Even If i Walk Alone

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

priorities

Bad Advice

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There is a lot of bad advice out there. Some of the worst advice we can ever give to someone is to say, “Follow your heart.” This advice is rampant in self-help circles and the culture at large. To someone waffling between options or contemplating a career change, it sounds like wise counsel. But as is often the case, the wisdom of man is foolishness (1 Corinthians 3:18-20). Jesus never told people to follow their hearts. He told them to follow Him (John 8:12; John 12:26).

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When you follow your heart, you will be listening to your carnal desires. God’s Word says the heart is more deceitful than anything else and incurable (Jeremiah 17:9). When we follow our heart, we are deceiving ourselves. We are playing ourselves for the fool. Only by following Jesus will we ever find the peace, rest, and fulfillment that our hearts desire.

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God’s Word, Not Our Feelings

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There is much emphasis on feelings today, both in the Church and in the culture at large. If you watch religious programming, you won’t have to wait long until you hear a preacher talking about the feelings that will come over you when the Holy Spirit takes hold. Instead of emphasizing what the Bible teaches, these men and women promote experiencing the power of God’s Spirit through the manifestation of laughter, falling down, convulsing, or babbling unintelligible nonsense.

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Within the culture, the prevailing attitude is people can and should do whatever makes them feel good. All of this is in direct conflict with the truth of scripture. As Christians, we must always defer to God’s Word, not our feelings.

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The Reason We Sin

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The reason we sin is that we reject the commitment we once made to Christ. When we live our lives as if we are the center of the universe, we forget our lives are not our own. God has purchased us for an astronomical price and we are now the sole property of Jesus. The Bible declares we are slaves to Christ (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; Ephesians 6:6; Galatians 1:10; 1 Peter 2:16).

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Because of the modern connotation of the word “slave”, we immediately bristle at the thought of being anyone’s slave. But don’t let modern culture and human injustice allow you to deny the holy and inspired Word of God. We are slaves of Christ, bought at the price of Him dying in our place. It is a debt we can never repay.

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Indulging in Entertainment

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In the last post, “The Relevance of the Church”, we discussed how entertainment has crept into our churches and dramatically changed what a service looks like. While most churches start with the goal of submitting to the Lordship of Christ and being a living demonstration of His life, over time, it is common for churches to become the sum of the people attending. They begin to reflect the whims and preferences of those who come through the doors rather than maintaining a rigorous adherence to Biblical teaching and structure.

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This means if we want to have more Christ-like churches, each of us must become more Christ-like in our lives. Don’t wish your church was better. Focus on becoming more Christ-like yourself. Our churches are obsessed with entertaining the masses because of our penchant for indulging in entertainment in our personal lives. If enough of us would take the call of Christ seriously by consuming our thoughts with Him instead of earthly pleasures and desires, our churches would once again be the light and refuge that our world needs.

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The Relevance of the Church

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Have we let entertainment cripple our lives and, by extension, the relevance of the Church? Speaking on this topic, A. W. Tozer said, “For centuries the Church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognizing it for what it was—a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attention from moral accountability… She appears to have decided that if she cannot conquer the great god Entertainment she may as well join forces with him and make what use she can of his powers”.

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When I was younger, I would have scoffed at such a statement, chalking it up to being old-fashioned, legalistic, and out of step with the times. I know I’m not alone in this because I believe it is precisely because of such attitudes we find ourselves with the Church we have today: weak, lacking in courage, and saturated with the ways and teachings of the world.

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