Even If i Walk Alone

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

Discipleship

Desperation

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Recently I posed the question, “How desperate are you”? I feel there was more that needed to be said on this topic, so I hope you will indulge me as we dig a little deeper into this concept. Webster’s defines desperation as a “loss of hope and surrender to despair”, with despair being characterized as “the loss of all hope or confidence”. Applying the concept of desperation to our spiritual life then means we have come to the place where we have no hope or confidence in ourselves; we are without recourse on our own, and in dire need of rescue.

Since we have no hope in and of ourselves, we must find it elsewhere. Jesus offers the greatest hope of all. He promises rest, peace and eternal life spent in communion with Him. I don’t know about you, but I could use just a small portion of that in my life right now! If we would follow Him, this is our destiny. Though we are faced with great trials and heartaches, remaining focused on Jesus gives us the hope that our troubles will someday be absolved by His healing. Faith in God allows us to see a future that is infinitely better than our present. He gives us something for which to strive. The Holiness of Jesus Christ is the light at the end of our tunnel. We must come to realize that there is no hope without Jesus, but with Him we have the ultimate promise of a satisfied and glorious life.

Just as we have no hope outside of Jesus, neither do we have any confidence except in Him. Only the Son of God is reliable without exception; only He will be there for us without fail. We rise up against trials only to be knocked down, but He has conquered them all. Even death proved to be no match for Christ. There is nothing He does not have the power to defeat. Your temptations, illnesses and addictions pose no challenge to His love and power. We are helpless to defeat sin on our own and we are unable to achieve anything of eternal worth unless He is working through us. Despite our bluster and pretense, our substance is ridiculously small. We are weak and fragile beings, often just one obstacle away from throwing in the towel. The only one who will never let is down is Jesus Christ. He is the calm in any storm and the power in every adversity. If we rely on ourselves, we will die in our failure; but if we put our faith in Jesus, we can know that He will be our strength and our life.

To be desperate for Jesus is to realize that He is our only hope and that we can do nothing without Him. Left to our own devices, we will fail and we will die, unfulfilled and lost. If we are still holding on to the belief that we are able to do anything on our own, we believe the lie of Satan. In fact the only thing we can do in our own strength is to turn away from God. In this we see the ultimate breakdown, the failure to recognize the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our best efforts result in total inadequacy. All we can do apart from Jesus is fail. With Him, all we can do is live and in a manner that is beyond our wildest dreams and expectations.

Search your heart. Are you truly desperate for Him? Have you come to the point where you have no hope for your life and no confidence in anything you do? This is a sacred place, because it is in the midst of this condition that we finally become ready to surrender fully to the Lordship and authority of Jesus. It is now that we may experience the totality of His love. He is desperate to share Himself with us, and we are in desperate need to receive Him. Put away your pride, your ego and your sense of self sufficiency. Be desperate, for in this there is life.

How Desperate Are You?

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It’s easy to get caught up in everything that we do throughout our day. The demands of our friends, families and jobs leave little room for us to breathe. Days blur into weeks, weeks into months and before we know it the years are passing us by. What do we have to show for our time so far? Are we accomplishing all we dreamt and becoming the person we determined ourselves to be? How are we measuring our days to determine what, if any, legacy we are leaving behind?

For me, living in America, it is easy to lose myself in my job and my career. My culture pushes me to work long hours and achieve ever greater levels of financial success. If only we dress and act the part, sooner or later we will achieve the success that society tells us we deserve. Day after day we strive to achieve greatness in our pursuit of the American dream. We are busier now than at any point in history. Our lives are spent connected to technology and awash in cell phones, emails and caffeine. At the edges, we try and fit in the other aspects of our life, yet never seem to have time for it all. On the outside of everything stands Jesus, our Lord and our King. This is the same Jesus to whom we pledged our entire lives. We said we’d follow Him anywhere, but now there simply isn’t time.

If you truly love Him, then you remember moments in your life when you were thirsty to drink of His Spirit. There were times when you simply couldn’t get enough. Your soul ached as you begged for more and more of Jesus, His holiness, and His grace. How long has it been since you felt this way? In our dogged self-reliance, when was the last time we were truly desperate for Him? When was the last time you were so desperate that you were completely undone, that you realized you could not do a single thing apart from His power? When was the last time you were undone, desperate beyond words and on your knees before the God of the universe? When was the last time you slowed down long enough to realize that this world is not about you, but rather about what you can do for Jesus? How long has it been since you put aside your own agenda to be the help for someone in need? I have found it far too easy to see people as distractions and annoyances rather than as deeply valued, wholly loved, co-citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. If we are not desperate for Him, than we are finished; we have no hope outside of Jesus Christ. Only He can save us from the wickedness of our world and of ourselves.

Nothing matters apart from Jesus; not your family, not your friends and not your job. All else, every single thing in the universe, pales in comparison to Jesus Christ. Anything but Him is useless. We cannot live without Him; we cannot show the world their need for Jesus, until we get the need in our own heart settled. We must reject everything that is not Him. He demands all that we have, so we owe every second of our lives to Him. We must recognize that we are nothing, He is everything and we need Him. He is all that we have, and He is more than enough.

This world will never change until we change ourselves. As long as we insist on leading a life that consists of what society tells us we should do, we will never be able to fully participate in the Kingdom of God here on earth. God doesn’t want our lip service; you can’t fool Him. God wants everything. We must come to the point in our lives where we no longer hold to anything but Jesus. We must drink fully of His Spirit, all the while realizing that we could never drink enough. It’s time to get serious about our faith and put away the things of this world. We are a peculiar people, so why try to be normal? Surrender everything to Him; let it all go. Empty yourself of every thought except for Jesus. Stop striving for success in this world and work for the Kingdom to come. Pray and realize how much you need God; cry out to Him.

Are you living for the praise of man or the praise of God? Everything you so desperately seek on this earth may be yours temporarily, but in the end it will all be taken from you. Only one thing matters now and in the future: Jesus. Do you thirst for Him? Will you forsake everything for Him? How much do you long to be filled with the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ? How desperate are you?

Confessions of a Western Christian

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I have a few confessions to make. I have been a Christian for thirty-seven years now, but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to discover what it means to truly be a follower of Christ. I have bought into the false teachings of Western Christianity and have totally missed the point of what it means to be a believer in Jesus. I have practiced religious rituals that have little or no foundations in Scripture. Worst of all, I have lived a life that is much more about myself than it is about the One who gave His life for me. I am unworthy of His love, and I am ashamed of the number of years it took for me to begin to travel the narrow road that leads to life and glorious light.

The years I have wasted cannot be redeemed. The past has had its say and I stand in judgment without defense. The only thing more tragic than everything I’ve neglected in my past would be if I continued on that same path from this point forward; I simply refuse. Thanks to the teachings of men like Greg Boyd, Francis Chan and more recently, David Platt, my eyes have been opened and I am not going back to the old lies of Western Christianity. It’s not that these men have some new revelation, but rather they (among others) are returning to the roots of the early church. They are casting aside the perverted teachings of the past couple hundred years to uncover anew what a life devoted to Christ really looks like.

This is of paramount importance. Countless men and women are walking around today, convinced that their salvation is secure because they prayed a certain prayer to ask Jesus into their heart. They are convinced that nothing could ever separate them from Heaven or from Christ, and they have a handful of Scriptures they will use to defend their view. These are lives being lived in peril. These are people who are not acknowledging the whole gospel, but rather a gospel of prosperity, comfort and irresponsibility. The teachings of the Bible are plain and they are clear. We are saved because of our faith and acceptance of God’s grace, which is given to us for the purpose of carrying out His mission on earth. We are saved by grace to do the things He commanded us to do. If we leave off the second half of the equation, we become the goats that Jesus refers to in Matthew 25:31-46. We call Him Lord, but we do nothing to give evidence to our claim.

If we are to follow Jesus into Heaven, then we must be willing to follow Him to the ends of the earth and to the end of our own rope. If we are not doing what He commanded us to do, to care for the orphans and the widows, to bring justice to the oppressed and to feed and clothe those in need, then we are in danger of hearing those awful words, “Depart from Me, for I never knew you”. (Matthew 7:20-23) This is not a game. This is not something we can take lightly or put off until later. We have been deceived and we have believed the lie of Western Christianity. A Christian life that looks no different from that of any other is not a life that is devoted to the teachings and the ways of Jesus.

Where do you find yourself at this moment? Have you bought into the lies of Satan and become consumed with a happy and healthy version of Christianity? Are you content to go to church, give some cash and basically be a good person? Or are you dissatisfied with the hollowness of modern Christianity and long for something deeper, something more? A magic prayer won’t get you into Heaven, but a life lived in total devotion to Jesus, regardless of the cost, most assuredly will. There is no more time for contemplation; your life could end today. How will you live the rest of your life? It’s all or nothing. Don’t be satisfied with the lie you have been sold. Choose to abandon everything in order to gain what is more precious than all else combined. No more games, no more lies; no more goats. From this moment on, may you live your life fully for Jesus and for Him alone.

Paling By Comparison

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We crowd our lives with so many good things that it becomes easy to miss that all the good things in the world are worth nothing in comparison to Jesus. In our efforts to live a Godly life, we become consumed with the busyness of our culture while wrapping it in a pleasant “Christian” covering. We head up committees at church, volunteer whenever possible, pray and read the Bible. If we are financially able, we send our children to private Christian schools, thereby securing a future for them where they too can be obsessed with the busyness of acting out their religion. In the Western culture, we have so many resources available to us and so many opportunities to serve that the noise of our efforts often drowns out the very mission for which we purport to be engaging. I encourage you to look again at the life of Christ; He was not a man dominated by busyness. He walked from place to place, often took time to get alone to simply pray and think, and always had time for those in need. Though it may have been short, His was not a rushed life. By all appearances, it does not seem that Jesus tried to fill every available moment of His time in the name of religion. Instead He chose the better way of simply obeying His Father and carrying out His mission on earth.

Satan is a master of taking good things and twisting them into something that actually pushes us away from God. Volunteering our time for worthwhile activities should always be a good thing, yet if we are neglecting time alone with God or if our volunteer time is not done with the focus on the love of Jesus, then we have allowed Satan to twist our generosity into something that pleases him. Whenever we are not actively involved in true Kingdom service, Satan is pleased; he is happy to let us coast along in this direction because we are doing him no harm. The longer we drift in this manner, the more difficult it is to see the problem with it, and the harder it becomes to turn around. This is why it is so important to constantly monitor our walk. Are we doing something that looks like Jesus in this moment? Now how about this moment? Every second of every day we are constantly making choices to either follow Him or to turn another way. As long as we are focused on the things Jesus did rather than on what we think we should be doing, we will be fine. The moments we glance to the side are the moments for which Satan waits. He is constantly trying to catch our eye with the shiny objects of this world (a new car, a bigger church building, a new ministry, etc.). All things can be used for the glory of God or for the glory of ourselves. We must be diligent when considering our choices.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world that can even remotely compare to the love of Jesus Christ. Why do we so often accept the petty treasures of this life in lieu of the eternal and matchless abundance of God? How long will we continue in this self deception and delusion? Jesus gave His life for us, even though we are an evil and unrepentant people. He loved us with such grace that He continues to see us as what He created us to be rather than what we have allowed ourselves to become. All He asks in return is our devotion to Him. We owe Him that and more. He alone can save us from ourselves and from the very forces of evil. God is our treasure, Heaven is our reward, and Christ is our salvation. We must once and for all cast aside everything to which we hold dear and instead cling only to the matchless glory of Jesus Christ. Everything else pales in comparison to the beauty and the love of the Holy Son of God. Don’t settle for the shiny trinkets of this world. Instead, let us devote ourselves to reach for the hands of the eternal King, the lover and healer of our souls.

Kicking the Christians Out

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What are you concerned with in your life? What drives you to get up each day? Who are you becoming? These questions shape our character, the essence of who we are. Over the past couple of weeks I have found myself among Christians, yet I’ve never been so frustrated or heartbroken. Call me naïve, but I used to think that Christians and followers of Jesus were one in the same. That illusion was shattered several years ago, but it has become magnified of late for me. Let me explain what I see as the difference.

A follower of Jesus is one who is passionately in love with Christ, the Son of God. They will go anywhere and do anything for Him. Their hearts are broken by the dependency of the widows and elderly, by the desperation of the single mother and by the hollow eyes of the homeless. Followers of Jesus show compassion and love to everyone they meet, doing so in the name of Jesus. They share the good news of Jesus whenever they have opportunity to do so. A true follower of Jesus is humble, thinks of others first and possesses impeccable integrity. People are drawn to them because of the light that shines from them, a light that is the very reflection of God. This is what a follower of Jesus looks like, because this is what Jesus looks like.

In contrast, a Christian appears to be one who prayed a magic prayer at some point in their life, probably went forward in a church service to proclaim their faith, and more than likely got baptized in some water. If they are a really good Christian, they then become involved in a ministry or two at their church and eventually teach a Sunday school class or become an usher. The really super Christians may even become deacons or elders in their church. Their speech, dress and attitude are always wonderful for an hour or two each Sunday. Catch them during the week, however, and you’ll find a different story. These types of people compartmentalize their life. One compartment is neatly packed with their Sunday life, while another compartment is stuffed and bursting at the seams with their lives outside of church. Even at church you will hear conversations of negativity, jealousy, rumor spreading and disenfranchisement. Ephesians 4:29 states that, “No rotten talk should come from your mouth, but only what is good for the building up of someone in need.” In verse 31 of the same chapter we see that “All bitterness, anger and wrath, insult and slander must be removed from you, along with all wickedness.” Does this sound like the folks at your church? My guess is that it does not because our Western churches are filled with Christians instead of followers of Jesus.

When I was younger, churches and towns had “revival meetings” every so often. For the uninitiated, these were generally week long meetings held in churches or tents where an out of town speaker would visit and bring a message of repentance. I must be honest, as a youngster I dreaded being dragged along to these meetings. The purpose of the meetings was to shake the local Christians awake, to remind them of their true calling, and I think, to scare the daylights out of those in attendance. Perhaps we need to start having these meetings again. Christians in our churches are in such a malaise that it’s about time that they were shaken awake and scared back to the reality of the seriousness of their choices. We need to rekindle the flame of passion for loving God and telling others about His love. We need to repent of the religion of Christianity and turn to a life of following Jesus.

Let’s kick the Christians out of our churches. Let’s not be afraid to see our numbers drop until all that’s left are true followers of Jesus. Just as He stated in Matthew 12:30, we are either for Him or against Him. A religious life of platitudes and bickering is not a life that is for Jesus. It’s not why He came, and it is not a life to which we’ve been called. These are the salt that has lost its savor; these are the lukewarm. Do everything you can to never fall into that lifestyle. Instead, renew your commitment to Jesus today; determine from this moment forward that you will follow Him wherever He goes, and that you will imitate whatever He does. God has no use for meaningless religion and neither should we. Repent, follow Jesus, love God and serve people. Surrender all that you are and become a true follower of Jesus.