Let me take you back to the moment you gave your life to Christ. You surrendered everything to Him and pledged to spend the rest of your days serving Him. How much time passed before you were right back into your old rhythms and activity? If following Jesus is our true intention then we have to put an end to our pursuit of everything other than Him. Nothing else matters. It is Jesus and nothing else or no Jesus at all.
That’s the truth, but we waste so much time and energy trying to put an “and” between Jesus and our own desires and dreams. The problem with this is if we are true followers of Jesus, our own desires will be the same as the desires of God.
Your job will never fulfill you. Your family will never give you eternal value. Your house is here today and gone tomorrow. Nothing in this world has any eternal value short of what you do for Jesus. No matter what you build or how much you acquire, it’s all going to go away. If you aren’t living for Jesus, then you aren’t living for anything. Living for yourself is futile because you will die and all you built will have been for nothing. A selfish life is a self-defeating life.
No matter how important your job or dreams may be, they are irrelevant unless they are done for the purpose of building God’s Kingdom. It is both mortifying and disgusting to realize we’ve spent most of our lives building the wrong Kingdom. How did we miss the simple message of Jesus? Love God with every ounce of your being, and then go and love others as much as yourself (Luke 10:27). At no point did Jesus ever encourage us to love ourselves or seek our own gain. His whole message was about the Father and serving others. This isn’t complicated, but it isn’t popular either.
At the heart of the very character of God is love for others. His love for us is so intense He sent His Son to be brutally tortured and murdered. In what more shocking way could He demonstrate the depths of how far He will go to pursue, love, and save us? Yet we have taken His beautiful love and impeccable character and made it all about us. We spend our days pursuing selfish goals, seeking selfish comforts, and thinking selfish thoughts.
We can’t claim ignorance. We know the truth. The only question is what will we do with this knowledge? Were you serious when you committed your life to Christ? Are you serious about it now? Every hour of our day should be spent pursuing Jesus, loving Him, and serving others. It is to this we are called. This is God’s will for your life. It’s time we stopped making everything about us. It’s all about Jesus; nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else.