Even If i Walk Alone

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

Discipline

Running the Race

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Paul’s letter to the Church at Corinth contains the familiar passage where he compares living life for Christ with running a race (1 Corinthians 9:24-27). It’s a great analogy not only because the road we travel is long but also because of the discipline it requires to stay on the path. Any form of athletics is by its nature a competitive process.

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Everyone who competes wants to finish first, but only one can. In some events, like a marathon, participants are content to only finish, regardless of winning or losing. Both hold lessons for us. No one runs a race without a goal, and no one achieves their goal without putting in a lot of hard work before the race ever begins.

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Making People Uncomfortable

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Are You making people uncomfortable with the way you live? That may seem like an odd question until you realize Jesus made a habit of making those around Him uncomfortable. If we want to live like Jesus, shouldn’t we be less concerned with having everyone like us and more concerned with making people uncomfortable when we interact with them? I’m not certain where the goal of getting along with everyone came from, but it’s ridiculous if you think about it.

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We are called to stand out and be different (1 Peter 2:9). We are also called to be bold and proclaim the name of Jesus (Matthew 10:32; 1 Corinthians 16:13). By obeying those two commands alone, there is no way we are going to be the “go along to get along” kind of people. When we choose Jesus, we choose to ruffle more than a few feathers by the way we live.

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The Game of Life

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There’s no such thing as the game of life. Despite the “wisdom” of the common bumper sticker, he who dies with the most toys does not win. Life is not winning or losing, it is living or dying. A spiritual war is waging all around us every day. Meanwhile, we go about our lives as if we have all the time in the world and that the most important thing we have to do is find pleasure or entertainment.

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We’ve got to wake up and recognize life is serious. Life is not just fun and games, and we must wage war against the spiritual forces around us. Every day, we must choose to serve Christ or to serve Satan. In our modern culture, we take life so casually that we don’t understand how serious things are. When we meet Christ face to face, we will understand how wrong we have been.

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Comfort Zone

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When faced with stressful and overwhelming circumstances, we all tend to pull back and retreat into what is most familiar to us. If what is most familiar and comfortable to us is sin, then we will find ourselves indulging in sinful behaviors every time our world feels like it is collapsing around us. Thus, when we most need God (as if we aren’t in constant need!), we are rebelling against Him. It’s not a good plan.

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A far better plan is to instill healthy spiritual disciplines that will cause us to retreat into habits like prayer and Bible reading when our life begins tilting upside down. Solomon wrote, “As shameful conduct is pleasure for a fool, so wisdom is for a man of understanding” (Proverbs 10:23). We need to be so obsessed with God and His Word that He becomes our comfort zone.

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Be Faithful

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In a world where moral decline is progressively moving the ruling parties toward open hostility against Christians, it can cause a lot of anxiety concerning the future. That persecution is coming is no longer a question, but only a matter of timing now. How should we, as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, respond in times like these? The only thing we know for certain is things will get worse before they get better with the second coming of our King.

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Until that day, I think the best thing we can do is to be faithful. One day we may be called upon to make the gut-wrenching decisions between freedom on earth or remaining loyal to Christ, between providing for our families or denying Jesus. Our steadfastness then will depend on how well-equipped we are to face those moments.

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