Is Your Faith Walk Generic?

Have you ever started a new job and felt that familiar mix of excitement and anxiety? The first few days—or even weeks—are often disorienting. You’re learning your way around, figuring out relationships, and trying to understand how things really work. Usually, you’re given some kind of manual: a bit of history, a mission statement, maybe a list of policies and definitions.

But imagine if that’s all you received—no clear job description, no sense of what your role actually is. Just a general picture of the organization.

That’s how many Christians end up living their faith. They live a sincere but generic spiritual life, without much sense of personal assignment from the Lord.

Discipleship is often done this way. We hand people a long manual (the Bible), or sometimes a shorter one—guidelines, beliefs, expectations—and we encourage them to learn the content and behave well. But we rarely help them discern their specific calling: what God may be entrusting to them, in t...

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Are You Grasping or Aligning?

Sometimes it may feels like we are not getting anywhere.  We may be working hard, being faithful and even bearing more weight than those around us. Yet, maybe few seem to notice our work, our abilities or our investment. At times like this, we start to wonder about the future – whether we will ever be seen or heard for who we really are. We may ask what we need to do to get noticed, appreciated and/or rewarded.

Strangely, we find James and John – two of Jesus’s closest followers – in a similar situation (Mark 10:35-45).  They, quite possibly with the input/influence of their mother (Matthew 20:20-28), decided they wanted to take their future into their own hands. They flat out asked Jesus to secure places of prominence for them in His Coming Kingdom. This seemed like a brazen request to the other disciples, though one that may have been in their hearts, too.

Jesus’s response included an interesting idea. He said that these places of prominence “belong to those for whom they have been...

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