The Only List That Matters (Part 2)

“If you are wise and understand God’s ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don’t cover up the truth with boasting and lying. For jealousy and selfishness are not God’s kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic.” (James 3:13-15 NLT)

Being a child of God, like being married, is a 24/7 lifetime commitment from which we never take a vacation. Being a child of God isn’t easy and, like marriage, demands commitment, sacrifice, and a determination to be a lifetime learner. To believe we can say a prayer, then never change is a lie from the depths of hell.

A prayer of confession and a promise to repent and live a faithful life of service to Christ’s honor is not a one-and-done proposition, any more than exchanging wedding vows ends all responsibility to the one with whom we plan to spend the rest of our lives. Like a marriage ceremony, confession of sin isn’t an end, it’s a beginning of a lifelong journey that doesn’t end until we close our eyes in death. To believe we can say a prayer and continue to live the same way we’ve always lived is to misunderstand what salvation means.

Baptism by immersion (see Romans 6) is a perfect picture of what should be happening every day we live as a Jesus follower. When we’re lowered into our watery grave, we die to self and when we’re brought up out of our watery grave, we rise to new life in Christ, never to be the same. Our spiritual journey doesn’t end there, that’s where it begins.

The love I have for my wife didn’t begin on our wedding day. That’s simply the day we made a public and lifelong commitment to one another to begin living out the love we already possessed in our hearts. Marriage is the platform or stage upon which we live out our love for all the world to see. Some days we reveal love and passion as it was always meant to be, but other days it’s a soap opera that includes villains and disappointments.

Similarly, walking with Jesus isn’t a straight, smooth road. It includes bumps, curves, and ups and downs that sometimes make us wonder if we’re ever going to get it right. We fail, fall, and by God’s grace, get back up and start again. In our walk with Jesus, as in marriage, we can’t think of bailing out every time it gets hard.

Ideally, as I’ve seen in my walk with Jesus and with my wife, often the horrible, troubling times lead to the sweetest and most enjoyable seasons of our lives together. Unless and until we can see the depth of our depravity, we can’t fully see the beauty and majesty of our sinless Savior. And to me, the mind boggling reality is, the Lord knew fully the depths of our wickedness and sin before He ever signed on to be our deliverer and best Friend.

We don’t have to try to hide anything from the Lord, He knows it all anyway. We need to see the evil we’re capable of, we need to wallow in the filth of our own sinfulness; otherwise, we’ll have the false sense that we’re really not all that bad and miss the only opportunity we have to find life and hope in Jesus.

The only “list” that matters in this life is to have our name in the Lamb’s Book of Life. And the only way to know with certainty that it’s there is to live moment by moment in the presence of our Savior.

Food for thought.

Blessings, Ed 😊