Even If i Walk Alone

Instructing and encouraging you to live your life as a disciple of Jesus

Do We Love Him?

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I am continually being brought back to the book of 1 John, primarily the second chapter. There is so much there that I’m beginning to think a single lifetime is not long enough to mine all the treasure it contains. One of the great things about this letter is the clarity of the message the Holy Spirit inspired John to write. There are numerous black-and-white statements. There is no nuance, no vagueness, and no wiggle room.

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This book leaves no room for you to hedge your bets. If you believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God that it is, then 1 John is the unequivocal handbook of how we are to live this Christian life. We say we love Jesus, but does our love pass the test? When push comes to shove, do we love Him? Let’s see what John wrote about this.

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Big Prayers

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Our faith is so small. It’s as if we are children of a multi-billionaire but never ask for anything more than a pack of gum from our father. God has so much He desires to share with us, but we are too weak-minded to understand and too immature to grasp all that our position in life affords us. We are co-heirs with Jesus to all God has (Romans 8:16-17).

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And yet, most of our prayers are for tiny trinkets and selfish comforts. Why don’t we pray big prayers? Are we afraid God won’t answer in the way we desire, so we shy away? I submit we don’t pray big prayers because our faith is far too small. The more we trust Christ, the bigger our prayers will become.

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Books and Learning

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I have always been surrounded by books. I am grateful to my mother for instilling a love of reading within me from a young age. She read to me regularly, and I watched my older brother devour thick books at a speed I have never come close to attaining. As a result, I was reading before entering kindergarten. Once there, I made quick work of plowing through the required reading for the year and had completed the first-grade readers as well before ever stepping foot inside an elementary school.

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My love of books and passion for reading has never waned. More than half a century later, books line my walls and inhabit stacks throughout my house. And that’s before even getting to the hundreds more residing in my Kindle and Kobo e-readers. Yet, after all this, I have to agree with Solomon. There is no end to books and learning (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Unless we put into practice what we learn, it is all vanity, a chasing after the wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14).

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Be Thankful

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While we should be thankful every day for the incredible blessings God has given to us, Americans set aside one day a year to express our gratitude as a nation. I recognize not everyone feels thankful today. Illness, job loss, personal tragedy, and general dissatisfaction with life can darken our minds and keep us from recognizing how much we have to be thankful for.

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Wherever you are, simply looking around you reveals much for which you can be thankful. I don’t know your circumstances, but I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t point to someone worse off than they were. So, that’s a start. If it could be worse, then there is something for which you can praise God.

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In His Presence

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We live our lives in a compartmentalized way. There are compartments holding our work stuff, personal stuff, and God stuff. We further break these compartments down into even smaller ones until we are juggling all these little boxes, unable to keep up and too tired to give any one of them our best effort. In the bustle and progress of modern society, we’ve lost the practice of spending time with God.

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Because our attention is so fractured and fragmented, we never seem to have time for our King. Spending time in His presence is at best a dream and is more often than not forgotten entirely. Somewhere between our declaration of His Lordship and our present reality, we’ve lost our love and fascination with Jesus.

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