How different are we living?

This is something I've been pondering lately. Just how different does my life look as I live with Jesus than others around me, living without Jesus? I've been reading "The Jesus I Never Knew" by Philip Yancey and I love the words that are challenging and the passages I have to read several times to understand. A few paragraphs are currently standing out to me and I thought I would.

In chapter 13 Kingdom: Wheat Among the Weeds the last two paragraphs are especially thought provoking:

"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse give a preview of how the world will end: in war, famine, sickness, and death. But Jesus gave a personal preview of how the world will be restored, by reversing the deeds of the Four Horsement: he made peace, fed the hungry,healed the sick, and brought the dead to life. He made the message of God's kingdom powerful by living it, by bringing it to reality amoung the people around him. The prophets' fairy-tale predictions of a world free of pain and tears and death referred to no mythical world, but rather to this world.

We in the church, Jesus' successors, are left with the task of displaying the signs of the kingdom of God, and the watching world will judge the merits of the kingdom by us. We live in a transition time-- a transition from death to life, from human injustice to divine justice, from the old to the new-- tragically incomplete yet marked here and there, now and then, with clues of what God will someday achieve in perfection. The reign of God is breaking into the world, and we can be its heralds."

We can be the heralds to the reign of God breaking into the world. We should be the beautiful display of the kingdom of God and as members of the body of Christ, the church, so many people look at our lives and judge the kingdom by them. What a scary thing! But it's so true; as I claim to be a follower of Christ people look at my life everyday and make judgements on the kingdom of God based on my life. Just how different from the rest of the world are we living? Are we doing our part as heralds?