Even If i Walk Alone

...this i choose to do.

Matthew

Follow Him

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Did you ever wonder what it must have felt like for the original disciples when they first heard Jesus invite them to follow Him? We read the story too quickly. Indeed, in its condensed form, it is easy to miss the gravity of the moment. Jesus beckoned them to follow Him, and they dropped their nets and ran after Him. How cool it must have been to be one of the original disciples. If only we had the opportunity, we think, we would have maximized it for all it was worth.

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While the compact telling in the Bible is powerful and shows the great commitment and faith of these men, it doesn’t paint the whole picture of what happened at that moment. These men didn’t just make a decision about what they would do with the rest of their lives, but they were also choosing to walk away from everything they had known.

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Victorious

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We all want to feel like a winner. Nobody wants to live their life in defeat. We fear failure because of the chance we’ll be labeled a loser. I submit we spend a large portion of our life focused on winning. We want to win in our relationships, with our finances, our career, and in pretty much any competition in which we engage. That pretty well covers how we spend our days. I dare say we might even be obsessed with winning. Otherwise, why would we spend so much of our lives focused on it?

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The best news is God has already declared you a winner. All things were created through His perfect Son Jesus, which means all things were perfectly created. You are the exact combination of skills, talents, and passions He created you to be. You are loved by the eternal King of the universe. That sounds like a winner to me. In Jesus, you are victorious before you ever begin!

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Focus and Distraction

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Do you feel as if you spend most of your time simply keeping up with the demands of life, or are you experiencing freedom and fullness? Jesus came to set us free (Luke 4:18-21) and to give us a full and abundant life (John 10:10). Knowing this, why is it so many of us feel stressed out, chained to our jobs, and like we are drowning under the weight of everything we must get done?

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I do believe we can live in the peace of Jesus even in our social media obsessed and frenetic world. But we won’t ever experience the life God intended for us to live as long as our focus is on anything or anyone other than Him.

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Rededicate

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It doesn’t take much to see our world is heading in the wrong direction. For those of us in the West, I believe we must accept our own share of responsibility for the way things are. After all, we’ve had religious freedom for a long time. We’ve had knowledge of our Savior for centuries. Somewhere along the line we stopped living as if Jesus was the only thing that mattered and found ourselves more and more seeking our own comfort and security. How can we who have been given so much think we will escape judgment for how little we have done?

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We not only are disobeying Christ’s command to tell everyone about Him (Matthew 28:18-20), but we no longer live as if Jesus is the Lord we claim Him to be. So, we are both disobedient and hypocritical. This is who we have become. This will be our legacy. Is that okay with you? Do you think this is the victorious life to which we have all been called (1 John 5:3-5)?

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Who is Loving?

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I read a convicting teaching from David Platt on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the passage of Scripture where we find the story (Luke 10:30-37), a teacher of the law had challenged Jesus’s commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves by asking, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus proceeded to answer the man’s question by telling the aforementioned parable.

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As Pastor Platt related, Jesus showed the answer wasn’t about who we should love, but rather the focus was on who is the one who is loving. And this is the point: all who claim to be followers of Christ must live in a way that is always marked by love. We are to be the one who is loving to all people at all times.

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