Even If i Walk Alone

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

Discipleship

Time to Pray

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After hitting the snooze button a couple of times, I found myself running late on a day that already held more to do than there were available hours. As I swung my legs over the bed, in my mind, I began rehearsing the day to come. Trying to schedule each piece mentally, I hit a jarring thought. Thinking of everything I had to do, I thought, “…and I need to squeeze in time to pray.” That may be one of the worst thoughts my brain has ever contemplated.

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Squeeze time in to pray? The Holy Spirit immediately convicted me of how wrong my thinking was at that moment. I anchor each of my days by doing nothing before spending time in God’s Word and praying. I know nothing sets me up for failure more than neglecting those priorities. And yet, here I was contemplating squeezing in the time to pray.

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Stay Ready

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If we want to be ready for the Lord’s return, we must be diligent to stay ready every day of our lives. To be caught unaware when Jesus comes back should terrify us all. It’s easy for us to shake our heads at the disciples who fell asleep while keeping watch as the Lord went off by Himself to pray in the garden (Matthew 26:36-46), but are we any better?

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Are we not even more guilty of falling asleep as we await the Lord’s return? If we are not focusing our lives on serving Christ and doing the things He commands us to do, we are not staying ready. We are simply going through the motions and living as if His return is not imminent. Jesus could return before you finish reading this post. He could come before I finish writing it! If He does, will He find us ready?

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Unstained by the World

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Much has been written around James 1:27, but the focus always seems to be on the first half of the verse, with little attention paid to the second half. It seems every Christian can get behind “looking after orphans and widows”, but things get a little dicey when it comes to keeping oneself “unstained by the world”. In theory, we’re good with it, but when we break it down into practicalities, things get a little uncomfortable.

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It’s amazing how quickly we can go from being willing to surrender everything to Jesus to being hesitant to let go of our favorite form of entertainment or vice. The truth is, we’re all allowing the world to stain us more and more each day.
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Defeat Sin

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I read a quote from John Macarthur that said, “Our ability to avoid and defeat sin comes not from imagining Christ in our circumstances but from obeying His explicit commands and following the example of His life in Scripture. Knowing what Jesus said about sin is key to overcoming it.” That’s profound.

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When we are facing temptations and decisions, are we so saturated in the Word of God that we instinctively know what to do because His Word is flowing through us? Are the commands of Christ so ingrained in us we choose His ways no matter what circumstances we found ourselves in? If we are determined to live a Christ-like life, we must dedicate ourselves to the study of His Word so we are equipped to know what to do in any situation.
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Choosing Divine Love

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One of my favorite Bible verses is 1 John 2:15. It is a beautiful verse with a sobering warning. Put simply, we cannot say we love God if we love the things of this world. Every day, this verse is at the forefront of my mind. It is the lens through which I see the world. To my regret, I still fail far too often to heed the warning. I have yet to learn to keep from loving the things of this world.

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One upside of how evil this world is becoming is that it is becoming far more difficult to love anything about it! Still, the battle goes on every day in the life of every follower of Jesus. There is no excuse for embracing the things of this world for those of us who claim Jesus as Lord. The choice could not be more clear: we either love Jesus or we love the things of this world.

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