during which Livingstone was saved, whereas the other boy was not. Livingstone tried his utmost to convince his friend to turn to Christ. He knew that the best way to live was to sacrifice all for Christ, but his friend was convinced that the way to live was to pursue money and the pleasure and leisure that comes with it.
Livingstone went to Africa in sacrificial submission to the gospel and God’s glory. His journeys to reach the unreached with the gospel took him thousands of miles on foot into remote African villages where no white person had ever been. Wherever he went, he preached.
When Livingstone died in Zambia at the age of sixty, his close friends buried his heart there while the embalmed remains of his body were brought to England, where he was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.
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Since the early 2000s, Yoga, Eastern Contemplative Prayer, and Mindfulness practices have made their way through evangelical churches, aided by well-regarded and popular pastors, elders, and individual Christians who were believed to be trustworthy.

The 1960s and ’70s was a time of great transition for Western culture—and in our opinion, not in a good way. Sadly in our view, America led the way down that slippery slope. Social mores and long-held religious tenets were challenged and often discarded by young people, which raised the eyebrows of former generations and truly frightened many parents. The news coverage gave the appearance that all the nation’s youth were engaged in “tearing down the system.” We were there, though. Not all the nation’s young people bought into this rebellion, but of course, the radicals—and there were many—got all the press. Overall, it was a very rebellious era, and many explosive changes to society were wrought at that time.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the young were introduced to drugs and radical ideas that had been largely unknown and unsampled in earlier generations. “Flower power” was a phrase attributed to Alan Ginsberg in 1965 and popularized among the “hippie movement,” who were protesting the Vietnam War and calling for “peace and love.” Behind the “love” part of the slogan was a push for unrestrained sexual freedom, which was nothing less than casting off deeply rooted moral standards and religious beliefs. “Let it all hang out”—and it did. It hung out and fell off—many of the young left God and His word in the dust. Of course, there has always been immorality and rebellion in every generation. Still, it was brought into the open and put on a pedestal, fashionable new ideals and immorality not so openly and freely accepted since perhaps pagan Roman times of old. It is essential to realize that “the young” did not develop these ideas independently. Young adults in college are idealistic and impressionable, open to new ideas, and looking for a cause. They long to “fix” the world and believe they are just the ones to do it.
Many kids “caught” this radicalism at their universities, and it was taught to them by their professors who had themselves been brainwashed by others. It just caught hold and came to fruition when our largest generation of young people happened on the scene, looking for pleasure and a cause—and a new worldview to adopt. Timothy Leary, the pied piper of LSD—scientist, psychologist, and Harvard University professor– led the way for the impressionable group of experimenters to, as he put it, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” Becoming “one with the universe”—and deadening one’s conscience—was much more accessible through the use of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and Psilocybin mushroom, which Leary and his friend, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were experimenting with on Harvard’s dime in their Harvard Psilocybin Project experiments. It took a while for American culture at large to shift, but once a large part of mainstream media and popular culture identified with the new zeitgeist, the significant cultural shift was off and running. Bye-bye, Miss American Pie…
If you lived through the great change in society, as we have, you watched major alterations surge in over a relatively short time, both in secular and religious views.
Alongside the political and immorality awakening, religious experimentation was a growth industry. Eastern mysticism had first made its way to the United States in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda arrived and spoke at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. Still, Hinduism mostly played a very minor role in American life until the 1960s. This is partly attributable to America’s banning of immigration from India in 1924.1
Also, in the 1960s, the “British Invasion” brought the Beatles to the United States. They were enormously talented and popular musicians who also challenged Western culture as they too went on a spiritual search. They crossed paths with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and together they spread Yoga and Eastern meditation, wildly popularizing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation. After all, who would know better than celebrities what is true and helpful?
As Yoga and Eastern meditation were becoming more mainstream, George Lucas produced a blockbuster film in 1977 that captured the attention of millions, titled Star Wars! The film was a sort of “space western” permeated with Eastern mysticism. Yoga was taught by Yoda the Yogi, drawing upon his “ancient wisdom.” The culture, including many in the church, actually began accepting the Eastern worldviews of “the Force.” Yogi Yoda explained it to Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back”:
“For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.”
Essentially Yoda was teaching “Oneism.” Oneism teaches that everything in the universe is one. There is no distinction between creator and creation2:
If One Thing / Tao is all that exists, then there can be no logical concepts, (as logic requires two things), nor indeed any understanding of how this One thing could cause the Many changing things which we experience in the world. The error has been in not correctly realising the properties of the One.3
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Such refreshment comes from an unselfish heart that is genuinely more interested in others than themselves. That is so concerned for the purposes of God and the needs of others that they hardly ever think about themselves at all. And it is a deliberate choice, a consciousness that our lives, words, and demeanor affect those around us.

For they have refreshed my spirit and yours. (1 Corinthians 16:18)

You love to see them coming. There are some people that are simply refreshing to your spirit. They bring joy, encouragement, wisdom, and spiritual perspective. To be around them is to be energized and helped. They carry the life-giving fragrance of Christ.

There are others, however, who seem to have (as one man said) the “spiritual gift of deflation.” “The mouth speaks of that which fills the heart,” Jesus said. You cannot be a refreshment to others if you are not filled with refreshment yourself. A heart filled with the Holy Spirit is the key to producing the fruit…

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