Recently, my sister-in-law was driving her granddaughter home, when they passed a billboard that was turned upside down. The billboard is an advertisement for an insurance company, and it was put up several weeks ago. My great niece had not seen it before, but she did see it on this trip and began questioning her grandmother as to why someone would put this picture upside down. When my sister-in-law told me about the incident, she said she felt there had to be a spiritual lesson in all of this. I agreed and began thinking about just what that lesson might be.
I did a little research and discovered that this avenue of advertising has been around for quite some time. It is deemed an attention getter and is used by all types of businesses. Car dealerships were one of the first to utilize this method of advertising. This was their reasoning. They wanted to catch people’s attention. They wanted to make a point. They wanted to say, “we are different from everyone else.” In those three reasons is our spiritual lesson.
If a company advertises that they will do certain things and then doesn’t follow through, all the future advertising they do will be useless. Their reputation will be ruined; and whether right side up or upside down, their business will probably fail.
Christians are walking advertisements. The big question is, “are we engaged in false advertising? That depends on the follow-through. We can tell people all day long that we are Christians; if our lives don’t show it, we will have failed.
When God declared that He had chosen a people as His own, this is what He said.
“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel” (Exodus 19:5-6 ESV).
“This day the LORD your God commands you to do these statutes and rules. You shall therefore be careful to do them with all your heart and with all your soul. You have declared today that the LORD is your God, and that you will walk in his ways, and keep his statutes and his commandments and his rules, and will obey his voice. And the LORD has declared today that you are a people for his treasured possession, as he has promised you, and that you are to keep all his commandments, and that he will set you in praise and in fame and in honor high above all nations that he has made, and that you shall be a people holy to the LORD your God, as he promised” (Deuteronomy 26:16-19).
In these passages, this people, the Jews, had declared that God was their God. God tells them that He has rules they must follow. If they follow these rules, they will continue as His treasured possession; and they will be raised up in fame and honor above every nation in the world. Moses and Aaron followed up this conversation with a reminder that the people had to keep all of God’s commandments. He had to be first in their lives, in every aspect, wholly and completely devoted to Him.
There are two New Testament passages that follow this same thinking. Paul told Titus, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:11-14).
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (First Peter 2:9).
Both of these passages convey the same ideas that God proposed to the people of Israel. In the Titus passage, the King James Version says, “purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” That word peculiar means “unusual, particular, special.” It conveys the idea that the Christian will not look like, act like, talk like, dress like, be like everyone else. Christians are to catch people’s attention, make a point, and say to others by our lives, “we are different from everyone else.” But we don’t want to be different. We want to look like, act like, talk like, dress like, be like everyone else. When we do that, our advertisement is false. We say we are Christians, yet we show that we are just like the world.
We often think of being peculiar as a bad thing, but Paul told Timothy that is the way God wants us to be—different. He doesn’t want us to be like everyone else. So, how is your advertising? Is it just like everyone else’s, or is it upside down?
Sandra Oliver