Even If i Walk Alone

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

John

Our Fruit

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Throughout scripture, we see a great importance placed on our fruit. Our fruit is what we produce and cultivate by our actions, decisions, and attitudes. It is the ultimate result of how we live. Good fruit is that which pleases and brings glory to God, while bad fruit results from selfish and prideful living. We often say our excess is the fruit of our labors because hard work often results in providing for the needs of our families and ourselves.

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A farmer who does not sow his fields will not reap a harvest. An office worker who goofs off all day will not get the promotion they crave. We reap what we sow in the physical world, and this is even more true in the spiritual realm (Galatians 6:7-8).

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Have You Died?

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You claim Jesus is the Lord of your life, but have you died to sin? Both cannot be true in one’s life. We cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). If we are a slave to sin, we cannot be a servant of God (John 8:34; Romans 6:16). In the same manner, if we are a slave of Christ, sin no longer has any claim on our lives (Romans 6:17-18). There is tremendous freedom in that realization. The chains of sin will drag us to an eternal death, but the blood of Christ penetrates those shackles and causes them to fall away (Colossians 2:13-14).

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We no longer have to carry the weight of our sins (Psalm 103:12; 1 Peter 2:24). As free men and women, why would we ever choose to hunt down those chains, reassemble them and clamp them back on? We need not do that, and if our commitment to Christ is genuine, we never will.

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Violating God’s Will

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A couple of different thoughts have been fighting for attention in my mind for the past several days. One was sparked by reading Job 28:28, where God said, “The fear of the Lord is this: wisdom. And to turn from evil is understanding.” We’ve talked about what it means to fear the Lord before (see “The Fear of The Lord”), but this verse is so clear.

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We could take it to mean that it is wise to fear God, which is true, and we can also understand it to be a succinct definition of what fear of God looks like: to be wise. Wisdom will keep us from violating God’s will. Which brings me to the other topic that’s been on my mind: finding God’s will for your life. I’ve also written on that topic before, and if you want a deeper dive, see, “Explaining God’s Will for Your Life.” I submit you will never understand God’s will until you develop a proper fear of His holiness.

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Not Ashamed

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Do your neighbors, co-workers, and friends know you are a Christian? Is your family aware that Jesus Christ is the most important thing in your life? Everywhere Paul traveled, the people knew he was a follower of Jesus. He wasn’t afraid to be bold in proclaiming the gospel of Christ. Against all odds, he stood firm in the faith (2 Timothy 4:7-8).

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He made the underlying reason for his boldness known when he wrote, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek. For in it God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith” (Romans 1:16-17). You know the question that’s coming… Are you ashamed to proclaim the gospel?

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Your Mindset

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I like black and white. Black and white is simple; it has no need for nuance. There is truth and there are lies. There is wrong and there is right. Paul pulls out another black-and-white issue in the eighth chapter of his letter to the Church in Rome (Romans 8:1-11). In these verses, Paul talks about how we all have one of two mindsets. We either have the mindset of life or the mindset of death.

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That’s about as black and white as it gets. On the surface, the choice seems obvious: do you want life or death? While the choice on paper is easy, aligning our lives with that choice is much more challenging. Every decision you make feeds into your mindset, so we must be careful with every decision, big or small.

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