Lessons

The Lord has been teaching me a lot lately. A few weeks ago God started opening my eyes to ways that I had let school replace Christ's role as the lord in my life. This semester has had pretty high demands on my time with projects, exams, quizzes, time consuming projects... lists of things that need to be accomplished. I found myself worrying and working on all my "to do's" from sun up to sun down while I kept telling God, "I'm sorry, I just don't have time today... I just don't have time for you." Days turned to weeks and, before I knew it, my identity started slipping from God and into school. It's interesting to me how a desire to serve God, to do things with excellence to bring Him glory, can turn into just doing things with excellence and forgetting the whole reason for doing it in the first place.

A few weeks ago, God started convicting my heart of this. At about the same time, Cornerstone announced that they wanted us, as a Church body, to take part in Lent this year in order to focus our attention on Christ and prepare ourselves for the celebration of His resurrection. For Lent, I decided to give up school as my first priority in the morning and replace it with God. Instead of waking up to finish details of a project, study a little more for an exam, or go to work early... I committed to reading God's Word and focusing on Him.

Well, the past two weeks have been amazing. God has not only taken back my heart in the morning, but all day. I've been reminded who Christ is and why I long to serve Him with my life. I've also realized how easy it is to slip into worldliness and complacency. This week Andrew and I started listening to a sermon series called "No More Games." It is about the holiness of God and how we, as Christ followers, should be living and breathing the holiness of God. I've been rocked pretty hard. His sermons are filled with truth and they shine a light on sin and wrong thinking. I often forget about the magnificence and loftiness of God and the demands this makes on my life. God says, "Be holy, because I am holy" (1 Peter 1:16). We are then told to "live our lives as strangers here in reverent fear" because we call on a Father that judges each man's work impartially (1 Peter 1:17). We were bought with a price, Christ shed is precious blood to redeem us. That is what I want to live for. My prayer is that God continues to teach me how to live and breath His holiness.