Even If i Walk Alone

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

Luke

Follow Him

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Did you ever wonder what it must have felt like for the original disciples when they first heard Jesus invite them to follow Him? We read the story too quickly. Indeed, in its condensed form, it is easy to miss the gravity of the moment. Jesus beckoned them to follow Him, and they dropped their nets and ran after Him. How cool it must have been to be one of the original disciples. If only we had the opportunity, we think, we would have maximized it for all it was worth.

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While the compact telling in the Bible is powerful and shows the great commitment and faith of these men, it doesn’t paint the whole picture of what happened at that moment. These men didn’t just make a decision about what they would do with the rest of their lives, but they were also choosing to walk away from everything they had known.

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Focus and Distraction

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Do you feel as if you spend most of your time simply keeping up with the demands of life, or are you experiencing freedom and fullness? Jesus came to set us free (Luke 4:18-21) and to give us a full and abundant life (John 10:10). Knowing this, why is it so many of us feel stressed out, chained to our jobs, and like we are drowning under the weight of everything we must get done?

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I do believe we can live in the peace of Jesus even in our social media obsessed and frenetic world. But we won’t ever experience the life God intended for us to live as long as our focus is on anything or anyone other than Him.

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Who is Loving?

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I read a convicting teaching from David Platt on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the passage of Scripture where we find the story (Luke 10:30-37), a teacher of the law had challenged Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves by asking, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus proceeded to answer the man’s question by telling the aforementioned parable.

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As Pastor Platt related, Jesus showed the answer wasn’t about who we should love, but rather the focus was on who is the one who is loving. And this is the point: all who claim to be followers of Christ must live in a way that is always marked by love. We are to be the one who is loving to all people at all times.

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Doing the Work

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Without a doubt, we are saved solely by the grace of God; there is nothing we can ever do to earn our salvation (Ephesians 2:8-9). On our own, we are all disqualified from salvation, because each of us has sinned and fallen short of God’s standard for eternal life (Romans 3:23). If not for the loving grace and mercy of God, we would all be lost and without hope. Thanks to His love though, we need not despair.

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Because of His amazing grace and the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, we can be saved from the hopelessness of sin. We can have hope because death is not the end for those who place their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I believe the sincerity of our faith is proven by doing the work He has given us to do (Ephesians 2:10). Our salvation is free, but it is not cheap.

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Going to Hell

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In our day, the phrase “go to hell” is thrown around flippantly in anger. It is common for many to joke they are “going to hell” for something they said or did. Without a doubt, culture has done much to desensitize us to the brutal and horrific reality of Hell. We’ve allowed forces outside the authority of God’s Word to convince us the Bible doesn’t mean what it says. And we’ve allowed this to happen to the point Hell is now a joke at worst or at best a casual curse.

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Going to Hell is not a trivial phrase, it is the most pressing and urgent subject we need to address as followers of Jesus. Since Christ doesn’t want anyone to go to Hell (2 Peter 3:9), we should spend our lives doing everything we can to keep every person we meet from going to Hell.

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