Instructing and encouraging you to live your life as a disciple of Jesus
What is it God wants to do in your life? God says, “This is what I have for you; come and see!” But we respond, “Oh no Lord; not me!” Why is our faith so weak that we cannot believe that God can do whatever He wants to accomplish in our lives? Why is our vision so small that we can only dream of what is possible through our own strength? Paul said in Philippians 4:13 that he could do all things through the strength of Christ. All things! He didn’t say some things or easy things, but all things.
For the past couple of years, at the beginning of the year, I’ve developed a theme phrase that has guided my life throughout the rest of the year. Two years ago my phrase was, “Consume less; contribute more”. That totally revolutionized the way I lived my life. Last year my phrase was, “Take action”. After doing some reading (“My One Word”” by Mike Ashcraft and “One Word That Will Change Your Life” by Jon Gordon) and listening to a sermon from Craig Groeschel, I decided to slim things down a bit this year and have a theme word instead of a theme phrase. In fact I took it a step further and came up with a theme word for my life, as well as one for the upcoming year.
There seems to be a lot of emphasis on self-esteem these days. Parents want to bring up their children with a healthy self-esteem; psychologists want to impart it to their patients. Having low self-esteem is said to negatively affect our creativity, integrity, and stability. It makes one overly critical, socially awkward, and generally unconfident; all of this because we don’t feel good about ourselves. As followers of Jesus, we should immediately see the trap in this way of thinking. All the focus is on the self; it’s on the child or the individual. We’re looking for reasons why we don’t feel we measure up to the rest of the world. To quote an old song, “we’re looking for love in all the wrong places”.
In the book, “Tozer on Christian Leadership”, A.W. Tozer says: “To me, it has always been difficult to understand those evangelical Christians who insist upon living in the crisis as if no crisis existed. They say they serve the Lord, but they divide their days so as to leave plenty of time to play and loaf and enjoy the pleasures of the world as well. They are at ease while the world burns…” I love Tozer. He never minced words and simply told it as it is. The statement above should convict every one of us. We spend so much time planning our lives and virtually none plotting how we will war against the enemy today.
It seems the longer we know Christ, the easier it is to become anesthetized to what He actually did on our behalf. We know the story of Jesus, how he became one of us only to die in our place. It’s a tragic but beautiful story. Too often that’s all it is to us. Whatever emotion and power we once took from the story has long since been replaced with nostalgia and boredom. How else do we explain the way we live? God gave His only Son to come and die for the wrongs we have done, yet we live our lives in casual indifference to that fact.