Unselfishness, Part 2

"And he answered them, "Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise." Luke 3:11, ESV

Note that in the story above, we are commanded to give to our neighbor out of our abundance, not in spite of our lack. Jesus did not tell us that, if we see someone lacking, we should provide for them despite how much it might hurt us. Having said that, it is also worth noting that, if we do come across someone who has a need that we can not meet, we need to do our best to use our resources and help them in fulfilling that need, not just ignore them and leave them to fend for themselves.

To keep the balance, it would be wise to talk about the concept of welfare. I understand that there are some individuals that genuinely need the welfare system because they can not provide for themselves. However, more and more people are taking advantage of the welfare system without any real need. They are living lazy lives and hurting those who truly need the system to survive. In part, that is the system's fault. The church is not to be a welfare system. The church is here to help those in genuine need, not the lazy.

"...If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living." 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12, ESV

I like the term unselfishness better than selflessness. It seems to imply this balance between the needs of others and the needs of self.

I want to challenge you today to look at your heart and identify those areas that are out of balance when it comes to selfishness or selflessness. Ask Him to teach you the right balance as you continue to draw closer to him in your daily walk.

Additional Scriptures: James 4:2-4, Proverbs 30:8-9

Unselfishness, Part 1

Once you have established your goals and priorities, it is important to inspect your attitude towards each of these areas of life. This is where the goals start coming into place. Over the next few posts we will be looking at how our goals help us in shaping and directing our growth and lives.

Before we do that, however, it is important to look at another aspect that is critical in balancing our lives. In many different places in scriptures we are admonish to focus on others rather than on ourselves. Selflessness has been stressed as a principal trait of the Christian's character. However, out of balance selflessness can become very destructive and dangerous.

On one hand, we are called to provide for our neighbors in need. We are challenged by stories such as the poor widow that shared her last meal with the prophet Elijah (1 King 17:8-16), or the rich young ruler to whom Jesus told that, in order to enter into His Kingdom, he needed to give away all his possessions and follow him (Mark 10:21). On the other hand, we are told that we need to be good stewards of what we are given, including our bodies, finances, and health.

There is a balance between focusing on others and focusing on self, and it all pivots on the attitudes of our hearts. If we focus too much on others, we will neglect the duties to our families and ourselves. If we focus too much on ourselves, we will become selfish and self-centered. Neither extreme shows the balance that we have been studying about so far.

We will continue discussing the balance between the needs of others and our own tomorrow.

How to Balance Your Life, Part 5

Once my relationship with God and family are established and supported, the relationship with the rest of my family becomes the next priority. By extended family I mean those that do not live in the same household as myself. My mother, father, brother, aunt, and so forth fall in this category.
Ministry and Friends are both very close to each other; they are fighting for last place. Ministry took precedence over friends because, in a sense, friendships are a sort of ministry at times. Furthermore, ministry is also closely related to my relationship with God. Jesus gave us the great commission to go out and make disciples, not friends. So ministry has a slightly higher importance in my life than friendship.

Finally, we all need people to come along side of us, encourage us, build us up. Fiends are a joy and add great value to life. Similarly, they have great potential to help one grow and learn. Carefully selecting your friends is something that I could not stress enough. Good friends will push you up, bad ones will pull you down. I encourage you to look at the friends and people you spend your time with and ask yourself the this question, "Will these relationships help me in achieving my life-long goals?" If you have selected your life-long goals carefully, asking this question is not selfish, it is wise. If your answer is no, then the group of people that you call friends should change. That is not to say that you should completely eliminate those relationship altogether. In some cases that is definitely needed, in other cases these people just need to move from your group of friends to the group of people that you minister to.

Father, help us live lives that are in balance, that are pleasing to you and bring you glory. Guide us and teach us as we make you the centerpiece of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. Let our relationship with you fill us to overflowing and, from that, spill into all the other areas of life. Let us be givers of live. Let us be an expression of your love to everyone we come in contact with, whether it is wives, sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, brothers, friends, or strangers.

How to Balance Your Life, Part 4

Earlier we discussed that the most important thing in life was our relationship with Jesus. The second most important thing in life, according to Luke 10:27, is our relationship with our neighbors. The priorities that were discussed on the previous section were selected in that order to support these relationships in a healthy and balanced way.

 "And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live."" Luke 10:25-28, ESV

My relationship with my wife and children is the next more important item in the list. This set of people are the most important in my life and they take precedence over any other individuals. God specifically gave them to me so I may take care of them. After that, other things start to take priority because they support my relation to Christ as well as my family.

The third item on the list is health. Being healthy physically and emotionally is paramount to having a healthy relationship with God and Family. If the physical health of an individual suffers, the mind and spirit suffer as well. If the mental or emotional health of a person is deteriorated, the entire person is out of balance and his/hers relationship with Christ and family suffers as well.

Health was chosen to be in the third place of the list, because it supports the first and second priorities. Following health is finances and work. This priority, like health, is also in support of a previous one. Without a reasonable amount of financial stability, family life will suffer. As a husband and father, it is my responsibility to provide for my family. I believe this is a biblical idea. However, this is also a decision that we have made between my wife and I. We decided that it was more important for my wife to stay at home with the children than for her to have a full time job. She does have a home based business (she is a Mary Kay Beauty.... I mean, beauty consultant) as second priority to raising the kids.

How to balance your life, Part 3

Priorities

How do you keep your day-to-day life balanced? How do you make sure you are accomplishing those goals that are really valuable for your life?

If we are going to keep our lives in balance, we need to have a set of well established priorities to help us in our daily decision making process. Goals and priorities are not necessarily independent from one another.

My wife and I have studied and discussed what the priorities for our lives should be. They apply to our individual lives as well as our marriage and family. I encourage you to study and pray about the priorities in your life. Ask God to lead you and help you come up with a well defined list that you can review when trying to achieve balance in your life, whether it is in your finances, your schedule, your goals, or any other aspect of life. Having a carefully designed set of priorities will guide you and help you structure you life. Here is our list:

1. God
2 . A. Spouse
     B. Children
3. Health: Physical, mental and emotional
4. Finances
5. Extended Family
6. Ministry
7. Friends

Once your priorities have been established, you need to schedule your time in a way that allows all of those priorities to be accomplished. If you find yourself spending a lot of time on things that are not on your priority list, it is time to cut them out. If you find yourself spending more time on the bottom portion of your list rather than on the top, it is time to rearrange your schedule and start saying "not now" to some of those things.

When my wife and I are faced with a new project or activity that we would like to get involved with, we always ask several questions. They are, "Where does this fall in our priority list? How will our involvement in this project/activity affect the rest of our priorities? Will we have the appropriate amount of time left for the higher priority items?"

Having a well established set of priorities will help you keep a balance between the different activities that require time and energy from you. In other words, they will help you spend you life wisely.

How to balance your life, Part 2

Life Goals.

It is important to establish what God's goals for your life are. I wrestled with my life goals a few years back and finally came up with the four main goals that I believe God wanted for my life. Every now and then I re-visit them and try to fine-tune them. This is not the final draft, but it is the latest draft.

Life Goals
By His grace, this I will do.

1. To keep Him first at all times and continue developing the intimacy in my relationship with Him, learning to walk by faith, following His leadership even as Jesus did, onto Christ likeness.
2. To discover and fulfill His will for my life in obedience, Christ likeness, worship, love, humility, and unselfishness. Through His grace and power.
3. To become the husband, father, and man that God desires for me to be.
4. To spread the Gospel, make disciples, and share my faith in Jesus Christ with as many people as possible.

It is important to notice the subtitle of this list of life goals, "By His Grace, This I Will do." Accomplishing these goals is not something that I can do on my own. Attempting to achieve these on my own strength would violate the very first goal anyway. These goals can only be accomplished by His grace. No amount of striving will help me achieve any of these outside of His grace.
Having a well defined set of Goals is a very helpful tool when making decisions. They help us keep our focus on the important things and avoid getting distracted by this world.

These are very generic and non-specific goals. They are based on scripture, study, and prayer. Even though these goals could apply to any Christian, I encourage you to embark on the adventure of discovering God's goals for your life instead of adopting these as your own. I would like to recommend "The Purpose Driven Life" as good study to start with when establishing your life-long goals.

Goals aim at answering the question, "Where is my life going?"
What are your goals for you life? Where is your life going?

How To Balance Your Life, Part 1

What is Life?

If we are trying to keep our lives in balance, It is important to answer the question, "What is life?"
This question is a very, very, old question. I can not give you an answer to this; you need to find it on your own, but I can share my opinion with you.

Lets just start by saying that every human being is an immortal being. That is, we have a beginning, but we will never cease to exist. Unlike God, however, we are not eternal. He has no beginning and will have no end. After our bodies seize to function, some of us will go on to live with God forevermore, while some others will continue existing in the place set aside for those under the wrath of God. Since no one can know or understand what things will be on the other side of our physical death, I will limit this article to this side of eternity.

Life is a conglomeration of things that include feelings, relationships, ideas, events, and many, many other things. However, it all comes down to one thing that rules everything else: Time. As far as I understand it, the answer to the question becomes, "Life is my time here on earth and how I use it."
Managing my time wisely is, therefore, a very high priority for me. Wasting my time being angry or frustrated at things that I can not control is a terrible and irreversible loss. Having said that, there is seldom an event in my life that I can not learn from, and that makes those irreversible losses few and far between. Everything else becomes a learning opportunity or an opportunity to practice and strengthen any one of several skills or disciplines such as faith, patience, understanding, perseverance, foresight, time management, planning skill, etc.

We do not know at which point we will be called to move onto the afterlife. Our individual and personal future (on this earth) is a speculation and an uncertainty; it is not promised. Likewise, the past is now behind and we can do nothing about it but reflect and learn from it. Life, then, is reduced to this very exact instant in time, nothing more and nothing less. Everything else is up to God.
We can conclude that making the most out of the time we have here on earth is making the most out of our lives. Using every moment in the wisest way we know is of paramount importance. However, this will hopefully not be my last moment of life. Which produces a problem because I would much rather be at home playing than whatever I am doing right now. Balancing and prioritizing our time and effort is a central key to making the most of it. We have been talking about balance in our lives, this would be the first step towards accomplishing this balance.

As we will see in my next post, my most important life-goals is my relationship and intimacy with God. There is seldom, if ever, a time or event that cannot be use to continue building a deeper, stronger, and more intimate relationship with Him. Unfortunately, I do not take advantage of all those opportunities as I should, but that is part of the growing process.

What do you think life is?

Balance in your Theology and View of God

Several extremes come to mind regarding what is being preached about God nowadays. Some people preach a "genie in a bottle" kind of God. Some people preach a God of wrath, fire, and brimstone. Others preach about a God that is nothing but love and grace, a hippie God. Even though all these teachings are technically true, emphasizing one aspect of God over the other is a misrepresentation of God, scripture, and it will yield dire consequences in our everyday lives. It will yield a twisted view of God and life.

God cannot be manipulated into doing our will no matter how much we declare and decree it. On the same note, God will not love you more or less than He already does, regardless how well we manage our sin. Actually, even if we are extremely successful at managing our sins, but we do so in our own strength, it will yield self-righteousness, which is sin in itself, so you are no better off there either.

God is in balance within Himself. God is a God of love, but He is also a God of wrath, holiness, and justice. He is our healer and provider, but He is also the commander of armies of Heaven, the Almighty Judge. He loves and forgives, but He also disciplines those He loves and condemns those He chooses to.

God does not necessarily want you to be rich, nor does He necessarily want you to be poor. He does, however, want you to have what you need in order to accomplish His will. If wealth is required, He will give it to you. If wisdom, then that is what He will give you. He will provide for you according to His wisdom and plans, but He will provide for you.

God is infinitely loving, kind, patient, and forgiving. But He is also infinitely powerful and can destroy all of creation with a single word. He is a God that can be approached with confidence and love but also in reverence, fear, and humility. We need to keep all of His attributes in mind and in a balanced way, not just those that we like the best that make us feel warm and comfortable.

Balancing Life as a Christian

We tend to swing from one extreme to another and skip the middle ground altogether. You can see this plainly in everyday life. For example, you can see this in the drastic extremes that are preached in the different churches of America and in the way some people twist their minds to give the Bible the meaning that they want it to have. This produces twisted lives. Let me clarify that I am talking about Christians here.

Every Christian should strive to live a life in balance, whether it is in actions, attitudes, words, thoughts, theology, or any other aspect of life. The bible advices us of this in several places.

 ^"Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time?" Ecclesiastes 7:16-17, ESV

"Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder[c] the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or turn your foot away from evil." Proverbs 4:24-27, ESV

How to achieve this balance becomes the main concern. This balance is what Matthew 7:13-14 is talking about when it mentions the straight and narrow path. On one side of the path we will find a cheap grace that excuses the Christian's every sin and gives free reign to the flesh and not the spirit. On the other side of the path we will find self-righteousness and make ourselves modern day Pharisees filled with pride, judgment, and self-centeredness, but deep down both sides are the same. Both sides are selfish and filled with sin and death.

The answer is found in the Proverb quoted above. "Let your eyes look directly forwards, and your gaze be straight before you." Jesus is the only one that can keep us on the straight and narrow path. He is the only one that can keep us from veering to the right or left.

Father, please keep our feet on the path that leads straight to you. Let us not veer to either side, but keep our hearts humble as we look to you for guidance. Amen.