Even If i Walk Alone

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

Matthew

Living a Godly Life

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What does it look like to live a life pleasing to God in everything we do? Living a godly life should be the aspiration of every follower of Christ. We all know that, but often struggle to discover how this plays out in practical terms. Inconsistency marks our lives, and we can well identify with the lament of the Apostle Paul: “I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate…” (Romans 7:15).

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King David wrestled with this as well and laid out some signposts for us to live a godly life. To wholly devote our lives to Christ, there are practical things we can do every day to live the life He created us to live.

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Prioritize Jesus

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It seems no matter how hard we try, we never have enough time to do everything we want and need to do. In all of history, we’ve never had more options about how to spend our time than we do today. With all the options comes a sort of paralysis. It’s too much. I recently heard a psychologist state anxiety results from too many options and too many images.

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We get anxious because the things of this world overstimulate us with possibilities. Satan is clever, and we can’t ignore the brilliance of his strategy. By overwhelming our senses, we experience stress, which hinders our decision-making processes. We must have a strategy to combat the overwhelming options in our world. We must learn to prioritize Jesus in advance so we can defend against the onslaught of possibilities.

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Don’t Be True to Yourself

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For most of my life, I’ve heard people say we should be authentic and be our true selves. This sounds like good advice, but it’s the worst advice a follower of Jesus could ever follow. To be true to yourself stands in stark contrast to how we are called to live. It is prideful, putting our feelings and preferences ahead of God’s. The advice isn’t far removed from the way the serpent tempted Eve.

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He convinced her there was a better way than the one prescribed by God. The devil deceived Eve into believing she could be more than she was. It was the desire to be something more, something she believed to be truer to who she was that she shared with Adam. The rest is the unfortunate history of the fall of man and the source of all our problems today.

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Coasting

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Would you say the gospel of Jesus is being spread in the area where you live? Is the environment for Christianity getting better or worse? Unless you live in a small pocket of the world unknown to me, my guess is your answers to those questions will not be encouraging. People don’t want to hear the gospel of Christ, they want to revel in their “own truth”, in whatever makes them happy. The irony is people are not getting happier. They aren’t happy at all.

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The suicide rate, particularly among younger people, is skyrocketing. Fear and anxiety, fueled by a relentless push by the ever-present media bombarding our every second, are rampant. Anger and rage fill the newsreels and feeds of social networks. And yet so many churches and Christians seem to be content to watch it unfold. We’re not stepping into the fray with the hope of Jesus. We’re not engaging in the battle; we’re coasting in our faith.

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Hold Fast

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A question I often hear pastors and writers ask is, “If you knew Jesus was coming tomorrow, how would you live today?” The best answer I ever saw or heard in response to this question was from John Wesley. He said he would live it as he has every other day, practicing the disciplines of his spiritual life. What an amazing testimony! We should all aspire to give such an answer. Tragically, few of us can answer in this way.

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As the days grow darker and the return of our Savior draws nearer, it becomes urgent we prepare now to meet our Lord. While so many of us play around and dabble with Christianity, I can assure you Jesus will not be playing when He returns. If we don’t hold fast to our faith today, what makes us think we will be ready to meet Him tomorrow?

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