The Essence of Living

I’ve been up really late and I cannot get this thought out of my head - this thought that we have been living all wrong. Humanity as a whole, Christian and non-Christian, has been living wrong. We’ve heightened our emotions and our desires as if life revolves around them, as if the goal in life is to experience as much of what we want as possible. We simply want to feel good, satisfied, and accepted. Overall, I do not have a problem with these things, but I am sick of how we have based our lives upon them; how I’ve based my life upon them.

The more I look at God the more I see a God who challenges us to live beyond ourselves. I do not see a God who says, “Just be yourself. Just do what feels good, and I’ll be proud of you”, but rather, I see a God who tells us to forget ourselves and remember Him. I do not see a God who tells us, “Follow me and it will get better,” but I see a God who tells us “If you follow me it will be the hardest thing you have ever done. People will persecute you, people will turn their backs on you, you will hurt, but I will be with you, and that alone will make the pain of the journey worth it all.” God tells us to stare into his eyes and look nowhere else. God commands us to distance ourselves from our fleshly desires and seek His Kingdom and His Glory. He speaks boldly for us to drop everything we are, everything we have, everything we love, everything we desire, and follow after Him.

Yet we do not. We live in a culture which claims that self-worship is the most important aspect of life. Our culture promotes sex, self-gratification, materialism, and the pursuit of personal satisfaction above everything that God has been speaking to us, and we have believed it. We have believed that we deserve something when the truth is we don’t deserve a single breath that we breathe. All of mankind has fallen into corruption. This corruption has tainted our desires, dreams, motivations, emotions, orientations, relationships, hopes, and ultimately our view of God. We have fallen from God, and do not deserve to be with Him. Yet we have come to believe we deserve whatever we want and desire?

May it not be so! May the grace of God fall upon us again here in the midst of our corruption. In the midst of our brokenness may the grace of God begin to restore us. May we seek the glory of God over the glory of ourselves, because it is God alone who deserves anything. May we look into his eyes. May we forget the things we’ve been living for, and truly live for Him.

This is not about us. Life was not meant to make us feel good or satisfied, but rather life was to point us to the essence of Life itself. To bring us to our knees before the one who truly deserves our worship: Jesus Christ.