Even If i Walk Alone

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

commitment

Nothing Else Matters

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I’ve been attending church almost my entire life. Being a preacher’s kid will do that to you. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the local church has played, and will continue to play, a critical role in the advancement of the gospel. Still, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the direction the modern Western Church seems to be heading. Maybe it’s me. Perhaps I’m just on a rant. But it seems the church (and I realize I’m painting with an incredibly broad stroke here) has fallen into a formulaic approach devoid of passion and urgency.

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Our mission is to take the message of Jesus into all the world (Matthew 28:18-20), but we seem determined instead to preach a gospel of self-improvement and feel-good adherence to a script Jesus never embraced.

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Are You Available?

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Are you available to be used by God? Before you answer, understand when God looks for an available person, He is looking for 100% availability.  Being half-committed isn’t committed at all. God is constantly seeking those who have left everything behind, taken up their cross, and declared their availability for the sake of the Kingdom.

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It’s easy to say we’re available for His service. It’s much harder to actually live an available life. A disciple of Jesus is available for anything at any time. Disciples don’t weigh the cost or try to see all the angles before answering the call. They simply proclaim their availability, and move the moment they are called.

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Desperation

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I’ll admit it. I’m desperate. Contrary to what you may be thinking, I think it’s a good thing. While desperation usually carries a somewhat negative connotation, I believe it’s a necessity for would-be disciples of Jesus. Until we come to the point where Jesus is the only thing of value to us, I question whether we are full-fledged disciples of His.

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Desperation may in fact be the key to living a life that looks like Jesus. Chances are, if we aren’t desperate for Him, we’re probably desperate for something or someone other than Him.

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Make My Life a Prayer to You

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Almost forty years ago, Keith Green recorded a song called, “Make My Life a Prayer to You”. While we could argue about how well the music has held up over time, the lyrics are timeless. “Make my life a prayer to you / I wanna do what you want me to / No empty words and no white lies / No token prayers no compromise”.

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What if we lived our lives as if they were prayers to Jesus? What if we kept Him the center of our focus in every moment we lived? Shouldn’t we all desire to live with no token prayers and no compromise? After all, this is the life Jesus called us to live.

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Complacency

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Complacency is a killer disease for would-be disciples. As soon as you think you are in a great place with your disciplines and in your relationship with God, you are in trouble. Unfortunately, I have learned this (more than once) the hard way. Each time I think I’ve grown so close to Christ I could never fall away, I’ve quickly found myself spiraling downward. It’s not as if you wake up one day and decide to walk the opposite direction.

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It always happens subtlety and slowly. You won’t even recognize it’s happening. You skip your morning prayer time, “just today”, because of something else going on in your life. Then you find yourself putting your needs ahead of others. The next morning you skip prayer time again. And so, the spiral begins…

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