Even If i Walk Alone

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

priorities

Simplicity

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I’ve had an old Margaret Becker song (“Find Me”) stuck in my head for several days.  The lyric for the part playing on an endless loop in my head says, “I’m gonna give away my stereo / Give away my TV / I’m going back to essentials, a chair and a lamp / And the Book that You wrote to me”. What have we given up in our crazy distracting, device-happy, and electronics fueled world?

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If you live in the West like me, I’m going to guess you have no shortage of “stuff”. You have no shortage of distractions. But what have we forgotten, and what have we lost? What if we took it back to essentials, just a chair, a lamp, and a Bible. Wouldn’t that be more than enough? Wouldn’t we actually be more fulfilled and happier?

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Not My Will, But Yours

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The prayer of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane is powerful for us today. It’s easy to miss the simple power contained within this prayer because we are accustomed to reading it as part of the crucifixion story. Jesus prayed, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup away from Me—nevertheless, not My will, but Yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42). It is the second half of the prayer on which I’d like to focus: “not my will, but yours be done.”

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A couple of years earlier, Jesus had taught His disciples to pray in a similar manner, when He prayed, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10). Jesus prayed and instructed us to pray for God’s will to be done, regardless of what we face or what is swirling around us.

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Building God’s Kingdom

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In Haggai 1:4, God says, “Why are you living in luxurious houses while my house lies in ruins?” While we should certainly feel some conviction of this taken at face value, I think there is also a deeper application. Looking at the state of the typical Christian life today, we could paraphrase this into “Why are you building such a luxurious kingdom for yourself while neglecting My Kingdom?”

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There is no escape from the fact almost every one of us devotes far more time building our own “house” than we do building the Kingdom of God. This attitude permeates how we spend our time and our money. The culture in which we live demands we prioritize self before others and certainly before God.

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Dead People

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There’s a famous line from the 1999 movie, “The Sixth Sense”, where the little boy says, “I see dead people.” It was supposed to be creepy at the time, but now it is more comical (or perhaps that’s just my own twisted sense of humor!). The fact is, as Christ-followers, we should say “I see dead people” every time we walk into a gathering of believers.

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If our faith in Jesus is genuine it means we have given up everything. Indeed, we have died to ourselves. Jesus said if we would follow Him we must “take up our cross daily” (Luke 9:23). Nobody walks away from their cross alive. We are dead people.

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Breathing Christ

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What if Christ were so central to our lives He became our very breath? Everything would depend on Him just as everything depends on our ability to breathe in and breathe out. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Jesus was so essential to our lives living for Him became as natural and effortless as breathing?

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The Holy Spirit of God infuses our body. He is not an add-on, but rather an integrated part of all we are. He adds no weight and is indeed as light as the air we breathe.  Because of this, communing with Christ can be as natural and easy as breathing in and breathing out.

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