OCTOBER 7, 2024

 "Success: relentless pursuit to get better in spite of the result"

ISAIAH 37-38

15What can I say? He has spoken to me, and He Himself has done this. I will walk slowly all my years because of the anguish of my soul. 16O Lord, by such things men live, and in all of them my spirit finds life. You have restored me to health
and have let me live. 17Surely for my own welfare I had such great anguish;
but Your love has delivered me from the pit of oblivion, for You have cast all my sins behind Your back. 18For Sheol cannot thank You; Death cannot praise You. Those who descend to the Pit cannot hope for Your faithfulness. 19The living, only the living, can thank You as I do today; fathers will tell their children about Your faithfulness. 20The LORD will save me; we will play songs on stringed instruments all the days of our lives in the house of the LORD. (38:20)

PHILIPPIANS 3

 7But whatever was gain to me I count as loss for the sake of Christ. 8More than that, I count all things as loss compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ,a the righteousness from God on the basis of faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to Him in His death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.12Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14I press on toward the goal to win the prize of God’s heavenly calling in Christ Jesus.

JOURNAL 

There are two mindsets that are in a constant tug of war in my brain. The desire and pursuit to get better vs. the desire to shrink back and rest.  Reality is that there is a place for both. However the conflict comes when my desire for rest overwhelms my desire to get better. God tells us from the beginning that he created us to work for 6 days and rest for 1. When I read these verses in both Isaiah and Philippians it is very clear that God is calling us to action in pursuit of doing good, making better and being a light in the darkness. 

Paul declares that all the things that he has lost are rubbish in comparison to the love that is found in faith in Christ. Paul is writing this from prison so when considering the loss and where he started, it's a very profound statement. To me all this is summed up in the reality that our actions done in obedience and in pursuit of God is the ultimate joy of life. It is the treasure that we long to find. Results we leave to God...but the effort to get better each day by pursuing God's heart, his love and in turn giving it away

to those that need it...this is the secret to all we deeply long to find.

1Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

1 JOHN 4:1