To Encourage You

Colossians 3:17 “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

The Christian life is a very high calling.  No matter how long a person has known Christ, and no matter how closely they have walked with Him, there is always room to go further and to climb higher.  In the verse above, we are commanded that in “whatever we do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.”  Notice the all-encompassing language that is used here: “whatever” and “everything” in reference to our words and deeds.   As Christ’s ambassadors and as His living body on earth, we are called in whatever we do or say to do it in a way that represents Him.  

I don’t know about you, but as for me, I have a very long way to go to make this true in my life.  It’s something that requires one to be filled with the Word of God and filled with the Spirit of God.  I heard one pastor talk about it as being “biblically minded” about everything.  It’s to place ourselves in a position of being able to speak, act, and react just like Jesus would in every situation of life.  To understand what that would look like, we have to be in the Word of God, because in it “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2;16).  It’s something the believer hungers for, for with the new birth, God has given us “the desires of our heart” (Psalm 37:4), i.e., they are new desires, such as a hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:6).  The heart of the believer should cry out with the psalmist “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart” (Psalm 40:8).  It’s what the Bible is speaking about in Titus 2:14 when it speaks of Jesus as the One “Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works.”  

So does that describe you?  If you are a believer, it should.  And like Paul, you and I should be able to say, no matter how long we’ve known the Lord, the following words: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,  that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,  I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:7-14). 

May God help us to be those who never “rest on our laurels” but keep on pressing on, to the glory of God.