Even If i Walk Alone

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

Romans

Following Jesus Is Hard

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Let me state the obvious: following Jesus is hard. If you think following Jesus is easy, my bet is you aren’t following Him in the manner His Word prescribes. It’s easy to say you follow Jesus. It’s even easy to place your faith in Him. None of that requires anything on your part, and you can take it back whenever that decision becomes inconvenient.

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The difficult work comes in living for Christ every waking moment of your life. As people born into sin, we all have an innate and outsized portion of selfishness that dominates our motives and desires (Romans 7:18). Keeping that alone in check often takes what feels like a Herculean effort. There’s nothing easy about living a holy life, so there’s nothing easy about following Jesus.

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Do You Care?

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We seem indifferent to the death of strangers, and to a degree, even to those we may know. It’s one thing if that person is a believer, in which case we should celebrate. I’m more concerned with those who die without Christ. Do you care that every time one of them dies that they will spend eternity in a very real Hell (Revelation 20:15)? Do you feel the weight of this when they die?

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If you are like me, it’s easy to become numbed to the deaths of so many. But this should never be the case. Our mission is to go into the harvest and warn as many as we can about the coming judgment and their eternal fate (Matthew 28:19–20; Matthew 9:37-38).

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What Keeps You from Being an Effective Christian?

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What keeps you from being an effective Christian? It’s a question we all ask ourselves at some point in our walk. We want to be more consistent, more bold, and more useful to God in His Kingdom. No one surrenders to the Lordship of Christ and then endeavors to live out their days in mediocrity.

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But mediocrity is where so many believers, once full of fire and zeal for the gospel, live their lives. Why is that? What gets in the way of living a life worthy of our calling as disciples of Jesus (Ephesians 4:1)? If we can identify the problems, it can help us be alert to the tactics of the enemy and not fall for His tricks over and over again (2 Corinthians 2:11).

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Every Careless Word

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Jesus said each of us will have to account for every careless word we speak (Matthew 12:36-37). No small, careless, or flippant word is small, careless or flippant to God. He hears and judges everything that comes out of our mouths. The Lord is holy, consistent, and always intentional (1 Peter 1:15–16).

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He demands the same from us (Matthew 5:48). Jesus didn’t waste words, but used every syllable to point people to the truth about who He was and to the majesty of His Father (John 12:49–50). The beautiful and cutting words of Jesus are life to all who will believe (John 6:63), but the foolish and wicked things we say and do result in our destruction (John 5:28–29).

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Seizing the Moment

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Are we as the Church seizing the moment before us? As I survey all the evil, mental issues, and despair in the world, I have to wonder if we are shining the light we have into such a dark and desperate place. Too many Christians are content with being in the club and see no reason to shake things up or draw attention to themselves. Christianity is not a social club, it’s a war zone.

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Our Sunday gatherings should be a respite from the battlefront where we recharge and gain more tooling to fight the battles we will encounter the moment we walk out those doors. I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I see. What I see are megaplexes with circus sideshows built for entertainment of the masses. I see leaders more concerned with appearing relevant than rescuing souls from the clutches of Hell.

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