Hello Everyone,<\/p>\n
Have you ever said this statement or made this commitment, “I’m going to start living for God!”\u00a0 If you are like me, growing up you may have heard a lot of people encouraging you to “Live for God”.\u00a0 My interpretation of that was that I needed to find out what the Bible said about what God expected of a Christian and I needed to fulfill those expectations and then I would be a good christian and God would be pleased with me.\u00a0 So I worked really, really hard at finding out those expectations and attempting to live up to them.\u00a0 Now, don’t misunderstand…I really loved God and wanted to please Him.\u00a0 So I worked really hard at this and was completly sincere in everything I did.\u00a0 I loved going to church and loved my friends that I hung out with.\u00a0 I believe we all had a sincere love for God and wanted to please God.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I don’t think those that taught us to “Live for God” realized what they were saying nor did they mean to bring confusion into our lives.\u00a0 Their teaching at that time accomplished God’s purposes in me and kept me out of a lot of trouble that could have reeked havoc in my life.\u00a0 The trouble that I found myself in years later was that I felt like I never could measure up to God’s standards and that it was never enough.\u00a0 I couldn’t understand after I had worked so hard for so long that the idea of “success” that I was looking for in my relationship with God and ministry seemed so illusive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At one point I felt successful-like everything was going well and then I arrived at a place and it was like the bottom feel out.\u00a0 No matter how hard I worked I just couldn’t be successful.\u00a0 I even resorted to praying harder and more often, I spent more time studing the Bible and begging God to please intervene.\u00a0 I memorized more scripture, got an accountability partner and witnessed more.\u00a0 At one point, I remember thinking that because I wasn’t tithing more God was punishing me.\u00a0 Yet, the intervention that I prayed\u00a0for never seemed to happen.\u00a0 I felt abandoned and left by God.\u00a0 I would pray and felt as if my prayers bounced off the ceiling and came right back and hit me in the head.\u00a0 I did not know that all the while, God was there, protecting me but allowing me to go through a process called brokenness.\u00a0 This process enabled me to see that all of my efforts would never be good enough and that Christ had already done all the work on the cross.\u00a0 He did love me and He was pleased with me.\u00a0 I could quit my striving and working hard to please Him.<\/p>\n
Jesus did this exact same thing when He began his earthly ministry.\u00a0 The religious establishment would teach their rules and regulations and Jesus would come along and raise the bar on them.\u00a0 One example was when they taught about adultery and Jesus came along and said if you even looked at a women with lust in your heart then you had committed adultery with her.\u00a0 Another was if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic (undershirt) then give him your coat also; or if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.\u00a0 Jesus caps off some of this teaching by saying, “You, therefore, must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”\u00a0 Now, there’s a standard to attempt to live up to!\u00a0 Wow….that makes me tired just thinking about it.\u00a0 What was Jesus meaning here?\u00a0 I have heard many debate and try to explain away what all this means.\u00a0 I myself did that many times.\u00a0 FYI….a legalist will always have an explanation for these verses….excuses really, because they can’t live up to that standard and that is exactly what I think Jesus was up to here.\u00a0 He wanted all of us across time to see and realize that we could never live up to this standard so we would get to the end of ourselves and quit trying.\u00a0 At this point we then look to Him and see the sufficiency of the cross and realize that in Christ all of our needs are met and we can receive the beautiful gift of His love and acceptance of us.\u00a0 What a precious relationhip we can then experience with Father!\u00a0 I call it “Living Loved”.\u00a0 I am full, complete, satisfied, valued and worth everything to my Father in heaven who made the ultimate sacrifice for me.\u00a0 He literally put my needs before Himself and made it possible for me to be crucified with Him and receive His life inside of me.\u00a0 I am now a new creation in Him.\u00a0 I don’t have to work hard or earn anything.\u00a0 It is all a free gift that I can rest in and experience on a daily bases.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Do I serve the Lord now, you may ask?\u00a0 Yes!\u00a0 But with a whole new perspective.\u00a0 I don’t live FOR God anymore…I live FROM God now.\u00a0 Meaning, I allow Christ, who is my very life to express Himself in and through me.\u00a0 I live out of Christ strength not my own.\u00a0 As Paul said in Gal. 2:20,“I am curcified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.\u00a0 This life that I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself up for me.”<\/em>\u00a0 The old Dana is now dead and now Christ is living through me.\u00a0<\/p>\n Think about these verses from the Message out of Galatians 3, “Let me put this question to you:\u00a0 How did your new life begin?\u00a0 Was it by working your heads off to please God?\u00a0 Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you?\u00a0 Are you going to continue this craziness?\u00a0 For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God.\u00a0 If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it?\u00a0 Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing?\u00a0 It is not yet a total loss, but it certaintly will be if you keep this up!\u00a0 Answer this question:\u00a0 Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, His Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does He do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust Him to do them in you?\u00a0 Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham?\u00a0 He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.<\/p>\n Later in the chapter Paul says, “And that means that anyone who tries to live by his own effort, independent of God, is doomed to failure.”\u00a0<\/p>\n And later he says, “The obvious impossibility of carrying out such a moral program should make it plain that no one can sustain a relationship with God that way.\u00a0 The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him.\u00a0 Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you.”<\/p>\n Well, I guess that about sums up this one!\u00a0 Rest….and live FROM Him and not FOR Him!<\/p>\n Dana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello Everyone, Have you ever said this statement or made this commitment, “I’m going to start living for God!”\u00a0 If you are like me, growing up you may have heard a lot of people encouraging you to “Live for God”.\u00a0 My interpretation of that was that I needed to find out what the Bible said about what God expected of a Christian and I needed to fulfill those expectations and then I would be a good christian and God would be pleased with me.\u00a0 So I worked really, really hard at finding out those expectations and attempting to live up to them.\u00a0 Now, don’t misunderstand…I really loved God and wanted to please Him.\u00a0 So I worked really hard at this and was completly sincere in everything I did.\u00a0 I loved going to church and loved my friends that I hung out with.\u00a0 I believe we all had a sincere love<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anewlifedesign.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}