Series Title: Stewarding The College and Beyond Years Wisely: Cultivating A Life Fully Devoted To God Now

God has one purpose in mind for those who receive His love through the act of sending His Son as the perfect and only sacrifice for humanity’s sin. That purpose is that we might be transformed day by day into the image of Jesus. This is His great goal. This is His “will” for us, His children (1 Corinthians 1:9). Many people ask the question, “What is God’s will for my life?” His will is to conform you to be like Jesus and to bring you to a point where you are ready and prepared to go anywhere and do anything that He might whisper in your inner man to do. As Message Bearers preparing to serve God in difficult circumstances, we want to focus our attention now on becoming “like Jesus” in every way possible. We must ask Him to do the hard work in us, boldly building our secret lives in the prayer closet with Him, helping us to mourn and grieve over the ease of sin within us, teaching us the hard lessons of faith, delivering us from the stench of our self-centeredness, and filling us with an unstoppable love that we know could never come from ourselves. 

There are a host of traits that Jesus possessed at the deepest levels and that God will, over time, commit to working into you. Some of them include: a sensitivity to God’s voice (John 10:3,4), a blameless and harmless spirit (Philippians 2:15), broken and contrite hearts (Isaiah 57:15, 66:2), faithfulness (Revelation 17:14), a right fear of God (Malachi 3:16, Acts 10:2, throughout Proverbs), deep humility (Psalms 43:2, 1 Peter 5:5), holiness (Deut. 7:6, Colossians 3:12), a hungering for righteousness (Matthew 5:6), a person of justice (Genesis 6:9, Habbakuk 2:4, Luke 2:25), one led by the Spirit (Romans 8:14), and the list goes on and on. Many of these I will deal with in depth over the next weeks in these Memos. There are four I want to highlight today that seem to incorporate many of these mentioned: Personal integrity, character, servanthood and embracing the place of being the last. 

Integrity, by definition means, soundness, adherence to a code of values, utter sincerity, honesty and candor, completeness. Jesus modeled these realities in an incredible way. Even when people betrayed and rejected Him, His integrity still shown through. Integrity is closely linked with growing as people who turn away from the nagging temptations to sin and instead respond with a vigilance to obeying God. Psalm 119 is a powerful writing which centers around the Psalmists commitment to walk upright with God. Through it we can hear the desperation of a human being as the hordes of darkness in varying forms surround him and press in with vigor and yet he stands firm. We are given the opportunity to feel the raw emotion and pain of faithfully obeying God in the midst of a perverse generation. It is through the cultivating of a deep, relevant life in God that we are able to follow in the Psalmists footsteps. Verse 9 tells us, “How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your word! With my whole heart I have sought you; oh let me not wander from your commandments.” It’s the heart cry of one very aware of his proneness to the temptations around him, and showing us the way to overcome: become a person committed to God’s commands as He has revealed them to us in His Word. Are you a committed student of the Word? Do you let it’s truth penetrate you and break you, renew you and revive you, soak you and clothe you? This is the key to becoming a person of Integrity. How, you say? Integrity becomes a value to us only when we see value to walking in it. As we grow in our love for God, trusting in His promises, and begin to sense His plan to use us for His purposes, our hearts cry is to not to hurt or grieve Him, and the value rises for us. It is also as we grow closer to Him that we experience Him pouring out His enabling and empowering grace to help us walk victoriously, thus humbling us of thinking we could remain faithful in our own strength. 

Integrity is the foundation on which all character is formed. We will never become a person of character apart from letting God build integrity within us. Character must be tested and tried, over and over again. It is not something we somehow arrive at one day. There will be times where we falter into sin. When it happens, repent quickly, get back on your feet and continue to pursue the heart of God. Part of character is consistently responding to God’s promise that He has taken our sin as far as the east is from the west and that He remembers it no more. Receive His grace and keep running the race. Proverbs 24:16 says, “For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again, but the wicked shall fall by calamity.” Those with character recognize their sin, get right with God, make restitution if necessary, and move on trusting in God’s promise of forgiveness. Your life and ministry in serving God around the world will be defined by the level of character that you develop as His son or daughter.

Embracing the lifestyle of a servant is absolutely crucial to becoming like Jesus. We read in Matthew 20:27-28, “And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave….just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many.” This goes against everything within us. Our human nature wants to be served and Jesus calls us to an impossible, counter-cultural stance. The only way to grasp this lifestyle and begin to truly manifest it, is to pour your life out upon God and ask Him to break you of all pride and then to receive God’s grace to live as a servant of others. His grace is the only thing that empowers us. The grace I refer to here is not the grace through which forgiveness comes, but the grace of enabling and empowering us to do something that He calls us to, but is impossible on our own. Being “the last” is painful as our flesh longs for appreciation and praise from others, for recognition when we do something well or good. Then we hear Jesus whisper, “I came to serve…follow in my footsteps and lay down your life!” There is a spiritual power unleashed when we humble ourselves in this manner. When we deny ourselves our right to reputation and commit to putting others before ourselves in all we do, we find true life. 

As you prepare to serve God around the world, remember that as you embrace a servant’s lifestyle and humility, people will be attracted to you and want to know what is the hope of your life. Jesus associated with the lowly and they responded to Him. As we choose humility and being “the last”, know that God will be honored and that others will become curious about why you live in such a way. Now is the time to commit all you are to growing in these qualities. They don’t happen all by themselves. We must purposefully embrace God and all He wants to form in us. 

“Lord, our hearts cry is that we may be conformed to you! We know that this is going to cost us much. It will be painful, full of hardship, lonely, and go against the very grain of who we are in the flesh. We are desperate for you and see our incredible inability to grow in you by our own strength. We cry out that you would pour out your empowering grace upon us to help us embrace your breaking process in our lives. We choose this process and ask for your refining fire. Thank you for your love for me through all of this. This is why you allow us to go through pain, because of your deep love for us.”