Thursday, August 24, 2023
Off and Running
I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us. (Philippians 3:14 NLT)
Are you satisfied with where you are in your spiritual growth?
We need to remember that the good is often the enemy of the best.
For example, some people give up after they’ve tried to lose weight and get in shape. They think, “I’m already overweight. I might as well be more overweight.” They stop exercising and trying to control their food intake. They say, “Just forget it. There’s nothing I can do.”
We can have the same attitude toward spiritual growth. We might tell ourselves that we’re not as spiritual as we ought to be, but there are a lot of people who are even worse than we are.
Even so, do we really want that as our standard of measure? Why not say, “I want to grow even more”?
The apostle Paul summed it up perfectly when he wrote, “I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me” (Philippians 3:12 NLT).
Or, as The Message puts it, “I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. . . . I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back” (verses 12–14).
We want to make Jesus Christ our focus—not a person, not a pastor, and not a church. The Bible tells us, “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have—Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11 NLT).
Jesus is the only foundation that will sustain us as Christians. So let’s build our lives on Jesus Christ.
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