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“With every benefit, we must embrace both responsibility and risk.”

A thought by Erwin Raphael McManus from his book, Chasing Daylight: Seize the Power of Every Moment Moment (Kindle Locations 400-401). Kindle Edition.

I’m sure that you have found that in the beginning days of your marriage it was so much easier to risk.  I mean you didn’t have kids, you didn’t have a whole lot of stuff and you had a whole lot of enthusiasm.  I mean, you believed you could conquer the world.  Get out of the way here we come.  But the older you got and the more responsibility you had made it a whole lot more difficult to risk.   It maybe made it more difficult to respond to God’s leading in your life.

God blesses you with a great house.  You have a nice car or two.  You have finally gotten the furniture you’ve always wanted and of course you have the kids.  God has been so good to you but in the midst of all this He seems to be impressing on you that He has something unbelievable for you to do but it means giving up all the stuff and moving your family.  It was one thing when it was just you and your wife and you had nothing.  This is a whole different thing, but is it?

It is so easy to let the benefits of life get in the way of living the real obedient life.  We get so used to looking at life from the viewpoint of how it benefits us and our family that we lose sight of the fact that God has a plan and a purpose for our lives.

I’m glad I didn’t have a father and mother who looked at life that way.  For half of my life at home we lived in an house trailer and my mom was my sister and my teacher.  I never had the privilege to play sports but I had the privilege of singing with my father and sister and listening to him preach every night in a different church every 10 days as we held revival meetings from one end of the United States to the other.  Oh we would stop every once in a while and my dad would pastor for 4 or 5 years and then we were on the road again.  I wouldn’t trade my life with anyone.  I am a Christian today, I really believe because my parents were obedient to God’s leading more than the pressures of what is best for the family. 

My prayer for my life and the life of my family is to not settle for anything but God’s best.  That is also my prayer for you.  God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.  Again I say, don’t settle for anything else.  There are too many people in this world who are giving first class allegiances to second class causes.  Don’t settle.

I am now at the other end of my life and I still don’t want to settle for anything but what God has for me to do in the rest of my life. 

So who or what are you living for?
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