Even If i Walk Alone

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

Luke

Be Bold

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In the face of unrelenting pressure to compromise, we must be bold and stand firm on the authority of Scripture. Growing up, peer pressure was a given. The desire to fit in, to be liked or even popular, is an enormous weight all people face as they go through their school years. I think we all thought once we moved into the “real world” that peer pressure would go away to a certain extent.

young man determined to be bold in his commitment to surrender to Jesus and live out his salvation with boldness and courage in true discipleship

But it never goes away; it just manifests in different forms. The culture is always trying to conform us to its idyllic mold. The problem is their idea of “acceptable behavior and speech” is grounded in millennia of wrong thinking and sinful attitudes. To conform to the world is to live at odds with the one true God.

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Guard Your Mind

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In an age of endless distractions, it’s never been more vital to guard your mind. What you allow into your mind affects how you feel, act, and live. I am convinced there are no neutral thoughts. At their core, every thought will either glorify God or ourselves. Over 2,000 years ago, Paul exhorted the Church to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

Woman scrolling through her phone emphasizing the need to guard your mind, exert discipline to to show your commitment to the holiness of God by minding our thoughts, keeping our focus on God and avoiding social media.

Infiltrating our minds is the primary way Satan wages war against us (Ephesians 6:11-12). The goal of the devil is to implant thoughts in our heads to make us doubt what God has said (Genesis 3:1), question who we are in Christ (Matthew 4:3-4), and erode our faith in Jesus (Luke 22:31-32). Every lie we’ve ever believed is another attack from the devil and his demons (John 8:44).

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Unsung Hero

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Joseph, the husband of Jesus’s mother, is a true unsung hero in the Bible. We don’t know much about him, and he’s easy to overlook when considering the heroes of the faith. But I submit Joseph was a model of obedience to God. Four times God gave Joseph faith-stretching, difficult, and even dangerous assignments, and all four times he not only obeyed, but did so without hesitation or question.

An older man, an unsung hero, praying expressing humility, faith, and obedience to God.

How many times does God’s Word compel us to do something challenging, and we come up with a myriad of excuses while doing everything we can to delay action? We can learn a lot from the faith and obedience of Joseph.

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Busy, Distracted, and Noisy

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Our lives are busy, distracted, and noisy. As long as this is the case, we will never experience what God intends for our lives to be. We will never experience what it is to be close to Him. To come to the full knowledge of God, our lives must revolve around nothing other than Him (Matthew 6:33). It is no small blessing that nothing on earth compares to the glory and majesty of Jesus because that means we can set our affections on the One more valuable and magnificent than any other (Colossians 3:1–2)!

Man drinking coffee, signing papers, and talking on the phone all at the same time because his life is busy, distracted, and noisy

If only we lived as if we believed this were true. Instead, we fill our minds with indecency, our ears with heresy, and our lives with irrelevancy (Philippians 4:8; 2 Timothy 4:3–4). We can not conceive of how much better our lives would be if we eschewed the fallen things of this world and lived lives devoted to the Savior of our souls.

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Faithfulness

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One of my favorite parables is that of the vineyard workers (Matthew 20:1-16), as it provides a great lesson on faithfulness. In it, Jesus tells how a landowner goes to the marketplace early in the morning and hires several workers, agreeing to pay them a denarius for the day’s work. The landowner goes back to the marketplace three times throughout the day, and a last time at 5:00pm to hire additional workers.

faithfulness,focus,mission,priorities,faithful,faith

His only promise of wages to any of those was he would pay them “whatever is right.” At 6:00 he instructs his agent to call the workers in and pay them, beginning with the last hired and moving backwards to the first. Those hired last received a denarius, so when those hired first came to collect their wages, they were thinking they would get more. However, they also received a denarius.

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