The Final 2%

Recently, my wife and I have picked one passage per day to go through with all seven of our children. For our family, we journal on our own and talk about the passage together. We have a set of questions that we go through every single day together, and we start in the morning when we wake up. We open up our Bibles to do our journaling. And then in the evening, we discuss what we've learned. 

And the questions that we ask are these:

1. What did you learn about God from this passage? 
2. What do you learn about the nature of humanity from this? 
3. What did you read in this passage that makes you want to worship God? 
4. What promises did you find in that passage? 
5. What did you see in yourself in this passage that you want to put to death? 
6. What are you going to do differently today in light of this passage? 
7. What kinds of applications are going to put into practice?

And then we write out a prayer. So those are the seven questions that we do as a family every single day. This has been a complete game-changer for us. It's hard to describe the joy of watching your children be formed and molded by the Word of God.

Recently, we were talking about how so much of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are representative or emblematic of the whole rest of the Bible. You can see so much of the gospel, even in the stories of those individuals. 

So, one famous story of Abraham offering Isaac, for example. We all justly take that as a foreshadowing of the father offering the son two thousand years later. But at the end of that passage, God says to Abraham, "Now I know that you fear me." But if you think about it, this is Abraham we're talking about. He already left where he grew up. He left his father's home, and he became a sojourner. 

You talk about someone who was a radically obedient follower of God and what it took. It took all of that plus this episode of offering his beloved Isaac on the altar for God to say. "Now, I know that you fear me." 

It reminded me that you can confess 98 percent of the stuff in your life, the junk in your life, but it's that last 2 percent that will ruin you if you don't confess it. There is something deep that God has for all of us that he wants us to put it on the altar, so to speak, in that Abraham-like manner. Even though he had done so much, much more than most of us would probably have a tolerance for, it was still in that final 2 percent that he showed he feared God. 

So, what does that look like in your life? What is that, 2 percent? How do you confess that? How do you work through that? How do you lay that out on the altar? God wants to give a significant blessing to those who are willing to go that final step into that full-hearted obedience where you're just putting your most valuable personal possession, whatever it is on the altar for God to use it as he wants.

Finny Kuruvilla serves as the CIO for Eventide Funds, lead Portfolio Manager on the Eventide Gilead Fund, and Portfolio Manager on the Eventide Healthcare & Life Sciences Fund.