Even If i Walk Alone

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

Discipleship

Following Jesus Is Hard

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Let me state the obvious: following Jesus is hard. If you think following Jesus is easy, my bet is you aren’t following Him in the manner His Word prescribes. It’s easy to say you follow Jesus. It’s even easy to place your faith in Him. None of that requires anything on your part, and you can take it back whenever that decision becomes inconvenient.

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The difficult work comes in living for Christ every waking moment of your life. As people born into sin, we all have an innate and outsized portion of selfishness that dominates our motives and desires (Romans 7:18). Keeping that alone in check often takes what feels like a Herculean effort. There’s nothing easy about living a holy life, so there’s nothing easy about following Jesus.

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It’s All True

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A recent survey of American evangelical pastors revealed 20% don’t believe in a literal Adam and Eve. That means 1 out of every 5 pastors does not believe God’s Word is authoritative. Even stranger, 16% did not believe in miracles and 1% did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. What this shows us is that mainline evangelical pastors think some of the Bible is true, but not all of it.

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It means one out of every five pastors thinks they can tell which parts of Scripture are true and which aren’t (spoiler: it’s all true!). With what wisdom do they make this determination? With the fallible wisdom of man instead of the infallible wisdom of God, of course (1 Corinthians 1:20–25)!

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Quiet Humility

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It’s the slow, steady rhythms that will lead us to look more like Christ. So many want to do “big things for God,” yet they’ve never mastered the small disciplines the Lord desires most. We learn about so-called “celebrity Christians” crashing and burning with alarming regularity. In a previous post, I posited the question pondering if there should even be such a thing as “celebrity Christians.”

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I am convinced the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic “NO!” It seems everyone wants a platform or to be an influencer these days. I understand why those with a secular worldview would desire such things, but it baffles me why Christians would seek these things as well. Whatever happened to living lives of quiet humility (1 Thessalonians 4:9–12)?

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What Keeps You from Being an Effective Christian?

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What keeps you from being an effective Christian? It’s a question we all ask ourselves at some point in our walk. We want to be more consistent, more bold, and more useful to God in His Kingdom. No one surrenders to the Lordship of Christ and then endeavors to live out their days in mediocrity.

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But mediocrity is where so many believers, once full of fire and zeal for the gospel, live their lives. Why is that? What gets in the way of living a life worthy of our calling as disciples of Jesus (Ephesians 4:1)? If we can identify the problems, it can help us be alert to the tactics of the enemy and not fall for His tricks over and over again (2 Corinthians 2:11).

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Every Careless Word

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Jesus said each of us will have to account for every careless word we speak (Matthew 12:36-37). No small, careless, or flippant word is small, careless or flippant to God. He hears and judges everything that comes out of our mouths. The Lord is holy, consistent, and always intentional (1 Peter 1:15–16).

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He demands the same from us (Matthew 5:48). Jesus didn’t waste words, but used every syllable to point people to the truth about who He was and to the majesty of His Father (John 12:49–50). The beautiful and cutting words of Jesus are life to all who will believe (John 6:63), but the foolish and wicked things we say and do result in our destruction (John 5:28–29).

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