HE MUST INCREASE

John 3:26-30

So John’s disciples came to him and said, “Rabbi, the man you met on the other side of the Jordan River, the one you identified as the Messiah, is also baptizing people. And everybody is going to him instead of coming to us.” 

John replied, “No one can receive anything unless God gives it from heaven. You yourselves know how plainly I told you, ‘I am not the Messiah. I am only here to prepare the way for him.’ It is the bridegroom who marries the bride, and the best man is simply glad to stand with him and hear his vows. Therefore, I am filled with joy at his success.

He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less.

The last verse of this passage is often quoted to remind us that it is Christ who must be made famous in our lives and not ourselves. But honestly I don't remember reading the previous verses.

When John's faithful disciples came to him to report to him about this one whom John had identified as the Messiah, they came with genuine concern for their master. John was the one who had brought the idea of repentance to Israel after many years of Israel living without communication with their God. John was preparing the hearts of the people for the one in whom they would find salvation and freedom from sin.

John's disciples were worried that Jesus was taking over John's ministry and they wanted to know what their leader thought about this possibility. John understood their concern, but he also understood what his job had been and the reason that so many now followed after Jesus. John gave his followers the picture of a Bridegroom and the best man. John knew he was unworthy of being the one who would save the world, and he trusted God's plan for his life. He even went as far as to say that as Jesus became greater, John must become less important. He had done his job and a new era had begun.

I wonder what it would have been like to be John. He was the messenger, the best man, the one who prepared the way, the one who prepared the people for the Groom, our Messiah. He didn't waver with the fact that he was not the Savior. He did not doubt that God's plan was best. His whole life purpose was to make his Lord famous and not himself.

How is my life reflecting John's life? Is my thought process following the thought process of John? Is it clear that I believe Christ is the Messiah and the one that others must see through me? This life was not given to me to waste for my own benefit. I was given life to love my Creator! I was given life to serve Him by serving everyone around me. I was given life to decrease, so that Christ and His love may increase!

RICHES THAT COME UP SHORT

We've all heard the story of conversation that Jesus had with the "rich young ruler" and the young man's unfortunate and unhappy ending.

If you haven't before, read it now in the link below, it doesn't take too long: 

The Rich Young Ruler

After reading this passage today, I realized how heart broken that young man must have been. To find out that all his riches, his status, and his good behavior added up to nothing in the reality of what it meant to follow Christ and inherit eternal life.

 It wasn't having the riches that didn't allow him to inherit eternal life; having things is not a sin in itself. It was his inability to make Christ more important than his material belongings. We might think that the young man was crazy not to want to give up his wealth, since he'd already been working so hard to please God in other areas of life. 

But think about it, maybe it's not "riches" for you. We all have something that we could probably give up to have a closer relationship with Christ, yet we allow that something to be more important than a close relationship with the Lord of Creation! 

When we think of it that way, we won't be so quick to judge the poor little, rich young ruler and instead look inward and find the things that we allow to become more interesting, important, or satisfying than Christ.

He is real! He can meet our every need! We just have to let Him, by making Him our EVERYTHING! Imagine the richness we can find in that.

HIS WAY VS. ALL ELSE

Psalm 119:14

“I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies, as much as in all riches.”

Imagine what life would be like if all of Christ’s children could honestly claim this verse that the Psalmist wrote. Many of the problems and frustrations in our lives have to do with worrying about material things and making them too much of a priority in our lives. These things fill up our time, our thoughts, our actions, and we lose sight of what we should be focusing on, and that is our relationship with Christ.

1Timothy 6:10 says,

“For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil: for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

Do we really believe the truth of this verse? It says pretty clearly that the love of money will very quickly bring our lives to ruin. Maybe not the world’s idea of ruin, but think of what it does in our relationship with God. If we love something more than God, haven’t we already come to ruin with what we are really supposed to be living for?

The world sees money as the measure of our success. The more a person has, the more successful a person is thought to be.

It’s almost as if we have to turn our thinking all the way around from what we have known as success and ask God to teach us His definition.

Now, I am not saying that money itself is a bad thing. We need it and that’s why we must be thankful to the Lord for His provision of it. But it is when we worry that we don’t have enough or are always desiring more, that we have lost sight of our true purpose in life.

So what is this “way of His testimonies” that we are to rejoice in?

It is a different path than this world takes and I think at first we have to teach ourselves to find out what exactly is God’s way versus the worlds way.

Psalm 1:2-3 says

“But his delight is in the law of the Lord…and whatever he does shall prosper.”

We must learn to find delight, pleasure, contentment, and success in all of the blessings that God has bestowed upon us! What are those blessings in our lives? We need to find out! We need to ask the Lord to show us His ways, His will, and His testimonies. Then we will be able to take those things and share them with others and encourage one another to stay close to Jesus.

Let’s learn to “rejoice in the way of His testimonies” as much as (if not more than) everything else in life! 

BE FREE AND KNOW THE TRUTH OF WHO YOU ARE

2 Corinthians 3:5

“Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;”

Who or what are we basing our sufficiency on? Who or what should we be basing our sufficiency on?

By sufficiency I mean: what we think of ourselves as being “good enough.” The enemy will attack us with thoughts of not being “good enough.” It is probably a different area in life for each of us, but there is probably something that we feel that we can never live up to, whether it is our own or others expectations in who we are or how we do things.

If we are trying to live up to our own expectations, we are relying on ourselves to say who we are. We naturally want a certain security as individuals. We may start to think that what we do, how well we do it, and how good we feel about ourselves is what gives us our identities.

If we are trying to live up to others’ expectations, we are saying that others opinions are what make us who we are. We may try to impress others to make them think well of us, keep them from rejecting us, or to make them think that we are someone that we are not.

The only One in whom we can find true sufficiency, is Christ. We must come to the realization that who we are has absolutely nothing to do with us, or with others’ opinions. We can find peace and security in the fact that it is Christ who makes us who we are. It says in:

John 15:5

“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”

Think of how strong Jesus is as the Vine and how firm and sure we can be as His branches. We can only understand this surety when we completely base our sufficiency (or our level of being “good enough”) not on our own works, but on the work that God is doing in us.

We no longer have to deal with trying to live up to a certain expectation from ourselves or from those around us. We must claim the new creation that God has made us as His child and as He tells us in:

2 Corinthians 5:17

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

Old things and old ideas of who we are must be put behind us now that we know the truth! It says in:

John 8:32

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Since we now know the truth of who we are, we are free from the burden of worrying about being “good enough.”

So the real question should be: Who are we in Christ? We are beyond “good enough” to the Lord, because our identity is no longer based on what the world, friends, the enemy, or we have to say. It is based on who Jesus is, and He IS sufficient in all things!

THE LITTLE THINGS

Luke 16:10 

"He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much:"

When we really stop and think about what it means to be “faithful in that which is least”, we realize that we have probably not even scratched the surface in understanding what that really looks like in our lives.

 When given a simple task, there are different attitudes we can have towards the fact that this tasks needs to be done. We can treat it as a chore, complain about it, or even just take it for granted. Now, I’m not talking about taking out the trash for example. I’m talking about when we do things that are affecting those around us. Although if you think about it, if taking out the trash is affecting those around you, then it is also one of those little things that God asks us to be faithful in.

When we take a step back, we can see how important it is to treat even the simple tasks as the purpose God created us for. When we line up a whole bunch of simple tasks that have been completed we realize that something great has been accomplished. As children of Christ, we must grow to want to do all things to the full degree, for the glory of God. Not using our own strength to be certain, but the infinite strength available to us through faith in Christ!

Many times, we (honestly, I’m talking about myself) fall into the trap of looking towards the future, wondering what God might have for us to do that is BIG. We may find ourselves starting to wonder what God might have planned for us when we “grow up.” But if we are not careful, we may be missing the blessings and opportunities that He has set right in front of us! It is the little things that make the difference. God has fame for some, and He has humble and unknown-to-any jobs for others. We need to be asking God to show us the little things that He has placed in ours lives right now. Then face those tasks as if that is what God created us for, taking every situation in life as if it is our big chance to shine for Jesus.

Life is too full of surprises for us to expect next year or even tomorrow to come. Yes, there is a need to be a good steward of our future and be wise in our planning. But if that becomes our full focus we are taking the risk of missing TODAY.

HIGHEST LEVEL OF HONOR

Proverbs 29:23 

A man's pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the 

humble in spirit.

Our immediate thought, when we consider what it means to be a humble person, tends to be the opposite of what the passage above is telling us. We may picture ourselves having a very low status. We may think of ourselves as being very weak. We may wonder why we would pursue a life of making ourselves less important, than those around us. We have created a way of thinking in our society that says that being the most known, loved, and adored by the world is what will give us meaning in life. We tend to think that popularity is the most valuable factor to a person’s identity.

When we read the passage above, we realize that our human thinking is completely backwards of the way God sees things. When a person is willing to give up that desire to be “number one”, God sees that person as someone who is worthy of honor. As Christians we are to base the truth of everything on the Word of God. So the way that we are used to basing our identity, is actually the opposite of the truth! We are believing a lie, if we see humility as a weakness.

We need to start changing our perspective of what it really means to be a “humble in spirit” kind of person. We have a hard time recognizing that humbling ourselves to be used by God is not weakness, but an indescribable strength. Thinking less of our own gain and pleasure is not depriving ourselves, but leaves room for us to find ways to think of others needs. Not building our identity on how the world thinks of us, allows us to be an available witness for the Lord to shine His glory through.

Our need to change our perspective from what we have been subconsciously taught can be tough. We have to train ourselves to see that having humility as what God sees as honorable, and recognize that pride is what will ultimately be our downfall.

James 4:10  

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.

FEAR: DEFEATED BY PERFECT LOVE

2 Timothy 1:7

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

FEAR…

It is part of who we are far too regularly and causes far too much damage. We often allow it to become a part of our lives without even realizing it. When we finally realize that it has taken over our entire thought process, how we relate to others, and our perspective of life, we have a difficult time finding a solution to overcome it. We end up in bondage to it with seemingly no way out.

1 John 4:18

 

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

PERFECT LOVE…

It is what heals wounds and sets things straight. It is what sets us free from the bonds of sin. It is something that has, is, and will change the world. When we accept it as a free gift from our heavenly Father and let it take over how we think, how we see others, and make it a way of life, we will realize how much meaning there is to our lives. It is what gives us purpose in life and hope for the future.

As Christians, we are instructed to strive to show love and kindness to all we come in contact with, in order to share Christ’s love. Yet whenever we are met with the rejection of the world, it can be very discouraging. We may go through times where we become emotionally and spiritually exhausted, feeling as though we are being fake or "putting on a face". We are not able to fully comprehend why anyone would reject something so freeing, wonderful, and ….perfect.

Unfortunately, fear is extremely powerful. Not as powerful as Christ’s perfect love, but is what comes naturally to us. Fear is what will keep the world from accepting perfect love. Fear is also what will discourage us to the point of no longer sharing it. When we allow the rejection of the world to cause us to fall into the trap of fear we must look into to the truth of the matter. That is, the fact that God has not given us as His children  a spirit of fear. He has given us perfect love which destroys fear!

We must lay our fear, anxiety, and doubts at the feet of Jesus. So that we can claim the perfect love that is ours. When we do this, then and only then will we be able to share the perfect love of Christ with the world.