This bit of wisdom from a homeless man got my attention and I had to repeat it here. I read this in a Desiring God email and the man asked: “Is following Jesus hard or easy?”; then he turned around and answered his own question, “If you have given your heart fully to him then following Jesus is easy. If you are split in your devotion and torn between following Jesus and this world, then it is hard.”
When Jacob was working for Rachael in Genesis, he had agreed to work for seven years. But the love that he had for her made those seven years seem like days. Why can’t we serve God in the same way? Life here is not easy regardless of your work or your vocation and for many, many people it is a struggle to even maintain life on a daily basis.
We seem to have the idea that our devotion to God can be an on one day and off one day kind of devotion, but how would you feel if that was God’s view of us and our life on this world? What would happen to us and our world if God just turned the Sun off for a while? The first notable difference would be that global warming wouldn’t be an issue any more. The temperature would drop in the first thirty minutes and it would be so drastic until the oceans would begin to freeze before the news could report on the Sun being dark.
There will be no “freezing of the oceans”, that is just my illustration. It is our devotion to God which can make life much better for us and for those around us. Many of us have a lot of trouble loving Someone without being able to see them but when you consider that God has loved each of us individually long before we were born…shouldn’t we at least try to focus our devotion on Him during the rest of our lives however long or short they may be?
Jesus came to Bethlehem to be born as a human being with His nature as God intact. He came to pay the price for all of mankind’s sins and that is what He did. He did this because of love, especially the love of God, is far stronger than anything that we could do or be. We could not “help” Him to bring salvation to us because it could only come through His sacrifice. Living as His child and being devoted to Him for the rest of our lives should not be hard. Even though you and I can’t see Him, you can look at all of the life and the wondrous beauty of creation and see that the Creator’s hand is now and was involved when creation began.
We are coming to the end of the church age so I hope that everyone who has not made a decision about their salvation will do so and soon. We don’t know what day He will call the church, those who have given their hearts to Him, to come home to heaven but it could be any day now.
The Living Message of Christ 