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”.
Most of us wish we were doing more that mattered. As followers of Christ we know we should be walking in His footsteps, doing the things He did and told us to do. We even make plans and resolutions to do more, serve more, and be more. Even when we are determined and our motives are pure, we tend to stop there. We stop at a wish, a hope, or even a prayer. But there are no style points in God’s Kingdom for wishful thinking. It is only when we take action and boldly move forward that the mission of Christ is furthered.
Reading through Jefferson Bethke’s book, “Jesus>Religion”, I was struck by his comment that too many Christians say “safe” prayers. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean by “safe” prayers. When we pray for missionaries or those facing persecution, we tend to pray for their safety. Pastors pray for the safety of those with them before doing an outreach event in some more dangerous parts of town. The problem is I never see Jesus, His disciples, or anyone in the early church praying for safety. Where did we get this model? I propose we start praying different prayers, prayers that are more aligned to what Jesus taught, and prayers that are far more relevant and powerful.