Whoever pursues righteousness and love
finds life, prosperity, and honor. — Proverbs 21:21
Today I am challenged to give a motivational talk on breaking the bonds of the things, habits, lifestyles, choices, etc. that hold us back from excelling and achieving the life we are pursuing.
First, I am a follower of Jesus Christ, so that will jade my opinion and thoughts, but often, like today, I kind of reverse engineered my faith. What does that mean?
While most people go to the dictionary for a words definition, and followers of Jesus go to the Bible to understand life, I flip it around so that words are merely unconsciously agreed upon reflections of life communicated through words and faith is the expression of a life divinely given, in a world divinely created, so who we are is (at many levels) an expression of the divine (for you theology types the imago dei) thus I am attempting I am attempting to explain truths of the Bible from the vantage point of a life and universe created with a natural order that shows why the Bible says what it says not the other way around.
I’ve heard preachers say, “The Bible says it so that’s the way it is.” I prefer the opposite tact, the Bible is a constant, impossibly unending source of our Creator’s love, which is reflected in the inspired words of scripture as humanity continues to strive to know this amazing, holy, and righteous God God, who desires to dwell with us.
Anyway, long story to say, I am going to try to show that the pursuit of righteousness as stated in the proverb above is, likewise reverse engineered. It is not something we can strive to attain because we want it. It is something inside us calling out. Something we already have. Something we just need to give something else up for — the thing that is holding us back. The pursuit is basically knowing and becoming more of whole. We genuinely are not a pursuit of something we don’t have yet. (Here is the follower of Jesus part…) God has already provided all we need as a wonderful miraculous gift. I would suggest that we all know what our thing is that is stopping us from attaining life, prosperity and honor.
So watch the message and let me know how you think I did. Hopefully, I won’t get too far off topic…
Click here to see the video, the message starts at 29:30 and is just under 40 minutes long.
I feel like my mind was racing to fast with too much stuff, so I flubbed some of the transitions from working hard to achieve something (like to be able to do a backflip or run better from eating healthy) and how important that is to relying on God’s grace.
There are moments in life where God clears the path for us and tells us to step through when we are ready. We have a responsibility in the unfolding of God’s gracious plan, but of course, then there are time where we need to rely soley on God to carry us through. In my life, I find the first to be more true of God. He clears out the path and says, “you are free to stay or go, but you have to choose.”
