Even If i Walk Alone

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

commitment

Stress

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In the beginning, we were created for and lived in perfect peace and harmony with God. Then we gave it all away for a stupid grab for an inconceivable “more”, something better than community with God. It was of course something which did not exist because dwelling in the presence of our Creator is the greatest form of happiness, fulfillment, and joy we can ever know.

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Still, we reached for something else. We were deceived to believe there was more we could desire than God Himself. From this one horrible mistake, stress was born. From that moment, stress has become a favorite tool of Satan to continue to keep us from God.

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Obedience to God

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At its core, this blog is about discipleship. It’s about living your life wholly devoted to Christ so you can live out the life He created you to live. What this looks like in practice will vary from person to person, but the one thing all disciples have in common is obedience to God.  By definition, obedience to God implies you have to do something in order to be His disciple. This isn’t a works based salvation; it’s works because of salvation.

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As A.W. Tozer once said, “Salvation without obedience is a self-contradicting impossibility!” Many people have bought into the teaching of salvation through grace alone to the exclusion of any responsibility for works of obedience. That’s a cheap and easy salvation never put forth by Jesus.

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Doesn’t Matter

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I wrote a recent post about the upcoming Presidential election (see “Trump or Hillary?”), and I don’t want to belabor the point. Or maybe I do. The fact is Christianity is on the decline in America because people who call themselves Christians have misplaced their focus and lost their direction along the way. The upcoming election doesn’t matter. Your 401(k) balance doesn’t matter.

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The size of your house or the price of your car doesn’t matter. Your kid’s athletic participation doesn’t matter. Even the size of your church or your level of activity in it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is Jesus and you living a life He would find worthy of one of His disciples.

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Not Dead Yet

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It doesn’t matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done. God can and will still use you if you let Him.  The Bible tells us even though we fall seven times, we can still get back up (Proverbs 24:16). Too many people use the failures of the past to disqualify them from the victories in their future.  If you are still breathing, God can still use you.

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No one is too low or too damaged to build the Kingdom of God. We limit ourselves by thinking God could never use someone who has done the things we have done. Since we can’t stop sinning, we think God has surely turned His back and run the other way. But these are just lies Satan loves to tell us.

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Stealing Time

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I learned (again) the hard way Satan is a master at stealing time. It’s amazing and more than a bit discouraging how you can be having a great day serving God only to see it fizzle into hours doing things of no Kingdom value. Without a consistent and diligent focus on how we spend our days, too many of them can be stolen away before we know it.

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While pondering that thought, it occurred to me maybe Satan isn’t so much a master at stealing time as we are at giving it away.God has put the gift of time at our disposal. Every breath we breathe is an endowment from Him. What God has given to us cannot be stolen. Satan has no power to do that. But as agents of freewill, it is within our authority to give away what God has granted to us.

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