Cement is an Ingredient in Concrete:

Today is October 9, which is my grandpa’s birthday, even though the last couple of years have been his heavenly birthday.  Today if he was alive, he would have been 73 years old.  This would be kind of nice because his birthday would have landed on a Sunday.  We would have probably gotten together as a family to celebrate.  I would have hand-made you a card to tell you how much I love and appreciate you.  You certainly were one of a kind, and you were the best grandpa in the world.  

My grandpa loved roads.  He worked on county roads for years, and he loved to teach so many people, especially me, my mom, and my aunt Cindy, who were his daughters, about the creation of roads.  There are special techniques and important items one needs to know if they are going to create a perfect road.  One that can receive awards from the state for being smooth.  My grandpa received such awards for his special ability to make our northwest Iowa country roads enjoyable for all drivers. 

Our school had been doing road construction. This was recently finished, and the road is now smooth where it used to be rough and had many potholes.  I bet my grandpa would have loved to have seen that work completed.  I bet he would have enjoyed hearing that now my school has a new road.  We would have definitely had to test drive over it the next time he would have been in town.  He would have had to rate whether or not he thought it was good road quality.  

One thing you need to know if you ever want to work on roads and to just have basic knowledge about how roads work is that cement is an ingredient in concrete.   Many times people will use them interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. Cement, rock or soil or gravel, and water are the only three ingredients that make up concrete.  Cement is the main binder between all the other ingredients.  Cement is the ingredient or the glue that keeps everything together.    

I believe we can look at cement as a main ingredient in concrete in our Christian walk.  Cement is like love.  I know, I know,  this may sound weird, but when we think about our Christian walk and the reasons we are walking with Jesus, the main ingredient we need in this hard, not one with the world walk is love.  Love is going to be the main ingredient that holds everything else together.  Without love, the other items of the Christian walk would easily fall apart.  

This idea of love being the main ingredient is mentioned endlessly in the Bible.  There is the first and second commandment, where we are called to love God with all of our hearts, minds, souls and body and then we are also called to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Jesus will later state that these two commandments are the two most important and the ones held in the highest regard.  This is because all of the other commandments will fall under these two commandments.  The main component and ingredient in this walk of Christian living is to love.  

I say this because I believe we as Christians can get stuck at times in the walk of legalism.  Legalism means here that we only do things such as pray, read the Bible, go to church, and follow all the rules that we can think of in the Bible out of obligation, not with a desire.  It is important to become reflective and think about how we approach this life and this Christian walk.  Are we living from a place of love or are we doing it because we know that would make our families proud or we feel it is the right thing to do, or we are trying to impress someone else?  None of those reasons will keep us sticking to God.  None of those concrete mixes have cement in them.  

It is highly important to follow God’s commandments.  They are there for a reason, but it will be so much easier to follow God’s commandments when we love the creator of those commandments.  This is even said in John 14:21, “Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me, the one who loves me will also be loved by my Father and I too will love them and show myself to them.”  This directly says that whoever loves God will keep his commandments.  They will not be easily followed without the love of God there as the main component.  Just as cement is the main ingredient in concrete, so the love of God is the main ingredient in the Christian walk.