I know Jesus is, not was, not merely a great philosopher-prophet, but is. He existed with God before earth began. Well into the 20th century, much of the world delineated time itself by marking that which existed before Christ (BC) and that which came in the year of the Lord (AD for the Latin Anno Domini). That phrase, in the year of the LORD, offers another clue that Jesus is, for every year since His arrival on earth indeed marks a year of the Lord!
Just because our Savior is a living God, we should not confuse the contrary nature of we living humans with the true, unchanging nature of the Lord. Despite all the changes in our culture, God has not changed. As He admonishes us throughout the Bible, God expects us to follow the same “rules” now as always. Jesus sums up God’s life-map in two simple, but deep concepts:
- Love God first. Acknowledge that God is King of your life, committing your whole self (mind, body, and spirit), to God’s life-map of Christian living. When you allow yourself to be led by your desire to serve God, you please Him and generally do not find yourself in messes of your own making.
- Love others (and treat others) just like you want to be treated, which does not mean assuming everyone else thinks like you, but means to treat others with the patience and kindness and openness that we all desire. If we’ve learned nothing else in the last decade, it should be that people are driven to extremes when they do not feel that they’ve been heard.
God wants us to build treasures in heaven, not pleasures of the flesh that go against His teaching or that become more important in our lives than God Himself. If we want to be servants of God, we cannot prioritize the things of this earth over our pursuit of serving Him.
God’s basic life-map guide begins in the ten commandments, back-to-basics. If you want some practical steps to living God, you should write those commandments on your very heart, carrying them with you daily, sharing them and supporting other believers in their pursuit in doing God’s will.
Here’s what living for God looks like:
- We make God our priority. We pray and study His Word. We take the time to consider our words and actions and how they align with God’s purpose before speaking or taking action.
- We control our fleshly desires. God wants a man to choose a woman, that the two may become one flesh, bound to each other for a lifetime. He doesn’t approve of sex outside the bounds of marriage. He doesn’t like divorce, but wants us to be committed to working toward a strong marriage. He longs for us to succeed in our lifetime commitment to our significant others.
- We stay in our lane. If we are each Christians, we should approach each other in love, studying His Word together and praying for the success of the other. When we are communicating with non-believers, we should concentrate even more on exhibiting the qualities of love and compassion and mercy that God infuses into our lives when we accept Him as Savior and live like we mean it.
- We recognize God alone is our judge and realize how little progress in change we will support if we approach others in condemnation. Yes, it is a fine line between not wishing to condemn and yet upholding God’s truth, but speaking from a place of love should never involve bitter or bad words. If we remember that people embracing the things of this world don’t know God, how much gentler will our approach be? We want to show how positive a life can be when God comes first, not drive someone further from our Savior because of our words or actions.
- We watch our tongues. We recognize that leading with our emotions/feelings instead of on the solid foundation of God’s truth goes against what God asks us to do.
- We react in love instead of hatred. We take a moment to really put ourselves in another’s shoes. We pray for the needs of others and pay attention when God leads us to be part of someone’s solutions. We don’t honk rudely and gesture in traffic. We don’t make rude comments on social media, even if we disagree or get called names first.
- We prioritize treasures in heaven, which means putting our thoughts in alignment with God’s Word. The Bible is not a book to be interpreted as each person sees fit, picking and choosing the parts they like with the sections they refuse to acknowledge. As a believer, the more often I read through His words to us, the more I see how God has always been the same. He has always loved. He has always been patient with us. He has always been honest. He does what He says, even if that doing sometimes means disciplining us, just as any loving father disciplines his child, preparing that child for adulthood.
- We do not hate, steal, kill, covet, but seek to have a heart for God, which naturally spreads to love for others.
I know God clearly abhors sin, especially the sins of an unrepentant heart. Any sin makes us unclean. God doesn’t prioritize our bad deeds. Any bad deed makes us less than holy, so that only through the blood of Jesus may any of us communicate with our God. Not one of us is without sin. I should remember that whenever I am tempted to condemn others.
My life-map with God has good days and bad. By the grace of God, I am able to work toward improving my steps with Him, and that in itself is a full-time, lifetime journey. I pray that my life and words drive others toward God and not away from Him. In the end, each person must make that journey toward God for him/her-self, for we all will have our moment to stand before the Lord of Angel Armies and answer for the map we have created of our lives.
In Christ,
Ramona
Photo by Andrew Neel:
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