Even If i Walk Alone

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

James

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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Unstained by the World

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Much has been written around James 1:27, but the focus always seems to be on the first half of the verse, with little attention paid to the second half. It seems every Christian can get behind “looking after orphans and widows”, but things get a little dicey when it comes to keeping oneself “unstained by the world”. In theory, we’re good with it, but when we break it down into practicalities, things get a little uncomfortable.

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It’s amazing how quickly we can go from being willing to surrender everything to Jesus to being hesitant to let go of our favorite form of entertainment or vice. The truth is, we’re all allowing the world to stain us more and more each day.
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Choosing Divine Love

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One of my favorite Bible verses is 1 John 2:15. It is a beautiful verse with a sobering warning. Put simply, we cannot say we love God if we love the things of this world. Every day, this verse is at the forefront of my mind. It is the lens through which I see the world. To my regret, I still fail far too often to heed the warning. I have yet to learn to keep from loving the things of this world.

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One upside of how evil this world is becoming is that it is becoming far more difficult to love anything about it! Still, the battle goes on every day in the life of every follower of Jesus. There is no excuse for embracing the things of this world for those of us who claim Jesus as Lord. The choice could not be more clear: we either love Jesus or we love the things of this world.

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Training in Godliness

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We’ve spent several days discussing how to prepare for persecution (see the “Persecution” page under the “Resources” menu to catch up on what you may have missed). The primary way you can prepare for persecution is to be constantly training in godliness (1 Timothy 4:7-8). Every believer in Christ should endeavor to do this, whether we are facing persecution or not.

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As followers of Jesus, we must always be building the spiritual muscles we require to keep us spiritually fit and healthy. We know if we don’t eat right and neglect exercise, we will become fat, sick, and miserable. If it is true for our physical bodies, it’s even more true for our spiritual souls.

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Resist the Devil

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Continuing in our series of how we can prepare for persecution, today we want to look at how we can resist the Devil and stand firm in the faith. As we discovered in “Prepare for Persecution,” the way to prepare for the physical and mental persecution awaiting each of us is to first prepare spiritually.

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We can never stand up to the trials of this world unless we see beyond the physical world into what is happening in the spiritual realm. If you are spiritually weak, you will never stand up to physical abuse. Without the proper spiritual foundation, you will crack under the mental manipulation you will face.

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