The Lord makes significant promises for those who will come
to Him. We waste our time, energy and
effort in chasing after other things we think will satisfy our needs and
desires. Augustine was right, "You
have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in
you." The question we must all
answer is, "Do we trust Him?"
So long as we fail to utterly trust Him in all that He has promised us
we will continue to seek satisfaction in other places, we will fail to find
rest. Trusting Him requires us to accept
that we aren't God and He is, His thoughts higher than ours and His ways
different. We like our own logic, we think
we can figure things out based on the way things are when He says that trusting
Him will mean that we can no longer trust our instincts or our logic. It also means that seeking His way, His will
and His glory becomes the way of our lives and if we commit to that one thing,
we will see success because His Word never returns void.
Jesus doesn't just call us to lay down our lives for God's
glory, He did it first and showed that it worked. The one man who ever lived who could change
the world through His life laid it down in order to change everything
forever. His life mattered but when it
was time to lay it down, He was willing to endure whatever was required for the
glory of the Father. The disciples were
materialists, believing that His life was the most important thing, that the
things life had to offer a king, a Messiah, were critical. Are we willing to pursue God's glory with
everything we are, willing to do anything, sacrifice anything to see Him
glorified? Are we willing to let go all
worldly ambition to see His kingdom advance?
That is the call, and so long as we are holding on to anything else we
will never see how much He can do in and through our lives.
Freedom is the alternative to bondage. Paul says that if you accept circumcision as
a religious thing then you have become a slave to the Law and to sin. In the cross there is freedom, the freedom of
knowing that eternal life is secure, we need not worry about what comes next,
whether we are good enough or not, our hope isn't in ourselves, it is in Christ
alone by faith. Once we have that
security, we are free to love and serve Him with everything we have and
everything we are. Abraham Maslow
identified a hierarchy of needs for a person to grow into what he termed
"self-actualization", the best person you can potentially be, and
those needs are grounded in security. We
have more security in Jesus, eternal life, than Maslow could ever imagine. We, therefore, are set free to become the
people we were created to be and that He intended us to be, but only if we
accept that security and that freedom as a gift and cherish it as our own
forever.
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