Finding your place in this world
"Come unto Me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light,” Matthew 11:28-30.
To the one who is searching,
There is a place where each of us was designed to fit. This is a place where God’s Word is abiding in us and we are abiding in Christ. Because we’re “in Christ,” we’re also jointly fit in community with other members of His body. Rather than striving and struggling to keep up with everyone’s expectations, we’re listening to and obeying the voice of the Shepherd. We are walking in the works that He prepared beforehand for us to walk in (Ephesians 2:10). This is the place where our yoke is easy and our burden is truly light.
When we first get born again, this place is quite foreign to us. Our comfort, is rather found in the things and the ways of this world. Yet we also find ourselves displaced. The world system is a heavy taskmaster demanding that we keep up with our daily quotas, while stripping us of the time, energy, finance and resource necessary to accomplish what’s expected. This obviously is not the place that Jesus promised. The Holy Spirit, however can use this displacement to dislodge us from this world’s system so we can find our place in Christ.
I have found three major lessons that must be learned in order to rest in the place Christ prepared for me. By following His Holy Spirit one day at a time you and I can learn to mature in each of these three areas:
- We must learn to seek God’s kingdom first. Matthew 6:33 tells us when we do, “All these things will be added to us.” “All these things” refer to our daily needs...What we are going to eat, and drink and wear. Life becomes difficult when we live our lives reactively. We can become adept at crisis management. We struggle to protect, provide and promote ourselves. If we’re not careful, we go through life fixing our problems and seeking the kingdom in our spare time. This perpetuates a viscous cycle that carries with it a very heavy yoke.
- We must not neglect our relationships when things become difficult. When asked what He considered the greatest commandment of all Jesus answered, 'The first of all the commandments is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord, the Lord our God is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.'" The word “commandment” is singular and the word “these” is plural. In essence, Jesus is saying these two commands are one in the same. You cannot love people without loving God and you cannot love God and neglect loving people. The commandment to pursue loving relationship is the core of the kingdom of God that Jesus told us to seek first. If there is no greater commandment, then this should become the focus of our lives. It’s typical that as the level of stress rises, the level of relationship diminishes. Devotions become shorter. Family time is forsaken. We tend to become more withdrawn and independent. We delude ourselves into believing that if we sacrifice to fix our problems that we will have more time down the road. This is seldom the case. We end up striving to give ourselves things that God waits to “add” to us.
- We cannot give what we have not first received. Jesus said, "And as you go, preach, saying, 'The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.' Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give, Matthew 10:7-8." In the Greek the word “freely” means, “Gratuitously - without a cause, freely for naught, in vain (Strong’s Concordance). The great commandment states that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. This insinuates that if I do not love myself, I cannot love my neighbor. I would in a sense be trying to draw love from an empty well. I must first receive God’s love in order to have anything to give back to Him or to other people.
So in all of our struggles and striving it might do us well to remember to stop and take a deep breath. By faith we must re-focus on God’s awesome unconditional love. He will never love us any more, nor any less than He does at this very moment. The more we drink this in, and immerse ourselves in this love, the more we will find the capacity to give it back to God, and to let it flow out freely to others. The more we do this in the midst of our pressures, the more we will experience the blessings of God being added to us.
Until God graces me to share again,
Randall Paul Pipes
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