Even If i Walk Alone

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

Discipline

Our Thoughts

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Most of us are pretty good at presenting a Christian face to the world. Underneath the façade, though, our thoughts often reveal a different side to our character. Indeed, getting our thought life under control is far more difficult than mastering our outward habits. John Macarthur once wrote, “The sins of our thought life are soul-coloring sins, character-damaging sins.”

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What we think about shapes who we become. We can never be joyful followers of Christ if deceit, lust, and conceit cloud our thoughts. The direction of our lives will be determined by what we think about most. A mind saturated by Jesus will yield a life devoted to Him. As appealing as that sounds, the opposite is also true. When our thoughts are on things other than God, the result will be a life that is frustrated, defeated, and ultimately wasted.

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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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