It’s so easy to spend our lives living from the wrong perspective. We make grand plans, spend our time earning a living, and serving God along the way. It sounds noble enough, but in truth we are living life backwards. We are looking through the lens of self-first instead of focusing our attention foremost on God.
We should spend our days serving Jesus, and earn a living or pursuing our dreams along the way. Jesus will not take a backseat to anything or anyone. He is totally focused on helping you live your life in a way which glorifies the Father. This can only be accomplished in our lives by adopting a Jesus-first perspective.
As long as we are focusing on our dreams or jobs first, we will always be pushing Jesus to the periphery. While claiming to put Him first, in fact we are only fitting Him in along the edges. The wrong perspective has the potential to change our eternal destiny. As Jesus said, many will come to Him at the end of their lives professing to know Him and relating tales of all they did for Him, but He will send them away as strangers (Matthew 7:21-23). I believe we, especially in the Western world, put ourselves dangerously close to that reality because we live our lives from the wrong perspective. We see Jesus as something to be added to our lives rather than life itself.
The older I get, the more heartbreaking it becomes for me to see so-called Christians so firmly enmeshed in the “American dream” lifestyle. We spend extravagant sums of money on houses, cars, and trinkets we cannot afford to impress people we don’t like or even know. We succumb to the culture because it’s easy to do, and conceivably weird not to do so. And that is the wrong perspective. That is the way of the world and not the Kingdom of God.
Our entire focus and objective must be Jesus. Everything else is meaningless yet we pursue it as if it has such value it could eclipse the God of the Universe! What are we thinking? You cannot be a disciple of Christ and live like the rest of the world. We are called to be different (1 Peter 2:9). We have committed to live our lives wholly devoted to Jesus. Why then do we dedicate so much of our time and energy to things having nothing to do with Him?
The wrong perspective causes a fatal cascade of activities in our lives. It makes us see the world through a lens not glorifying to God. Our possessions and desires blind us to the beauty and majesty of Jesus. We have allowed the worthless things to clutter the amazing and valuable riches of Christ. Look around your home. Look at your priorities, the way you really live, not the way you wished you did. Are you living from the perspective of self or Jesus first? Don’t miss this. The wrong perspective can kill you.