LifeLink Devotions for Monday, April 15, 2025

He tried it all. He spent his entire lifetime pursuing everything that life has to offer in an attempt to discover the purpose for human existence. Years were spent building a name for himself and acquiring everything one man could ever want or need. He was wealthy beyond imagination and wise beyond belief. He indulged himself in every known pleasure and passion. Yet in the end, Solomon concluded this in Ecclesiastes 12:13.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”

As I contemplated that verse and its application to the priorities of my life, I discovered an important truth. My life is not to be a pie chart with every part of my life in equal balance. It is not to have one slice labeled “spirituality.”

Nor is it to be a pie chart with God at the center under the assumption that suddenly all the other areas of my life will be brought into order, yet still giving me the right to wander in all those areas as I see fit, somehow claiming that God now has blessed my wanderings. 

We have been deceived into believing that our lives will be better and more balanced by adding God to them. Nothing could be further from the truth of the Gospel. God never asked to be added to our lives. He has provided for our crucifixion with His Son Jesus, so that our life is cast aside and the life of Jesus Christ is born in us. We do not add God to what we have determined is the path of our lives, but rather we raise a white flag of surrender and place our lives fully into God through Jesus Christ. We are added to Him, not the other way around.

F.B. Meyer wrote this in one of his devotionals.  “It is only as we refuse to be conformed to this world, and yield ourselves to be transformed by the free entrance of the Holy Spirit into our minds, that we can learn all that God will do for us. We are nothing; He is all. And He is prepared to be and do all things in us, if only we will open to Him as the land lies open to the summer sun.”

When we begin to understand that we are to be found in Christ and that Christ is our life, then we will know what it is to love God and then love others as Christ did. The purpose of man is to discover the purpose of God for man, and Jesus stated it clearly when He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.”

I can’t do that with God as just a part of my life. I can only do that when my life is lost in His.

Pastor John