God-Centered

The following is a post I wrote for For His Glory Community Church a few months back. It’s something I have been focusing on a lot lately (living a God-centered life) so I wanted to reshare it here.

LIVE GOD-CENTERED!

It sounds so simple……..until you begin to unpack the complexity and enormity of what that really means. Let’s look at a few key areas which I believe we must first submit to before we can begin to outwardly live God-centered.

Make Jesus Lord of your life (Luke 9:23-27)

This isn’t about making a decision to accept Christ. Effectively, anyone can claim to “accept Christ” or even “follow Christ” (John 6:64-66). The decision to allow Christ to rule and reign in our lives and to submit to everything He is calling us to is much greater. During His public ministry, Jesus told people to give up everything they had and even hate their family. Why would He do that? I believe this is Jesus’ illustration to say that we must be willing to risk and even give up all we have to follow Him and truly make Him Lord.

Love the greatest commandment (John 13:34)

If we cannot do what Jesus has commanded us to do, how can we make Him the center of our life? Love is such a challenge. The world gives us many definitions (most of them false) of love. In Christianity, the catchy phrase says something like “love is a verb”. I agree that it is an action. But the root of that action is where true love comes from.

Why should we love Jesus? To seek blessing? Or maybe because we’ve just always loved Him? To me (and I hope you), loving Jesus is rooted in the recognition of the gift of grace He has given us through His perfect life on Earth, death on the cross, and resurrection from the dead. He died for each of us personally so we could live a life free of condemnation. I LOVE JESUS because He loved me first and has given me the ability to truly love.

Why should we love people? Because Jesus tells us to? Or is it because we feel bad for them? Maybe both in some small way, but greater should be the desire to love like Jesus loves because we love Jesus. Our love is Jesus’ love and our loving of His people is Him loving His people through us.

Live out the great commission (Matt 28:19-20)

God sent Jesus to us and Jesus sends us to the world (John 20:21). We are an ambassador of Jesus. As this ambassador, we are given the key to the kingdom and Jesus is asking us to make copies and hand them out. While we trust in the sovereign will of God who is able to reveal Himself to anyone and everyone, we must see the world as never getting the keys unless we give them to them. God does not put His work on us, He blesses us with the opportunity to share in it.

God-centered

If we make Jesus Lord of our life, love Jesus and His people, and live out the great commission I believe that we will live God-centered. This will flow out into our families, work places, churches, communities, and more. As Christians, living God-centered isn’t a way of life, it is our life.