Pursuit of Discipleship

I Timothy 6:11-12

But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 

What is it that we pursue? Love ( in the world’s eyes), money, fame, highs, absence of pain, regrets to be taken away, doing good deeds, sex, etc??? We are chase something.. Even if that something is nothing. I have chased fame, pleasure, good deeds, love, definition, knowledge... But it got me nowhere. Paul talks about what we should pursue in this verse. Righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness... Do we wake up and say that we want to be righteous today? Do we strive to be godly in all we do, even though we lie constantly like a second nature or pursue lusts and its pleasures? Do we pursue the love of God? A perfect, holy, unconditional love? Every lover we have on earth will fail us at sometime, but God will NEVER fail you. He will never break up with you, stab you in the back, leave you, let you down, nothing like that. Do we seek steadfastness? Are we steady, stable people that don’t let people down? Are we trustworthy? Does our yes mean yes and our no mean no? Do we lie to people, even about little things? Do we pursue gentleness? Along with this goes patience and self control and compassion? Do we seek all these things??? When we are betrayed by a friend and everything is going wrong because of it, do we treat them with love? Are we patient with people that seek to make us mad? Do we pursue our faith? Do we seek to grow our faith like its the most important thing to us? If we did, I truly feel our lives would be radically different. And it wouldn’t stop at our lives, it would branch out into the world. We would be people that sought their King with such a fervor that nothing could contain it. We would be so much like Christ that people would see a difference in us. Its so easy to be happy with blending into society. But as lights in a dark world, there is no blending in unless you become dark. You are either for Christ or against Him. There is no in between. Family, we have to choose that we serve God and pursue Him. We have to seek Him in order to know what He is like. I have seen it a few times, when someone spends so much time with another person, that they talk like them (tone, pauses, everything), they act like them (similar mannerisms), they are reflections of the person that they have spent so much time with. Are we this way with God? Do we spend so much time with Him that we talk like Jesus talked? That we act like He would act, with love instead of anger, with patience, compassion, honesty, purity... Do we know what He says in His word? Can we say verses off hand? Family, I truly feel that we do not pursue our relationship with our King as much as we like to think. So often, we read a few verses to a chapter of the bible, if even that much, forget what we read, pray for meals, sing a worship song at church, raise our hands to it, say “praise the Lord,” but not really truly seek Him. We need to be warriors, seeking direction from our King. This world is a battlefield, yet so often we don’t have our weapon, the Bible, ready, on our hearts. We don’t have guidance from the King, because we never sit at His feet and ask. We don’t have armor (Ephesians 6) because we don’t train ourselves in order to grow. So when we look at this, we are warriors going into battle without a weapon, without direction or a plan, and without armor. That makes for one sucky warrior if you ask me. We need to be prepared to fight the good fight by pursuing our King above all else. In order to seek Him though, we must count the costs. What are the costs? The costs are all of our regrets, addictions, sins, evil memories, guilty pleasures, sorrow, pain, burdens, planning for our own life (which even if we get what we wanted, it might be the worst thing for us, sometimes it works out great, others can be disastrous), and in exchange we get forgiveness, peace, strength, love, purpose, hope, comfort, and so much more. Why are we so unwilling to make that trade many times? Honestly, we look at our lives of sin, and cling to them instead of the cross. I have done it time after time again. Whenever I have done it, I feel that God has not been enough for me. This is the farthest thing from the truth because God is more than I could ever want and hope for. He is everything I need and all I could ask for and then more. 

As Christians, we are called to this fight, and to fight it well as this passage speaks of. We so often ignore the fact that God calls us to this. Every time we refuse to enter that battlefield, we are ignoring His call. Instead of having an attitude like Isaiah who said, “Here I am LORD, send me.” We say, “Lord don’t send me, I’m busy, I’m not good enough, I’m not ready, I want to hold on to my sin more though.” Why do we make excuses with God? We need to be people that listen to and answers God’s calling on our lives. Let’s be a generation that seeks His face and serves Him above all else. 

We need to let God penetrate our core selves and change us into people like Him.

Blessings