Better at Responding to Purpose
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Matthew 9:9-13 (NIV)
What is your purpose in life as designed and imagined by God?
One of the biggest liberations in life is to be fueled by a clear discernment about God’s intended purpose for your life. When you’re clear about your purpose, you stand behind many yeses because you know they are directly in line with the purposes of God in your life.
So, how do we better steward our lives for purpose?
This text suggests that being a better steward comes through better interpreting our “rest stops.” Not rest as in a chill place between point A and point B, but rest as in an intended interlude between where you are moving from and where you are headed to.
Perhaps one of the reasons it was easy for Matthew to walk away from his tax collecting arrangement is because he was clear that it was never a permanent station and only a rest stop.
There are some clues in the Scriptures that Matthew was in a rest stop as a tax collector. For example, being a tax collector assured that you were fluent in Aramaic and in Greek, and accurate in data collection. The qualifications make you the perfect candidate for writing a gospel. Everything Matthew experienced prior to meeting Jesus would be needed so he could have impact for the continual spread of the gospel.
The lesson is to stop regretting your rest stops. These rest stops, these pass-throughs, these certain seasons, these shifting spaces: they birth or confirm vision. They create heightened awareness. They mature spiritual gifts. They confirm callings, talents, and abilities. They contribute to or challenge emotionality.
The ability to interpret when God is moving and what God is saying is critical to becoming better at marrying our lives to His purpose for us.
Better at Fighting My Flesh
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
Romans 13:14 (NIV)
Our thoughts, our actions, our emotions, our drives, our passions, our pursuits—they are all subject to the desires of our flesh. Our flesh, our human nature, is that part of us that lives apart from the influence of Christ. Paul says you can live better than your flesh. Every one of us can live better than our base nature.
While you are maturing in Christ throughout your life, you will have to ask God to help you live as you should, and you will live your entire life fighting the pull of your nature to do the opposite.
How do we fight these habits? How do we live better at fighting what tries to influence us outside of the influence of the Holy Spirit? Paul says: Here’s how you live better fighting your flesh: Stop making provisions for your base nature.
In the original Greek, this means stop processing the pull of your flesh. You can’t do anything about its invasion, but you do have a choice about how you process it. Paul says to stop giving your flesh a contribution in the consideration of your life’s plans. Be quick to dismiss the flesh.
You can’t stop a thought from circling around your processing center, but you don’t have to give an audience when selfish people start making suggestions to you. You can choose to feed your spiritual discernment and to seek wisdom from the Word of God, watching how Christ has exemplified this Himself.
Scripture doesn’t say “negotiate.”
Scripture doesn’t say “bargain.”
Scripture doesn’t say “compromise.”
Scripture says, resist the devil and he will flee.
This is all Paul is suggesting. If you know your flesh is going to take you in a direction that’s not under the influence of the Spirit, make no provision for the flesh. Cut its access. And its access is your attention, your time, your affection, your responses.
Make no provision for the flesh. Here’s how: clothe yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That means making the choice to start the day intentionally aligning our thoughts with Christ, doing a head and heart check through the revelation His Word gives to us, submitting our entire day to Him in prayer, letting the Lord exercise dominion over the subtle ways our flesh is begging for responses from us. This is what Scripture means when it says to submit your ways unto Him.
Better Choices
Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
2 Peter 3:17-18 (NIV)
Thank God for our freedom to choose. It’s a gift given to us by God. But while we are grateful that God has given us the freedom of choice, we also can confess that we could be giving God a lot better choices.
We can walk a more powerful spiritual life. We can honor God in the multiplicities of our lives. We can resist the influential pull of the culture and not feel pressured by the intimidating volume and certainty with which false teachers promote their false ideas and beliefs, their desires and opinions. It requires the spiritual discipline to say: “I love God so much for giving me choices that I want to honor Him by giving Him better choices”.
You decide in your life that for you to honor God, you’re not going to chase easy choices. You can decide: “I don’t expect that with blessing comes ease of all decision making. I will not avoid hard choices, but not only will I not avoid hard choices, I will not be led by others’ choices. I’m going to steward the privilege God has given me to make a choice. And as I grow in faith, I’m going to offer Him better choices.”
While God has blessed you with the freedom of choice, can you acknowledge that you have not always been a good steward of that freedom? And if you are honest, you and I know we could offer God a lot better choices with regard to our lives—choices about what matters most.
What you and God have fought to do to get you where you are should not be so cheaply negotiated by the opinions of other people.
God has redeemed you and set you where He has positioned you. Only you know how much God has had to intervene in the cracks and crevices of your life’s progression to get you to a place of peace, to help you love yourself again, to make you not ashamed of who you have become. You don’t sell that cheaply. You protect that.
Fight to make better choices for God. Fight because the forward movement has been so transforming that you need to protect your progress. You are connected to God’s revealed mind, His express knowledge and thoughts, His eternal will.
Better at Building Relationships
If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
Romans 12:18 (NIV)
We can do relationships better. In Romans 12, Paul is teaching that you might be, in some of your relationships, the only witness for Christ. Or if not the only witness, you might be the strongest witness, which means if the person you are engaged in a relationship with is ever going to get a right and clear picture of Christ, it’s going to be contingent upon what they observe in their relationship with you.
Paul is simply teaching that the people you are in relationships with might shape their desires differently regarding Christ if they witness your life responding to the leading of the Spirit. That means your witness matters.
This is why he puts the pressure on you to spark the conversation. It’s why you have to make the reservations and initiate the considerations. It’s why you have to be the first to reach out. It’s why, even if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have to offer the first apology. It’s why you have to arrange the agenda and navigate the terrain. It’s why you have to make all the decisions. And yes, it’s tiring, and I know it’s fatiguing, but God knows what He put in you, and He knows it works. You just need to be faithful.
You can shift your language from “God, this isn’t fair” and “Why is it always me?” to “God, what a blessing that you trust me to carry this kind of weight. Thank you that you’ve settled your Spirit in me like this, that I’m going to at least fight to react in obedience.”
In many people’s lives, you are perhaps the only person who brings Jesus into the conversation. And that’s why God depends on you. Because when they watch your reaction, when they listen to your commentary, when they see how you respond to things that are happening in your life and how you are staying together with so much chaos swirling around you, it provides lenses for them into what it means to live in perfect peace. When your mind is steadied on Jesus, being a witness becomes more important than anything else.
Better at Loving Me
The one who gets wisdom loves life; the one who cherishes understanding will soon prosper.
Proverbs 19:8 (NIV)
Part of the Hebrew understanding of love makes it not only emotional but actionable. You can use the word love in relation to God’s love for you to shape your perception of yourself, to guide your self-care, and to frame your view of life, including how you fit into the world and what’s really important about your life.
God wants you to love His people, and He certainly wants you to love Him. He wants you to love His church and His creation. But God also wants you to love yourself, and He wants you to love yourself as He loves you, which means you have a right to make loving yourself a priority. You are honoring God when you love yourself because it affirms your gratitude for the way God decided to express His creative, sovereign, divine imagination through your life.
If you carry God’s wisdom, you are receiving what helps you to love yourself, and therefore, you don’t need to depend on or become addicted to whether other people are handling you with a healthy love. When you love yourself, you don’t mind demanding from others how you expect to be handled as you grow and mature and change.
They need to handle you based on the you that you’ve become and not the you that you used to be, still timid and afraid and uncertain and unaware. In Christ, there is no stagnation. He’s always growing us and maturing us and shaping us and filling us and blessing us and elevating us and progressing us. So that means you are always growing, and you have to give yourself permission to love yourself enough to move forward.
Do you know how many of us won’t accept God’s blessings because we’re still beating ourselves up over who we used to be? Perhaps guilt is suppressing you so much that you don’t think you deserve it. Know that the devil is a liar. He who the son sets free is free indeed. And if you are free, that means every opportunity God has in your future is given with full knowledge of your past, and He’s telling you to forget those days that are behind you.
