Even If i Walk Alone

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

commitment

God Calls You by Name

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I’ve seen a quote sprinkled around the internet, not sure of its original source, but it says, “The devil knows your name but calls you by your sin. God knows your sin but calls you by your name.” This is an astute and accurate description of the difference between the way we are seen by God and the adversary. God loves everything about you.

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He created you to look like Him and is so intimately familiar with you He knows the number of hairs on your head (Luke 12:6-7). Satan, on the other hand, only knows who you are. In fact, the closer you draw to God, the more aware of you the devil becomes. He knows who you are, but he hates you because of whose you are.

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Live a Countercultural Life

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Where is the passion among followers of Jesus today? Where is the urgency of knowing the scores of people we associate with daily are doomed to spend eternity in Hell, forever separated from their Creator? We say we love Jesus and claim He is Lord of our life, but where is the evidence?  By my observation, most Christians today are focused more on their own success and retirement plans than they are on the starving masses, enslaved children, and desperate lost souls in the world.

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Everything is assumed to be someone else’s problem. We’ll leave those things to the professionals and their organizations. All the while, it is we who are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus, a directive we conveniently ignore.

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Personal Development is Useless

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I recently had the epiphany that personal development is useless. As a professed adherent to constant personal development in my own life, the revelation took me by surprise. I am always looking for ways to better myself, do things more effectively, and am consistently refining my habits and disciplines. But ultimately, personal development is useless because it starts with myself. I am a terribly flawed human being. We all are.

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Nothing that comes from us will ever improve ourselves in a significant way. We are building on a flawed foundation (our flawed selves). While personal development may be useless, God-development is where the true answers are found. If we start with perfection, we have something worth building upon.

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Spirit of God

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Does it strike you as odd to read of the power of the Holy Spirit throughout the New Testament? Do you ever wish you had a healthy dose of the same spirit today? The same Spirit that permeates the pages of the New Testament, and indeed all of history, is alive and active in our world today. The reason we miss Him is we aren’t looking for Him.

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We’re so wrapped up in our own world and busyness we wouldn’t recognize the Spirit of God if He visibly showed Himself in front of our faces. Somewhere throughout the centuries, we’ve lost our sensitivity to the Spirit. Or is it perhaps we have lost the desire to truly see Him?

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Stay Focused

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The latest book by Francis Chan, “Letters to the Church” is a fantastic and convicting work that compares the modern Western church to the early Church detailed in the New Testament. This will always be a touchy topic because one feels the need to walk the tightrope between offending and convicting. I think Francis does a masterful job of doing this, but much to my delight chooses to err on the side of not worrying what anyone other than God might think.

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Early on, Pastor Chan writes, “The older I get, the more aware I am the end is near. There is no time to care about what I want in the church. There’s no time to worry about what others are looking for in a church. I will be facing Him soon, so I have to stay focused on His desires.” This is a word by which we all should be living.

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