obedience

Live a Countercultural Life

November 26, 2018 by Tim Sherfy

Where is the passion among followers of Jesus today? Where is the urgency of knowing the scores of people we associate with daily are doomed to spend eternity in Hell, forever separated from their Creator? We say we love Jesus and claim He is Lord of our life, but where is the evidence? By my observation, most Christians today are focused more on their own success and retirement plans than they are on the starving masses, enslaved children, and desperate lost souls in the world.

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Everything is assumed to be someone else’s problem. We’ll leave those things to the professionals and their organizations. All the while, it is we who are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus, a directive we conveniently ignore.

What Really Matters

October 25, 2018 by Tim Sherfy

What we live for matters. More specifically, who we live for matters. One day, each of us will die. We’ll face our Creator and be asked to give an account for our lives. We’ll have to answer the question of who and what we lived for. Make no mistake, Jesus already knows the answer to the question before you open your mouth. The truth is, we all know the answer today, and that should scare some of us to death. Life is not about being a “good” person or doing “good” deeds. Life is about God. Period.

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How closely our lives resemble that of Christ’s life has huge implications for where we will spend eternity. Don’t miss this. Don’t stop reading because you’ve heard this before. There is nothing more important at this moment than making certain you are living a life worthy of your calling (Ephesians 4:1-2).

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What is Your Purpose?

April 12, 2018 by Tim Sherfy

What is Your Purpose? Christine Caine answered this question when she wrote, “The purpose of our time on earth is to learn to walk with Him, abide with Him, and live through Him – and then share that light with others.” How comforting and refreshing. It takes all the pressure off us. We can let go of everything we were striving to be. We can stop working so hard for all those things we were trying to accomplish. The competition suddenly got a whole lot lighter.

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Our five and ten-year plans just went out the window. But that’s a good thing because odds are we weren’t going to hit them anyway. As humans, we have a terrible tendency of overestimating what we can do in the long term and underestimating what we can accomplish in the next couple of hours.

Practicing Obedience

July 31, 2017 by Tim Sherfy

Over the past couple of posts (see “In the Presence of God” and “Bible Study”), I’ve been looking at some foundational aspects of following Christ. We’ve discussed prayer and Bible study, which are the linchpins in getting to know God. Today I want to wrap it up by focusing on what I see as the third, and perhaps most important, tenet in living a life wholly devoted to God: practicing obedience.

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The reason I feel this might be the most important aspect of developing your relationship with Jesus is because the other two concern learning who He is and what He’d have you to do. Practicing obedience is all about taking what you’ve learned and putting it into action.

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Living Intentionally

January 14, 2016 by Tim Sherfy

I’ve been focused lately on living intentionally. My theme this year is “Devotion”, and I’ve already discovered increasing my devotion to Christ is nearly impossible without ordering my days in an intentional way. Unless I am very specific about how I will choose to spend my time, my time will get spent in ways that in no way reflect my devotion to Christ. At least at this stage of my own walk with God, unstructured time rarely defaults to time spent with Him.

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It’s been both an enlightening and frustrating realization. While I’ve been reading books on living intentionally, it was Francois Fenelon who helped me see how living intentionally is firmly rooted in the pages of God’s Word. Here’s how the Bible demonstrates intentional living through the practice of living in the moment, keeping your eyes fixed on Jesus, and being content with what you have…
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