Tag: holy

Less Than His Best

Stop settling for, stop striving for, stop aching for less than His best for you.

We must stop our faithless pursuits. He did not create us for mediocrity. He did not create those who will inherit a heavenly kingdom to lust after flesh-satisfying goals. We are holy royalty, ‘chosen in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His children through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace’ (Ephesians 1:4 – 6).

Credit: Ash Almonte

Every moment we spend trying in vain to increase our self-esteem, self-confidence, self-awareness is time wasted, time that could have been spent increasing a lost soul’s knowledge of the Savior, increasing someone’s holy confidence and God-esteem. Investing in others is what increases our holy confidence and God-esteem.

Self be damned! He never said to rely on self. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who preached self-reliance — not the Creator, not the Savior, not the Comforter. Have you ever heard of “self-create,” “self-save,” or “self-comfort?” OK, maybe self-comfort. But really — how effective is hugging yourself?

(May 24, 2018)

Wasted Lives

We reach a certain age, and we start to wonder if we’ve wasted our lives, if our lives have had any meaning. We wonder, we fret, if enough time remains to correct course if we have, indeed, wasted the gift of time.

Now consider this: have multitudes passed through this life who absolutely wasted their lives? They were unmotivated/unwell/unsupported non-doers who just took up space, produced nothing — not a healthy child, a garden patch, an improved social condition (markers of success, per Ralph Waldo Emerson). Maybe some non-doers actually made life worse.

Did God not have a plan and purpose for them? What if, at the last moment, those unsaved non-doers accepted the light of Christ and are spending eternity in heaven? Here’s the truth: God’s ways are not our ways. What we see as value, as purposeful, as a redeemed condition, a well-raised child, a garden patch, God sees with holy eyes. We see with the eyes of a child. He sees with omniscience. We do not yet entirely know what He considers good and a well-done job.

Surely, God has welcomed many non-doers at the gate with, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” Perhaps we, who seek earnestly, rabidly, to achieve purpose, need to shift focus from judgment of wasted lives to loving through God’s eyes.