Please enjoy this excerpt from Manage Your Mission – Living wisely and abundantly for today and eternity.  This book will help craft your life mission, establish its priorities, and succeed in each area: Faith – Family – Fitness – Field – Friends – Fun – Finances. 

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2 Corinthians 4:17–18 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Philippians 3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ

You’re gonna have to serve somebody.  Bob Dylan

Now that we’ve covered some basic principles for wise living, let’s move on to the first F, Faith.  The Faith section is by far the largest and most important. It is the foundation of everything else and covers many parts of the following categories due to inevitable overlaps.  Getting that part right is crucial to managing your mission. 

Faith should be the foundation of all we do.  Knowing how much Jesus loves you and what he has done for you now and for eternity liberates you to live out the rest of your life productively and effectively.  Your sins are completely forgiven, you are a citizen of Heaven, Jesus is interceding for you at all times, Jesus counts you as a brother or sister even though he is also your Lord, and so much more.

But let’s first define faith as trusting in the real Jesus for your salvation.  Christian faith isn’t blind faith or faith without evidence.  Those are just urban legends from the Big Book of Atheist Sound Bites (not an actual book, just my term for the kinds of things that many atheists throw out).  I note that it needs to be the real Jesus because the Jesus of Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Progressive Christianity can’t save you. Why?  Because those versions of Jesus don’t exist.  Mormons, for example, make fantastic neighbors, but if you peel back the layers and look closely at their holy books, their Jesus is not real.  The real Jesus is presented in the pages of Scripture.  All of them.  We all have doubts, but we can more appropriately doubt the doubts as we learn more.  Be like this guy in Mark 9:24: Immediately the father of the child cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

In short, after working through enough Bible difficulties with satisfactory answers, I tend to give God and his Word the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure this thrills him to no end.  I say that tongue-in-cheek because, on the one hand, he certainly doesn’t need the Neil-seal-of-approval on his Word, but on the other hand, he does love it when we exercise faith and trust what he revealed to us. So, again, not blind faith, not faith despite the evidence, but faith grounded in the truths he has revealed to us.  We’ll have more on that in the Apologetics section.

Faith becomes the lens through which you view the world.  It is a daily battle to ensure that you embrace a biblical view of the world.  Your faith should drive all of your priorities. If we are Christians, we should say, as Mary did, “Behold, I am a servant of the Lord” (Luke 1:38).  So our ultimate priority should be our faith, and everything else should come from that.  Having faith as our #1 priority helps us keep an eternal perspective.  We are saved by faith.  If it is genuine faith, our lives will show it through our good works and priorities. 

Copyright 2022

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible