What if you died, went to heaven, saw all the glory of God there, and then He asked you to go back to earth and now live here again? The thing was, He set you down on earth like in the terminator where they go through time with no clothes and nothing at all? (Okay, so you get one set of clothes to start with).
But He also gave you a set of priorities: 1) build His kingdom and love Him first, no matter what 2) love all the people you meet 3) do what you can to get people of all the ethnic groups in the world following Jesus 4) strengthen other people who believe as much as you can in their faith and love for God & 5) do as much good as you can anywhere you can, but especially for other believers. The tools He did send with you are 1) His written message for the world 2) His presence and person inside of you 3) access to Him to request help, and anything, really, that you need to accomplish His priorities 4) His promise that He will be with you and never leave you and that IF you keep His priorities first, He will take care of all your needs for living in this world and 5) the reality that there are other people on earth who are followers of this same God.
How would you set off to arrange what you would do here on earth? Where would you start?
What would you begin to do?
I want to propose that the VERY LAST THING you would ever consider would be to adopt living like 99.9% of American people live as your first priority. It would be laughable. "Oh, I will first go get a job so I can buy my own house and invest in 2 cars and enough clothes to have a change for every day of the year and so I can have enough electronics to entertain myself for most of the hours I am not working at my job. Oh, and I want to make sure that I have enough food so I can eat as much as I want every day. And I have to be sure to have my own dwelling place with enough furniture to fill every room. I will also pay money to make sure if I die that my heirs have a million dollars to live on and never have to work. Yeah, that's how I will start." Umm, what does ANY OF THIS have to do with the priorities you were given or the tools God gave you when He sent you back here?
Yet that is where I have found myself and I am undone. I have to go back to the start. The first sentence. This is me and this IS us. But I find myself with pretty much a lot of that stuff now with me. I have had it backwards. You don't start, I should not have started by thinking I should focus on fulfilling the second half of tool number 4 listed above. Why would I even think that? Because that is just what is done here in America. Oh... the American dream. To me has become a nightmare of sorts. "Let me go, I want to be free, I want to live, and follow the One who brought me back from the dead." "NO, YOU MUST SERVE THE AMERICAN DREAM AND GIVE ALL YOUR SOUL TO FIND IT; YOU MUST NEVER FOLLOW THE PRIORITIES THAT GOD GAVE YOU AFTER HE BROUGHT YOU BACK ALIVE. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
So now I MUST re-Imagine my life. Start with the priorities of God, start with His tools He gives me. And whatever else gets in the way of those, and does not help or serve those, they go. Adios. Hasta la vista, baby. They must. "If anyone wants to be my disciple, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." If we want to be Jesus' disciple, we have to say to ourselves NO! Then we must DIE. Then we are given life and we follow Jesus. And following Him means we adapt to His priorities and use the tools He gives.
We DON'Tadapt his priorities to us, to our way of life, and make His tools serve our purposes. Oh God have mercy. This is NOT ABOUT MONEY. It is about priorities and whom I am serving. But in America we give lip service to saying we get that it is not about money. WE DON'T GET IT. We do serve money and live for money and follow money and do everything we can to preserve our way of "life" instead of putting everything on the pyre for the use of the King and reorienting everything about us toward His mission, His goals, His priorities. If we do that and He lets us have money aplenty to bless and do good, praise His name. And if He lets us live with 4 other families and share 2 cars and eat rice and beans so we can follow Him, praise His name. And if He lets us live on 100 dollars a month and have one set of clothes and live in a tent and walk from town to town to share the good news and we are beaten by the unbelievers there, then Praise His Glorious name. And we might then understand how our Indian evangelist brothers, maybe some of them, live their lives for the King. Would it not be better to be laughed to scorn, thrown to the lions and lose our very lives than to sell our souls for money and follow a dollar? We are children of the great King, and we bear the name of the suffering servant: and no servant is greater than his master. Let us follow HIM wherever He leads. And one day, on THAT day, to hear from His lips, "Well done, my good and faithful servant," oh what bliss. We will know that we have pleased Him who is our very LIFE.
Unless we can re-IMAGINE our way of living to accomplish God's priorities with the tools God has given us, we will continue to be sucked along with the American way of life.
Christians: we are dead people brought back to life. Re-Imagine your time here with faces solidly focused on our Savior. We must, we must, we must, we must.
If you want to read more on this, read Francis Schaeffer's book, "True Spirituality," and Romans chapter 6.
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