Even If i Walk Alone

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

eternal life

A High Bar

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One recent afternoon, I was conversing with a close friend of mine who is not a follower of Christ. I would peg him as agnostic, but he is a thoughtful and intelligent man, so while he disagrees with my faith, we can have civil and rational discussions about it. In the conversation, he surprised me with a comment that was both blunt and telling. He said his problem with Christianity was the forgiveness issue.

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He said he could never sacrifice his own son, and his feeling is that instead of forgiving mankind, God should raise the bar and demand more from us. I thought he was going to say he struggled with forgiveness so couldn’t conceive of God forgiving us, but he went another direction. He considers a high bar a better solution than a merciful gift.

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Already Dead

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What God wants, and the world needs, is dead people. Being willing to die for Christ is the necessary point of surrender for all who profess Jesus as Lord, but it’s only theory until you take the next step. Plenty of people say they would die for their faith, but very few ever do. I’m not talking about physical death, I’m talking about dying to everything in this world.

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God doesn’t need another person who claims Him as Lord but can’t let go of the entanglements of this life (2 Timothy 2:4). Christians who are already dead desire nothing and nothing sways them. This world no longer holds a single claim on their lives.

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The Cross

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When was the last time you contemplated the cross of Christ? We love to think about and glory in the resurrection of Jesus and all that it implies, but we are less comfortable thinking about the cross. Of course, there could have been no resurrection except for the cross. Our sanitized Sunday School versions of Christ’s death tend to hide the horrors of the crucifixion.

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On top of the slow suffocation of hanging nailed to a tree, Jesus first suffered an intense and brutal beating at the hands of men trained to keep someone a breath away from their death. The horror of the beatings and crucifixion of Christ are but a shadow of the pain we cause our holy God every time we sin against Him.

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Abide in Him

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The book of 1 John is replete with passages from the apostle admonishing us to abide in Christ. Some versions translate the word “abide” as “remain”. Both words convey what is at stake here. It’s not enough to believe in the gospel and accept Jesus as your Lord in a single moment in time. Those whose commitment to Christ is genuine will spend their lives seeking to be more like Jesus (1 John 2:6).

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They will desire to abide in Him because they feel out of place anywhere else (Philippians 3:19-20; John 15:4-5). To remain in Him is to avoid being swayed by every false teaching, tossed about by any new so-called revelation (Ephesians 4:14). The Lord doesn’t want us to chase after religious fads or whims, but only to abide in Him (Colossians 2:6-7).

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Few Are Going to Heaven

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The greatest burden of my life is the conviction that so many, perhaps even most people who proclaim to be Christians are not. It’s not the first time I’ve written about this, and it won’t be the last. That’s what happens when a burden is constantly crushing down on you. When I look around at the modern church, and even more broadly at the industries that have sprung up around it, my soul aches for those who think they are on one path but in reality are on another.

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To quote J. C. Ryle, “According to the men of the world, few are going to hell; According to the Bible, few are going to heaven.” The great tragedy of our day is not that we aren’t bringing more lost people into the body of Christ, but that so many lost people believe they are already in the body of Christ.

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