Life as a Christian

     Today at church we had a lovely speaker, speak on what it means to live the Christian life.  I had prayed before I went to church that the teaching would impact me in some way, and the worship would be great since I would be going home for the summer and didn't know when I'd be back in Racine to go to the church again.  I was not disappointed.  The teaching made a lot of things clear for me, plus the teaching was given by the guy that I had listened to online giving inspirational teachings.  When they announced he would be speaking I actually shouted in excitement, I got some weird looks but that's okay. :) I encourage you to all listen to the teaching, as it will be posted on the Living Light website soon. This is my summary, and real life connection to the teaching done by John Lalgee.

      The speaker started off by telling us to think about the royal baby in Britain (He's British), and to imagine being born into royalty.  Then he told us that we are the ones who were born into royalty due to being Christians.  That we were once just people of the Earth, but now we're way more than that.

      Next, he told a story about how his life was falling a part at the age of 19, and he was desperate.  He sought out God in his time of desperation, and God brought the people into his life that he needed.  This had been me at the beginning of this year.  I didn't want God to be in control of my life when I started college.  I wanted to live life my way. (I was kind of stupid),  As you can probably guess that didn't work out for me.  I lasted a little over a month, before I felt totally broken.  I reached out for help, and God blessed me with strong Christian friends.  I'll never be able to comprehend how lucky I am for that.

     We get used to things that were once wonderful for us. He said that a year after finding "your" church you begin to see it as less than wonderful.  I haven't had that experience with Living Light yet, but I know some of my friends who go to the School of Worship have faced this.  One of them told me how they kind of wish they could experience the School of Worship for the 1st time again because all the wonderful life-changing teachings just become an everyday thing for them after awhile.  We need to appreciate these things and remember them.  We need to be contagious people in our excitement for God.  The enemy causes us to lose sight of things, and makes things become distant to us.

      John explained how the ideal Christian life would look, how we would want to grow up in a church family, get married to the perfect Christian wife/husband, and have children who grew up knowing how to love God etc.  He said though that, that life really isn't that Christian at all.  As followers of Christ our lives should mirror the gospel.  We can't really love this life and follow Jesus at the same time, we need to find life in Jesus himself.

   To live a life such as Jesus did, we need to know what type of things made up Jesus's life in the 1st place.  When Jesus lived on Earth he had led a life of devotion, obedience, passion, servanthood, and was caught up with the idea of eternity.  God divinely provides for us when we do his will.  We need to be caught up with eternity as well.  It even shows in the Bible how Jesus was so set for eternity in Hebrews 12:2: "For the joy set before him, he endured the cross."  Jesus wasn't afraid to die, he was longing for it so he could be reunited with his father. Our lives should be readying our lives for eternity. We are born, born again, and then we die, so eternity is important, because just like one breath it's over so quickly.  Life is so short, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless.  We need to pour out our lives for God with the short life we have.

   God deserves better than our complaining hearts.  We lost all of the things negative about us when we decided to go and follow God, so we didn't lose anything at all really.  God has shame for the people who feel so at home on the Earth, we can't be caught up in earthly things.

    The last part of the teaching affected me the most, even though it's a concept that seems so obvious in the first place.  There will be no more pain or tears in heaven so death should actually be seen as a celebration, and it shouldn't make us as broken as it seems to do.  Dying is a gain! Growing older is also a blessing, because it means we will soon returned to God.  Society has created so many false ideas like the idea of mid-life crisis's, and diets.  Neither of those things matter when you're a Christian.  He ended with the idea that prophets would help us see things clearly for how God wants them to be seen.  Not with the blurry vision we see most things in the world with,

   This wasn't a part of the speech but it came up during worship time.  The idea that God is like a heart surgeon, and we are the patients.  We must let God take control of the situation just like we would for a heart surgeon.  The concept of Godly glasses came up as well.  That we must see things as God sees them, not in a way that society has blurred them into being.