discipleship

Romans 12:1 – Who takes first?

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I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Romans 12:1

What is worship? How are we to worship God? Looking at Romans 12:1 we see that worship consists of being a living sacrifice. What does this mean exactly, what does it look like to be a living sacrifice? A lot of it comes down to the concept of humility. I know it seems like humility is something that is mentioned constantly, but that is because it is central to our faith. The concept of being a living sacrifice means we are not just day by day but instant by instant laying aside our will and our desires and looking towards God to receive His will and His desires. This means in order to be a living sacrifice we take ourselves out of the equation and place God first in our life.

You see worship is what we place our energy, priority, and focus on. What we worship is what we place first in our life. The problem though is that we often make a list of things in our lives and rank them by priority, yet just like a golf leaderboard something in second place still has the chance of becoming first. You see God wants not just to be first in a list of priorities but He wants to be our everything. This is offering ourselves as a living sacrifice, we take our leaderboard of things in our life and place God at every single ranking. In other words we throw out the leaderboard, throw out the rankings, and seek out God alone.

So do you have a leaderboard of priorities in your life? If so I challenge you to first place God firmly in that top spot, then work on making God fill all the spots, as that is what spiritual growth is.

Galatians 1:10 – Who do you try to please?

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Galatians 1:10
For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Are you a people pleaser? Do you plan out your actions regarding how others will see you? Do you resist doing certain actions because it may offend someone? How about do you think if your actions will bring yourself pleasure as a priority? This is the opposite of how we as Christians should be. Now I am not saying that we should intentionally offend others, but our actions should be based off will this be pleasing to God, not will this be pleasing to someone else, not even ourselves.

The issue here comes down to pride. What I am getting at here is that when we look at how we can please others, to try to gain the approval of man, we are looking at how we can make ourselves look good in the eyes of others. So in other words we are placing ourselves at the center of our lives. You see when we try to please others our motivation is often to make ourselves look good to the people around us, think about it would you rather have someone tell you what you want to hear or tell you the truth? Would you rather be told that you look good in that suit, or would you rather be told about the tear in the pants around the back pocket? We don’t like it when people are trying to just please us, so why do we often try to please others by avoiding to temporarily hurt them.

You see when we focus on God and are motivated to please Him, others may eventually thank us. That is because when we share God’s truth it may cause some discomfort to people, because of the conviction of sin, but it is a temporary discomfort if it eventually leads them to the foot of the cross. I have heard it said somewhere, and I believe it does hold true, you have to really hate someone not to be willing to share the Gospel with them because when you refuse to share the Gospel you are acting as judge and jury convicting them to eternal punishment. So you see when you try to please others, while temporarily pleasing them, it ultimately hurts them. So which would you rather be a people pleaser or a God pleaser? Do you want to give people temporary pleasure, or would you rather offer them eternal hope?

Psalm 119:9 – Why is Bible Study Important?

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How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word.

Why is it important to study the Bible? Well if you were to ask the psalmist, he would tell us that it is to keep us focused on God and to help keep us from falling into sin. The more time we spend in the Word the more we see how we should be living and acting. We see how we should keep our focus on God as He is the only one worthy of our worship; and whatever has our focus, whatever takes our priority is that which we worship. Spending time in the Word keeps our mind and hearts centered on God, guarding our way and keeping it pure.

The best illustration of this in practice is when we look at the temptation of Christ. After Christ was baptized He went into the wilderness for forty days at the end of which Satan came and tempted Him. We see in the narrative that with each temptation Christ countered Satan by quoting Scripture.. But now here is the thing, it is not just enough to know Scripture, we can’t just memorize verses and just quote them at times of temptation; we need to understand what the verse actually means so we can use them appropriately. We even see this with Christ’s temptation, in one instance Satan, seeing Christ countering him with Scripture, used Scripture to try to get Christ to sin by twisting the intended meaning of the verse to suit his purpose. Someone not grounded in Scripture might look at it and think, “you know you’re right,” but because Christ knew His Scripture, He was able to say, “you’re wrong and according to Scripture here’s why.”

So have you been finding it hard to stay on track in your faith? The first thing to do is look to see if you have been neglecting your Bible, and start digging into His Word.

John 3:36 – What is Belief?

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Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
John 3:36 ESV

I will admit this is a tricky verse to look at, because in many translations the word obey is also translated into believe. I will say that in my opinion trust would be a good word to have in both places although believe and obey is the better option. You see our Christian faith is a combination of belief and obedience that stems out of our trust in God. What I mean is that our belief in God goes beyond just the intellectual to a deeper trust in God that leads to obedience. For example let’s look at our regular relationships, when we were kids I am sure we all scraped our knees at one time or another. Now often our parents would tell us that we would be okay and that we would live while in that moment we would feel like our world was coming to an end, but because we believed in our parents, we trusted them, we knew what they were saying was true and it would help comfort us.

We do this because we know that our parents have our best interest in their mind, even when they are disciplining us they are doing it out of love. Even though we may not like it at the time our belief in our earthly parents has us obeying them because we trust that they have the best intentions for us in the long run. God is the same way, we may not like what we are going through or may feel like obedience to God is killing our fun, but in the long term obedience to God will lead us to eternal life. Our pride will often say that intellectual belief is enough, that obedience is not needed, but remember we are told many times that our belief and obedience goes hand in hand. So how deep is your belief in God, is it the surface level intellectual belief or is it the deeper trust that leads to obedience?

Matthew 6:34

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Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Matthew 6:34 HCSB

Worry, it seems to be a fact of life. There are many things in our lives which we tend to worry about; finances, health, and relationships are some of the big areas where we encounter worry. The question is who has ever benefited from worrying about something. I usually find the opposite to be true, the more I worry about one thing the more time and energy is taken away from something else. Let’s say I am worrying about my finances and where I am going to get the money to pay my rent among all my other bills, that takes time effort and energy that I could be using to focus on producing content and working on a number of podcast and other multimedia projects I am involved with.

You see Satan uses worry as a way to draw first our attention away from God, but also to foster doubt into our minds. When we worry we are often, though not intentionally, stating that we don’t think God has as much control over His creation as He does. It is a subconscious belief that we need to be in control, worry is essentially just another form of pride. When we worry it is because as I mentioned we want to be in control and our worry is because we feel like we aren’t in control and that makes us uncomfortable.

What Jesus wants us to do is to give control over to Him. That is because if we place our trust in Him and let Him take control we have no need to worry. If we are willing to focus our time and energy on God and let Him worry about everything else, everything else will essentially fall into place. So what are you worrying about today? Why don’t you give it over to God and trust Him to take care of it.