Are we living for sensual rewards or spiritual rewards? Sensuality is a hidden idol. We are consumed with wanting to feel and experience life. We are driven to leave a mark wherever we go. Feeling empty if we haven't grabbed someones attention, if we haven't made someone laugh, if we haven't laughed ourselves. We need others to validate our existence, we need others for life to feel abundant. But those others, every single one of them, become an idol as we slowly rely on their responses toward us, whether its negative or positive. By allowing others, even family to validate, “recognize, establish, or illustrate the worthiness or legitimacy of our existence”, we are embracing the exact opposite of what Jesus came to give us. He said he will give us a life of abundance. But the only way he said we can have that is when we love EVERYTHING else less than Him. When we truly believe him to be Lord, and ask for his Spirit to dwell in us and guide us, we will hear his voice telling us to “let go” and cut ties with anything we love above or more than him. In Luke 14:26, he said “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple”. This is a hard statement to understand, and it is one that is the hardest to obey. The simple meaning of Jesus’ statement is to love your loved ones less than Him and be willing to cut ties with anything that hinders you from obeying Christ. He wants you to live in the revelation that HE LOVES YOU MOST and wants to give you that abundance you can rest in. One that no loved one can provide for you. He needs you to spread that same love, and how will you be able to if you cant love him most?
When we remain in the world to take of it and to offer to it, we exist to self validate and be validated. This is not the abundant life Jesus came to give us. Our heart must seek validation from Him alone, only then will we be worthy of his kingdom. That is the life he is calling us to. To be validated as heirs of an everlasting kingdom, as his beloved bride, that he desires to reveal himself through. When a bride walks down the isle, we behold her in her glory because there is a love shining forth from the heart she is carrying to the altar, the heart she will willingly give away to the one she loves. What if we can have that kind of glory on us everyday because everyday we willingly carry our hearts to the altar of the one we call Lord?
No comments:
Post a Comment