Transcript:
Hello, it’s Jessica here and I just wanted to take a few minutes to share something that has made a huge difference in my relationship with God over the last few years and something that I feel like I’ve learned and grown deeper in my understanding of this over time and still continuing to learn it more and more. And it’s something just really exciting and beautiful to me that I see in Scripture and that I see as living the Christian life and I just wanted to share that here.
Prioritizing
I used to live, and many people live in a way that we would list priorities and put God first, maybe family second, work third, friends fourth, and we have this list of priorities where we put God as number one — and we always want to keep God as number one and then we kind of list everything: second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. And sometimes, I would do a really good job of keeping God number one. That might look like: I would spend time with God in the morning, read the Bible, journal, go to church, be in fellowship and whatnot. Sometimes He would kind of fall into number two or number three, and things would kind of slip down the list and then I would have to kind of do a regroup after realizing after a few days or a few weeks, and be like: “okay, I need to put God back on number one“. And I would kind of reevaluate and see what happened, what went wrong? Why did He kind of slip down the list? Why am I being distracted by different things? or what’s going on? Why is He not number one in my life? It was kind of this cycle of going back and forth and putting Him up there and then sometimes He would slip back down and then putting Him back again and Him slipping back down. Sometimes, it felt a little bit like a roller coaster, up and down and and it wasn’t always very consistent. And over time, by being in the Word, reading different books and just from other mature Christians and seeing their life and talk about the Word and their relationships with the Lord. I realized that I wasn’t viewing my relationship with God in the way that the Word tells me it should be. The Word does not say that my relationship with God is separate from everything else in my life, rather the word of God tells me the opposite that my relationship with God is everything in my life. It’s not just a part of my life, but it’s everything. To help explain this better. I want to share some of my favorite Scriptures in regards to this idea where Scripture clearly states this relationship to God in our lives. It’s all throughout the New Testament, these three are some of my favorites.
The first one is Colossians 3:1-4:
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
So here in Colossians, we see that we have died and our life is hidden with Christ in God. Christ who is our
life will appear then we also will appear with Him in glory.
Galatians 2:20