Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow Me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for My sake, you will save it. " - Matthew 16: 24-25 NLT
Planned blessings. Do you ever plan to be a blessing? I do .... or at least I try to. Earlier this week, my sister and I drove past a random guy standing in the middle of the road with a sign that read something along the lines of, "Selling cotton candy to pay for rent and to provide presents for a wife and three kids." I saw his face as he looked down. Maybe it was disappointment? It was especially cold that day. If this man stood out there in that kind of cold, clearly, he was in need.
We kept driving ... right past him. The next couple minutes in the car were silent because I was thinking of ways I could have helped him ... in any way. A couple minutes later, I asked, "What do we do? Why do we just keep driving?" And then come the excuses. So why do we keep driving? Why do we keep moving on with our own lives? Why do we go on as if other people aren't just as important as we make ourselves to be? When people go through hard times and we see it, too - how can we go on? When people have nothing to eat, how do we have the littlest ounce of courage to eat something ourselves?
See, as followers of Jesus, these are the kinds of situations we should act in. No, I don't mean that we should find every person on the street and give them money, but with the needy, supply; and with the helpless, help! We like to feel safe so we create this bubble and in that bubble, the only person in there is you, me, one, just one person. We like to be safe. We like to be secure. We don't ever want any thing less than comfortable. You know? Sometimes it's just hard, but I think we just make it harder. Granted, we're human ... but we like to make things complicated when the resolution is quite simple. You just be obedient to what Christ has commanded and have faith in His promises.
"God's not into appearances, He's into the heart. As long as the heart is pure and the heart is simply to glorify God and to sacrifice by giving our best to Him. And I pray that will be the revelation. And that giving our best to Him is not just after the confession of our lips but it's after our action.
...when it comes to reaching others, being prepared to be inconvenienced enough to kind of lay down our agendas and take up God's agenda." - Joel Houston
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