The plumbline

“This is what He showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plub, with a plumb line in His hand. And the Lord asked me, ‘What do you see, Amos?’
“‘A plumb line’, I replied.
“Then the Lord said, ‘Look, I am setting a plumb line among My people Israel; I will spare them no longer.’” Amos 7:7-8
On several occasions I helped my parents hang wallpaper in our house. After stripping and scraping the old paper off, and priming the walls, the hanging could begin. To start, you would drop a plumbline – a weight on the end of a string. You would then make marks with a pencil on the wall following the string, and you knew this line was perfectly vertical. But you had to be careful when hanging, not to use marks from a previous plumbline. And every time you went around a corner, you would have to drop a new plumbline, because the walls were not perfectly straight. They move very slightly over time.
God used this analogy as a warning for Israel, and it’s a warning that the church today would do well to heed. Do we still measure up to the plumb line we were initially built against? Or have our walls become warped and twisted? Do we put more emphasis on traditions than on trandformation in people’s lives? Have we allowed our love to grow cold – love, that is supposed to be the primary characteristic of those who belong to Christ? (John 13:35). Have we turned church into a concert, and watered down the message so that we don’t offend anyone? Have we tried to reason away some of the harder Biblical truths, saying, ‘Well, that was their culture but it doesn’t apply to us any more’? Maybe it’s time to check things, by dropping the plumbline of the Scriptures against what we believe and what we are doing.