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In order to start living your best life now, you need to build your life on Jesus by choosing to come to him and listen to him. Finally, you need to begin to obey Jesus so that you can start living your best life now.
The third building block to a better life that you need to place into your life is to be obedient to Jesus.
Choosing Jesus over other forms of self-help and actively listening to his words instead of all of the noise around you, should result in you actually living your life in such a way that would put Jesus’ words into practice. If you have chosen to follow Jesus and learn from him, but are not actually living out what the Bible teaches, then you are not a follower of Jesus. You are a fan of Jesus, who has zero foundation in your life and when life gets tough (which it will just wait) you will get going.
According to Jesus, the opposite is true of the person who has chosen to come to him and listen to him and actually live out his teachings in their own lives and in their own unique context. That person has built into their life the necessary building blocks needed for living a better life from here on out. That person has bug deep into their relationship with Jesus and allowed him to dig deep into them so that he could excavate all of the unnecessary, weak, and sinful things that are choking the life out of them.
We don’t like to talk about obedience. No one likes to submit and obey. Everyone wants to do what they want to do when they want to do it, and how they want to do it. However, we have all tried that for so long and it is so tired. That way of living does not lead to life, it leads to death. In fact, Jesus came so that he could bring us life to the fullest so that we could start living our best life today (John 10:10).
Obedience is a good thing. In fact, being obedient to Jesus in 2019 will lead you to live your best life this year. The reason why is two-fold: being obedient builds foundations into your life and it stops you from being deceived.
Obedience builds foundations into your life because through obedience we build endurance, humility, and a servant-heart that loves others the way Jesus loves them. Obedience also builds resistance to deception (James 1:22-25) because you are actually living out what you believe and you can measure your level of faith in Jesus by how you actually live out your life, in what you put your trust in, and how you handle yourself in difficult and draining situations. If you have chosen to follow Jesus, listen to and learn from him, then it will be easy to tell if you are actually living like him in your everyday life. If you aren’t being obedient, then you can’t measure how close you are following Jesus and you will end up deceiving yourself because of it.
Obedience is not sexy, but it is extremely important. Friedrich Nietzsche even said of that,
“The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”
Lastly, being obedient to Jesus means that you are allowing his words and his character to renew your mind (Rom. 12:1-2) so that you no longer continue doing the same things everyone else is doing because those things do not lead anyone to live our their best life. Instead, choose to come to Jesus, listen to and learn from him, and live in obedience to him with the assurance that you will start living your best life today and make 2019 your best year yet!
What are some ways that you can start being obedient to Jesus in 2019?
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