When you are a child, you go to school. When you grow up, you go to work. After work, you go home. When you get old, you retire. Eventually, you die. Then, there’s eternity. Because there is an eternity waiting for us on the other side of death, what we are living for matters. What you live for in the next 5 years is more important than where you will be when the years have passed.
Why?
Because if you are a Christian, you view the world through the lens of Scripture. As a Christian, your life should be the Gospel… nothing else matters. Jobs, money, and school have no eternal value if you are not living your life to the glory of God. Being a Christian does not excuse apathy towards living life, really living it. Not only going to work and spending the money you make, not only having a family, not only raising children. There is more to life.
When you become a Christian, you are not and never will be your own person. The individual who grew up in that city, married that person, and lives in that house is gone; someone new is there. Someone who has been made new by the blood of Jesus.
Once you are saved, your life is no longer about you. It’s about God, it’s about Christ. And it isn’t even only about Christ, it is Christ.
To live life as a Christian means in every situation to respond as much like Christ as possible. It is relating every single thing you see, hear, smell, think, touch, and do back to Scripture. It is training yourself to know God more and trying to see Him in anything you may come across. It is raising your kids to know Christ before they know their own names.
If a child can learn only one thing, they must know Christ and Him crucified.
Everything else comes after. We should chase God and trust Him to give us whatever we need. Seek Him first and all these things- food, drink, our bodily needs- will be added (Matthew 6:33). Our hope is not in the world, it is in nothing but the blood of Jesus.
But the world is so tempting. The world is desirable, the world is beautiful…the world is going to be destroyed. We should view this world as a beautiful piece of our Creator’s generosity but we must remember it is temporary. The heavens and the earth are stored up for fire as we see in 2 Peter 3:7. What we see is real to us, but God is more real. We have to see God in the foreground, midground, and background of everything or we will be tricked into thinking He isn’t there. We have to actively seek God because Satan is smooth. He slips sin into our path and makes us want to follow it. He tells us vanilla extract is delicious, he lets us smell it, he gives us cakes and cookies and tells us that it’s the vanilla extract that tastes so good. It isn’t until we have tasted the actual liquid that we know it has been an elaborate scheme. Satan uses sin in the same way, making 5 years look like eternity while eternity is fast approaching. He makes sin desirable, sin makes the world desirable, and when we are buried in the pleasures of the world, God looks undesirable. Because there is sin in the world, we will never fit in with the crowd.
Christ called us to be different. We are not children of the world; we are children of God.
This does not mean we should spiritually check-out and half-heartedly go on. It doesn’t mean we should stop living. On the contrary, this means we should live life to the fullest. We should recognize the challenge God has given us to live for Him alone in a world full of distractions. Not letting life live us but living life. It is taking advantage of each situation we are given by doing the best that is humanly possible to bring glory to God in every way imaginable. Take care with the big and little things because, as Pastor Cory Colravy says, “Little things done with great love are great things to God.” It is getting to work or turning in an assignment on time, or taking interest in our coworkers and classmates. It is teaching children to love with their whole hearts, God first and then their neighbor. It is making sure that in 5 years, we will be closer to God than we are now and bringing glory to God with every second of those years.
“Wherever you are, be all there! Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.”
Jim Elliot.
Written by: CCS Alumni Grace Gouletas
