Freedomنمونہ

Day 6: Opposing a Culture of Idolatry:
Welcome to day 6! Today, we’re discussing how to oppose the world’s culture of idolatry by remaining fully focused and in full submission to the Lord.

This thing called Christianity doesn’t work unless you’re all in. You’ll never get the best of God until He has all of you. And that’s the truth. Joshua challenged the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you” (Joshua 3:5, NIV). To “consecrate” simply means to fully devote. When you fully devote, you will see God move powerfully in your life.

In Matthew 4:19, Jesus issued the invitation, “Come, follow me.” Many people misinterpret what Jesus meant by this. They know how to follow the rules, but they don’t really know how to follow Jesus. As a result, many haven’t accepted this invitation because they feel like they don’t measure up.

But Jesus is not calling us to total perfection. The disciples surely weren’t perfect. Actually, they were perfectly flawed. He is simply calling us to total devotion. And that’s what it means to follow Jesus. Not rules, not dos and don’ts. It’s about your heart. He wants you. The apostle Paul gave a good description of what it looks like to go all in in Romans 12:1-2.

God wants all of you—the good, the bad, the ugly. What He wants is your everyday, ordinary life. One translation says, “Don’t conform to the pattern of this world . . .” (Romans 12:2, NIV). But if you want to be a kingdom citizen, someone who’s fully devoted to God, you need to know there is a different culture that we need to operate in. It is counterculture. And we develop it by fixing our attention on God. When you do that, Paul says you’ll be changed from the inside out. You’ll be able to readily recognize what God wants you to do.

Many of us feel the tension between the two cultures at war with each other. We hear the invitation, “Come, follow me,” but we also feel the pull of the world. And like Paul said, the culture around you wants to drag you down to its level of immaturity. And most of us feel that; we feel culture pulling us down, away from the will of God.

You were created to worship. You will worship something. Something is going to take your affection, your time, your focus, and your energy. Dethroning your false idol isn’t enough. You have to replace it with the one true God who designed the throne in your heart to be for Him.

It can be a little scary to go all in because it requires some level of sacrifice. What do you need to give up? It could be a relationship, a career, or a habit that may be pulling you away from the values that honor and glorify God. If God calls you to let go of something and you can’t, then you don’t own it. It owns you.

Don’t do Christianity halfway. Go all-in with God. Make a commitment right now to give Him the next year fully devoted to Him. You have likely made other long-lasting commitments in your life for things of far less importance in comparison to God’s will. You’ve given your time to dead-end careers. You’ve given time to hobbies. Why not give God the creator and sustainer of life one year of your full devotion and see if it’s not at least ten times better?