Even If i Walk Alone

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

habits

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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Creating New Habits

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Andy Stanley mentioned in a recent sermon, “Every habit begins with a first time.” It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  While obvious, I think it houses some profound truth. If every habit does indeed begin with the first time, then we must be ever diligent about what “first times” we are allowing to occur in our lives. I believe this is one reason why Paul encouraged us to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

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If we don’t, we begin to create thought patterns that become more and more difficult to change as time goes by.But it’s not just our thoughts. Every action we take and every word we speak for the first time begins creating new habits. If we aren’t intentional about our thoughts, words, and actions, we will be creating new habits we don’t want to have.

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Starting Over

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What if you were starting over in your walk with Christ? What would you do differently than you are doing right now? It’s easy and even inevitable to fall into ruts if we are not intentional in our choices. Are you living the life you know Jesus wants you to live? Why not? What’s holding you back? What fears have been getting in the way of you living your potential and becoming the person God created you to be?

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I admit it’s a lot of questions to throw at you all at once, but if we aren’t taking the time to evaluate where we are in our relationship with Jesus and how we’re doing in our walk, we will continue to drift along doing the same things we’ve always done and achieving the same results we’ve always gotten.

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Complacency

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Complacency is a killer disease for would-be disciples. As soon as you think you are in a great place with your disciplines and in your relationship with God, you are in trouble. Unfortunately, I have learned this (more than once) the hard way. Each time I think I’ve grown so close to Christ I could never fall away, I’ve quickly found myself spiraling downward. It’s not as if you wake up one day and decide to walk the opposite direction.

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It always happens subtlety and slowly. You won’t even recognize it’s happening. You skip your morning prayer time, “just today”, because of something else going on in your life. Then you find yourself putting your needs ahead of others. The next morning you skip prayer time again. And so, the spiral begins…

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The Way of the Disciple

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Not many look at each moment of their life as an opportunity to serve God. Time passes so quickly and we lead such frenzied lives that we scarcely notice the opportunities we miss and the decisions we make by rote. It is for this reason that we do not experience great growth in our spiritual lives. Until we learn to capture each moment we encounter, we will struggle to live our life wholly devoted to Christ. A life that is wholly His recognizes every decision is an opportunity to say yes to God and no to our selfish desires. Every breath we take, every thought we think, is a new opportunity to die to ourselves and find ourselves alive in Christ.

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