What are you living for? What are you dying to?

As followers of Jesus, we are living for God, and we are living for a greater purpose and call. We are also called to be dying to certain sinful things in our life.

The Apostle Paul wrote the Galatian church, instructing them, saying, “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24, ESV).

How do you stay sharp? Who is sharpening you? Who are you helping to sharpen?

We cannot follow God on our own and we cannot do life on our own. We need one another to help one another stay sharp.

The wisdom of the Proverbs instructs us, saying, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17, ESV).

What do you believe about life after death? What does resurrection mean? What does it mean that Jesus is the resurrection and the life?

Jesus gives us his resurrected life in place of our sin generated death.

When Jesus’ friend Lazarus was not well, he went to visit Lazarus and his sisters in Bethany, after waiting a few days. When Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already died and had been in the tomb four days.

When Lazarus’ sister Martha heard that Jesus was coming, “she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.’” (John 11:20-22, ESV).

How has God designed you? In what ways are you unique and gifted? Do you see that God made you on purpose? Can you see God’s thoughtful and good design?

We were made by God’s good intention, purpose, and design.

The Psalmist writes, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” (Psalm 139:13-14, ESV).

Who are you trying to be like? Are you imitating someone? Who do you pattern your life after?

Following Jesus is about doing what he does. Jesus followers avoid evil and do the good that Jesus has modeled.

Discipleship is imitation.

We can be imitators of evil, or we can be imitators of good.

In his third letter, the Apostle John wrote, “Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.” (3 John 1:11, ESV).

Can you see in the pitch black darkness? Do you have blind spots in your life?

We need light to see. In our sinfulness, we are blinded and we walk in darkness.

Jesus came as the light of the world to help us see his light.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus said, “‘As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’ Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man's eyes with the mud and said to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.” (John 9:5-7, ESV).

Where do you go to receive wisdom and a word from God?

There is so much information coming at us from every direction. We are bombarded by different mediums of communication, facilitating sending us messages from a variety of value systems and conflicting worldviews.

A medium is something in a middle position. Most likely you have heard the expression, “Let’s look for a happy medium.”

A medium is also a means of communicating or conveying information, an idea, or a message. The plural of medium is media.

Who do you know you can call in a moment of your greatest need or desperation?

When we are in trouble, we need people we can reach out to. We need help in our time of need.

When we are in need of salvation, we must call on the name of the Lord.

In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul instructed the Roman church, saying, “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Romans 10:13, ESV).

What good works might God be doing in and through us despite of our brokenness and infirmities?

Our brokenness and infirmities are not necessarily deserved or brought upon us by our sin or by other people’s sin. Sometimes God is doing a great work through our brokenness, through our flaws, and through our infirmities. It is possible that God is bringing about his purposes and priorities through our infirmities.

This was the case concerning the man born blind in the gospel of John, chapter nine. As Jesus passed by, he saw a man blind from birth, and his disciples asked him, “’Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” (John 9:1-3, ESV).

How do you love God? What are the different aspects of your life and your being through which you are able to express your love of God?

We are instructed by the law of God to love God with all that we are. We are to love God with our total being. We are to love God in heart and mind, and we are to love God through all our strength and in all our doing.

In the fifth book of the law, the Torah, the final speech of Moses, God speaks, saying, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5, ESV).

Where does your hope come from? How do you endure trials? What role does prayer play in your life?

Hope helps us to keep going in anticipation of what God has in store for our future and is cause for joy.

The trials we encounter in life require patient endurance, stamina, and perseverance as we move forward.

How much is required for you to have your needs met? How much is enough? What are your physical and spiritual needs?

We all have basic physical and spiritual needs which need to be met for our survival and wellbeing.

In the account of the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s gospel, Jesus addressed the woman’s spiritual need by offering her living water.

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14, ESV).

Have you ever been torn between two places? Maybe you have heard the expression, “Stuck between a rock and a hard place”?

Oftentimes, we can be emotionally, physically, and even spiritually, tied to a specific place. We can see our decision to be somewhere as either the one place or the other. Particular places have particular meaning and significance in our lives, and it can be difficult to see beyond them.

In the account of the Samaritan woman at the well, in the gospel of John chapter four, this issue of place comes up in conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman who came to draw water from the well.

What are you looking to for help? Where do you look for salvation? What are you seeing?

We see what we are looking to. However, not everything we look to and see can bring us the salvation we seek.

The Apostle John quotes Jesus in his gospel account as saying, “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:40, ESV).

What happens when the true worship of God becomes idolatry? Is it possible that the God given signs which point to the worship of God can become an idol?

In the the beginning of the reign of Hezekiah the son of Ahaz, the twenty-five year old king of Judah, the Israelite people were worshipping idols. The same bronze serpent God had instructed Moses to build to save the rebellious Israelites, had become a point of idolatry as their history unfolded in the days of the kings.

The book of Second Kings tells us, King Hezekiah “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, according to all that David his father had done. He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan)” (2 Kings 18:1-4, ESV).

What wildernesses and death does our sinful rebellion bring us? How are we rescued and saved from our sin?

Our sin and rebellion against God can lead us through dry and perilous wildernesses in our lives. The judgement bite of the enemy, the serpent, can bring us death because of our sin and rebellion.

When the Israelites complained, rebelled, and sinned against God, having just been freed from slavery in Egypt, God sent fiery serpents to strike them with death and judgement in their wilderness wandering.

The book of Numbers tells us, “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.” (Numbers 21:8-9, ESV).

When Jesus takes our sin, what happens to our sin? Where does our sin go if it is no longer ours to carry?

When Jesus removes our sin, he takes our sin upon himself. Jesus carries our sin so that we do not have to carry it.

Paul wrote the church in Corinth, saying, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV).

Are you being overcome, or are you overcoming?

We can be overcome by the evil in this world, or we can overcome evil with God’s goodness.

The Apostle Paul wrote the church in Rome, encouraging them, saying, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21, ESV).

"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.'” (Matthew 4:1-3, ESV).

Prayer and fasting go together hand in hand. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assumed both prayer and fasting, saying "when you pray" and "when you fast" (Matthew 6:5 and 6:16). Notice Jesus did not say "if". The assumption is followers of God will be active in the disciplines of prayer and fasting.

After his baptism, Jesus began his earthly ministry with prayer and fasting when "Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" (Matthew 4:1-2 and Luke 4:1-2).

Where does temptation come from? How are we tempted? Why are we tempted? What do we do about temptation? Where is God when we are tempted?

Ever since the fall of humanity, in Genesis chapter three, humanity has been tempted by the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. When the serpent tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, he did so by sowing seeds of doubt, “Did God really say?” … “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:1-7, ESV). Eve was tempted by what she saw, she desired to satisfy her hunger, and she longed to be wise and to be like God.

In his book Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters, Timothy Keller makes the point that we are tempted to make gods of money, sex, and power. Keller says, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart” (Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods). Our temptations will always fall short of satisfying the void in us, which only God can fill.