A Few Weeks Ago I went to the gym early in the morning, not particularly feeling very happy with myself. As I was working out, I looked up at a sign in the gym. It said in big red bold letters, “CHANGE YOUR LIFE.”
While the gym meant the sign as an advertisement for getting a personal trainer, I took it as message to me. “Change your life.” Isn’t that exactly what Jesus said to those to whom he preached? I realized that was what I had been called to do, and I wasn’t completely doing it.
As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “Our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom. 6:6). It was a change from the old way of life to a new way of life. That is what Jesus is saying in Luke 14:33 when he says, “Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” Jesus is talking to all of us that we should turn away from what we have been doing completely. Jesus is saying, change your life.
Sometimes we are comfortable and do not feel it necessary to make great waves in the way things are. Life seems to be good. One does not feel to be a bad person and is enjoying oneself. What can go wrong? I see many people with this attitude of, “live free and be happy.” The sum of this life without God is short-term satisfaction but it will end in destruction. Without God there is no hope in our lives. Without the death of His Son we have nothing to look toward.
To understand why you should change your life is to understand that life without hope is but a life of darkness, all over in a flash. No one wants to believe he will die tomorrow, but it could happen. Do you think that any of those children who have been killed in the shooting incidents recently thought they were going to die? Did they think when they woke up that morning that, “poof,” they would be gone? As the preacher says in Ecclesiastes 2:14, “The wise man has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness; yet I perceived that one fate comes to all of them.”
The preacher says, change your life.
In sum, each one of us has been somehow, some way, called by God. Our paths are all different but there are only two destinations, life and death. There is no third way or middle ground. There is no way to squeak by with a “C” with God. As Jesus says, you are either for me or against me.
The wages of sin is death, and so are the wages of complacency. Some things come along in our lives to jolt us back to the path that we have been called to. Think of it as God gently nudging you and watching over you. For as Jesus says to every one of us, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Jesus calls us to change our lives, and choose life.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One