Tag: Faith

Each of us has seasons in our lives, which are designed by God to further our walk with Him or to challenge us to find His power to win the war against our drawing near to Him. One of my more recent seasons was spent on a porch in North Carolina, where I enjoyed the view of a wonderful mountain landscape. For five years, weather permitting, I was able to spend hours and hours with Him. I had been given no purpose but to sit and wait in His presence, find His direction, and then come back to His lap when any assignment was completed. Even though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, this season was more marvelous than I can express in words.

My season has definitely changed. At present, the demands of my life cause me to fight for moments with the Lord. I know He’s always available, waiting for me to join Him; but now, obligations are pressing in on all sides. There is a continual war raging to keep me from those quiet moments I had learned to cherish. The freedom to be with Him at almost any time I wanted now has to be fought for in the midst of the business of my life. If I don’t recognize the war and engage in the battle to be with Him, I become captive to all the activities that demand my attention. It’s a conscious battle that must be fought moment by moment if I want my life to be really significant in Him.

As husbands and fathers, you have the most important battle of your lives facing you every moment of every day. The demands you face and the choices you make will determine how well you are able to carry out your offices. If you don’t recognize that your priority must be to develop an intimate relationship with Father God and fight desperately for it, your life and the lives of those in your care will be greatly affected. Instead of a vibrant, world-overcoming love relationship with your Lord, you will find yourself and those around you counted among the lukewarm masses, unable to lead others to a significant life, the one bought for you at the cross. You’ll be held captive by your activity, unable to break loose from your bondage or help others to overcome their war. Is that what you want?

Let’s talk more!

Jim Corbett

OK. Your job is going quite well. Your marriage is as good as any of your friends’ marriages. Your children may not be serving the Lord with all their hearts; but they’re basically honorable, and anyway there’s plenty of time for that to change. In fact, things could be classified as satisfactory. You really don’t need to seek the Lord with all your heart, do you?

Whether you know it or not, you’ve become a blind guide for those around you. You’ve forgotten what your relationship with Jesus is all about. You’ve bought the lie that it’s all about you and how well things are going in your puny world. You have become the center of your relationship with the Lord and are teaching others to do the same by your actions.

Being a child of God and a steward of other people carries with it grave responsibilities - life and death responsibilities. Christianity 101 is being so sold out to Jesus that others see Him in you. Never in the Word is there any hint that your relationship has anything to do with your comfort or complacency other than when God calls those areas sin. You and I are called to be the light of Christ to the world.

I don’t know about you, but I desperately need God and His mercy and power to be anything like Jesus. I believe that’s the bottom line for every one of us. The things that happen in our lives have little to do with whether or not we are to pursue a first love relationship with the Lord every moment of every day, and urge others to do the same with our every action and breath. If we persist in pursuing the Lord, our lives will be significant assets for His use.

When people see who we are when we act like Jesus, they will see who they are supposed to be. What happens after that is of little consequence to our mission of knowing God and being where He desires us to be. As we walk as Christ walked because we have been with Him, everything else will fall in place. We really need God every moment of our lives to get to that place and stay there, no matter what others do.

Let’s talk more!

Jim Corbett

Nations rising and falling, threats of economies crashing, terrorist threats world-wide, reprobate thinking abounding, Christian persecution being given a more prominent platform, and many more disruptions fend for their place in our minds on a daily basis. Any thinking believer can see that the world is changing at a rapid pace. Formulas that used to flourish during normal, much easier times no longer work. Procedures and plans that brought relative safety only a few years ago will not help our families survive if things progress in the direction they seem to be heading.

As prominent as all these disruptions are in our world, they’re really nothing more than distractions from the real war at hand. In the Word, it says that we are to look past those things that are temporal and on to the eternal. We are to look past what we see and on to what God is doing. All these issues that invade our lives distract us from keeping God’s plan and our real purpose in life from being in the forefront of our thinking. They take up our time by having us worry about them and plan on how to remain safe from them.

The plans of God, the falling away of the church, nations reeling in terror, wars, and rumors of wars are all foretold in the Bible. They will not be avoided. We, as believers, are to prepare spiritually when we see these times and seasons on the radar. We, as husbands and fathers, are to become all that we can be in Christ not only for His glory, but for those we steward. We are to show others the path to safety in Christ by looking past the distractions all around us and on to the real life we have been given because of the cross. We are called to overcome this dying world in the same way Jesus did.  What are you looking at and how are you responding to it?

Let’s talk more!

Jim Corbett