For Days When You’re Empty

You might have noticed that some days we women are up and down. {ahem}

And although some of this can be normal (can you call hormonal stuff normal?? ;)), many days our lives feel empty. You know, the tired, defeated, over stressed, under-appreciated days? When I have one of these days, it is because I have tried to live my  Christian life without Christ. —->Yes, that sounds like an oxymoron! But I believe, from my own experience and from observing general Christianity today, that it is much more common than we realize.

To truly live a “Christian life”, Christ MUST reign supreme on the throne of our heart.

That means that each word, thought, deed and action is under His control. (and whenever we sin, guess what? We are admitting that Christ is not in control.)

It goes like this: I love Him initially, but as I am serving and doing all the good things we Christians do in His name, I somewhere along the line forget about Him. I sideline him, because my normal mode of operation is independence.

How about you? Ever have one of those days?

It is like we are on a fast moving train, barreling towards accomplishing many good things: service, ministry to others, growing in sanctification, even witnessing. But we left Jesus at the station, when in fact, He was supposed to be the engineer, driving the direction of the train. 

The scary thing about this is that we can do all kinds of good things “for Christ” without love for Christ. We can be very devoted to proper theology, standards, exposing false teachers and evil worldviews of our day and still be  completely loveless towards Christ. This was exactly the problem that God exposes to the church of Ephesus in Rev. 2:2-6. He called it “leaving your first love.” He was tired of their loveless service and told them to repent or face punishment.

I want to share some excerpts from Elyse Fitzpatrick’s wonderful book Because He Loves Me: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life:

“Because he is preeminent, he is to be supreme in our every thought, word, and deed. He is to be supreme in our hearts because he is supreme in reality.”

“Without conscious effort he’ll slip from his rightful throne and in his place will spring up idols of sinful desires or even splendid vices, those good works we think we’re doing for him but are actually using as a way of avoiding him.”

“Why would would we want to avoid him? Simply because we want the preeminence.”

“How frequently we forget that everything is for him and about him.

We forget that he is to be first, in our honor and worship.

Whenever the gospel slips from our conscious thought, our religion becomes all about our performance, and then we think eveything that happens or will ever happen is about us.

When I forget the incarnation, sinless life death, resurrection and ascention, I quickly believe that I’m supposed to be the unrivaled, supreme and matchless one. It’s at this point that I’m particularly in need of an intravenous dose of gospel truth.

He is preeminent.

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever, AMEN. Rom 11:36

“On the days when you feel as though you’ll never get it, you’ll never please him, you’re such a failure, you must remember the lavish gift: his great heart pumped blood through his veins and then out his wounds so that he could bless you.”

So today, remember that He is central in all things. Write it on a 5X7 card if you need to, because we are so forgetful that it helps to put what is important in front of you so you won’t forget. Be intentional with remembering. Wear a bracelet if you have to serve as a memory prompt. These are all the crazy things that I have to do in order to remember!

What about you? How do you try to remember what you are learning?