Even If i Walk Alone

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

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Do We Love Him?

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I am continually being brought back to the book of 1 John, primarily the second chapter. There is so much there that I’m beginning to think a single lifetime is not long enough to mine all the treasure it contains. One of the great things about this letter is the clarity of the message the Holy Spirit inspired John to write. There are numerous black-and-white statements. There is no nuance, no vagueness, and no wiggle room.

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This book leaves no room for you to hedge your bets. If you believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God that it is, then 1 John is the unequivocal handbook of how we are to live this Christian life. We say we love Jesus, but does our love pass the test? When push comes to shove, do we love Him? Let’s see what John wrote about this.

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In His Presence

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We live our lives in a compartmentalized way. There are compartments holding our work stuff, personal stuff, and God stuff. We further break these compartments down into even smaller ones until we are juggling all these little boxes, unable to keep up and too tired to give any one of them our best effort. In the bustle and progress of modern society, we’ve lost the practice of spending time with God.

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Because our attention is so fractured and fragmented, we never seem to have time for our King. Spending time in His presence is at best a dream and is more often than not forgotten entirely. Somewhere between our declaration of His Lordship and our present reality, we’ve lost our love and fascination with Jesus.

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You Love the World

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Over the past year, I’ve probably referenced (1 John 2:15) more than any other verse. I keep coming back to it because its message is so clear and sobering: “Do not love the world or the things that belong to the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.” Do you love the world? If so, then you don’t love God. It’s a harsh statement, but impossible to avoid.

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There isn’t any wiggle room in the verse to accommodate how much we love the world, so we can’t rationalize and say we love God more than the things of this world. God has never been one to accept partial love. We cannot serve two masters; we will love the one and hate the other (Matthew 6:24).

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Reframing

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I heard a story of an airline pilot whose goal was to become the best pilot in the business. He framed everything in his life around that industry. When his friends were talking about Paris, he would interject about the time he flew there. When the topic was food, he would talk about the improving quality of airline food. No matter the subject, he would find a way to relate it to flying.

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His worldview allowed him to see everything in the context of what he held most dear. This reframing of every situation and conversation holds a great lesson for living the Christian life. If we were all as dedicated to our faith as that pilot was to his passion, our love for Christ would grow exponentially. No one would ever question the purpose of our lives.

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Is Jesus Lord of All?

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Jesus is the One you reach out to when you are in need, and perhaps the One to whom you give thanks when things are going well. But is He also the one you serve in between those times? It seems to me this is a true test of our faith. It’s not whether we are grateful to Him in good times and seek Him in the bad, but the test is if we will serve Him in the boring and mundane middle.

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As I’ve repeated many times in my writing, if Jesus isn’t Lord of all, then He isn’t Lord at all. If changing circumstances change how you think about Christ, then He isn’t Lord of everything. Is Jesus Lord of all in your life?

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