Running After Righteousness

You and I are both loved by God and lovers of God.   That may sound a little to basic for some of you, but that is the reality of who we are, “Loved By God” and what we do, “Lovers Of God”.  As you and I wonder through life searching for life’s meaning and our purpose for exsistance upon this obviously identity starved planet we call earth, we must strive to remember that we are loved by God and we are lovers of God.

 The world around us will try to squeeze us into a place where the secondary issues of life become the primary issues and the primary issue becomes the secondary pursuits of our hearts.  The primary issue is to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbor as our selves.  The secondary issues are everything else.  In our own hearts, we must constantly remind ourselves that to strive after secondary wines, or the secondary rewards which both God and this life offer, is to prostitute our hearts for the sake of self satisfaction and acceptance.

This is a deep pit and a wide trap that is designed to suck us into the trap of human validity.  There is no human on the face of this earth that can validate you in your pursuit to discove your own personal right standing before God.   Althought day after day, men and women are lead like ox going to the slaughter or like deer stepping into a noose, little knowing that that it will cost them their lives. As you and I take a step into God’s presence and decide that who He is to me, for me and in me, is more important that what people think of me and what I can accomplish by striving after their approval, I can avoid the pit of deception and the trap of performance.

My wife and I used to really like to watch football on television. We still like the sport greatly, but there is a new dynamic coming into the game that was not there several years ago. That new dynamic is the approval trap for these young men who are being asked, from very early on in life, to perform in order to be approved. We agree that in order to get a job of substantial value the one looking for pay must perform in order to be paid, but there is a new level of perversity which is coming in to play that is captivating a generation, becuase my generation bought into the lie that it is alright to perform well, becuase to perform well is to get paid well. Once we bought into that, the rules change and the performance trap gets even more intence. For our children, we are to raise them differently than we were raised. We will not sit around and wacth
James Bond movies, that are full of sexual content. We will not teach them to get ahead at any cost. We will not teach them that performance is justified because that is what is expected of us.

We will teach our children to run after righteousness. We will teach ourselves and teach future generations to run after the reality that they are loved by God and that they are lovers of God. We run after righteousness because that is the primary pursuit in life. Running after righteousness is what gives us understanding into who we are and what we are here for. Running into the reality that God has made us righteous becuase of what He did for us and not by what we can do for ourselves is vitally important. Grab hold of the reality that your life’s pursuit is to run after His presence and not let go, no matter what you have done, no matter where you have come from. Your life long pursuit is to discover who He is in you. When your heart is set in the right place, seeking the right pursuit, that is when healing begins it’s restoring work.

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