Isaiah 50:4-9
Here’s a principle: the higher your aim in life, the more committed you will need to be to reach your goal because the reasons to quit will be greater.
Climbing 4-Buttes vrs. climbing Mt Everest.
If all you want in life it’s to make things relatively comfortable for yourself and your family and friends well then, OK, you’ll face some adversities along the way, all right, but you might just be able to complete your two mile climb and retire comfortably until you’re left watching the world go by from a bed by the window.
But if you’re determined to please God come what may no matter what, the reasons to quit that climb will stack up in front of you like Mt. Everest.
So here’s the problem. How do you stay sufficiently motivated so as to overcome every single reason you would have to quit no matter how daunting?
Before we consider that let’s think about what the goal is. And to answer that let’s ask what did Jesus have in mind when he set his face like flint and heading into Jerusalem?
Mark 10:32-34 (NIV)
Clearly, Jesus already knew what was going to happen to him. I don’t think those were the details on his mind.
So what was on his mind? What was that flint-like look on his face declaring? Perhaps we could put it this way:
I refuse to yield on making sure that my life is a pleasing sacrifice to God. I will not allow anything to get in the way of being all that God wants me to be or do all he wants me to do.
“The Sovereign LORD has opened my ears; I have not been rebellious, I have not turned away.”
“Because the Sovereign LORD helps me, I will not be disgraced.”
And what was God’s plan for him? It was to make him everything you and I could ever need to experience the freedom and joy that comes through pleasing God.
Hebrews 5:8-9
Our hearts were created to where we find no greater joy in life than to please God, by virtue of the fact that there is no greater self giving, self sacrificial being than God.
However, for Jesus to please God in becoming all that we would ever need to live lives pleasing to God cost him his life.
And if we too are going to live to please God then we too must sacrifice our own interests whenever they conflict with living to see others come into the freedom and joy of pleasing God.
That is our Mount Everest, and it is fraught with all kinds of reasons to quit and just go back to paying attention to our own stuff. In other words, reasons to grow weary and lose heart.
So back to this problem: How do we stay sufficiently motivated so as to overcome every single reason we would have to quit?
Jesus know all about that and replies: 4 “The Sovereign LORD has given me a well-instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary.”
In our weariness Jesus speaks to us.
Listen for what he is saying to you. It will sustain you and keep you on your journey of constantly being his radical agent of freedom and joy in the lives of others.
