I am writing this on Saturday, after I read the Lenten devotional for today in These Forty Days. It is based on Matthew 6:19-34. Dr. Rowell talked quite a bit about what our choices look like and how we exercise discipline in how we choose to spend our time, or when we get offered a promotion that might take more time, or maybe choices that might not align well with our values and priorities as citizens of God’s Kingdom. However, what struck me the most was this statement: “maybe that’s why we are sometimes offended when Jesus starts talking like this, because he calls us to a completely different. way. He says to us, “Kingdom people are not even concerned with the same things the world is concerned with.””
Ouch! That statement hit home with me today and started me thinking about what I am concerned with in my own life and does it line up with the Kingdom or with some other priority? Does it look more like Jesus or more like the world around me? I have started to reflect on these in my own life, asking God what changes he might have me make in my priorities and where I spend my time. I challenge each of us to do the same.
If we find that our lives don’t match up with the priorities of the Kingdom of God, we need to be on our knees asking God to forgive us while also repenting and starting to make intentional changes to realign our priorities with God’s and removing those things that either do not line up or that he asks us to give up. This is where it gets hard – when God asks us to give up something that we love, but there is not greater joy than to be right where God wants us to be while doing what it is that he is calling us specifically to do.
This Lenten season has been a great season of reflection in my own life and I pray that it has been in yours as well.
On the journey together,
~ Pastor Todd