Living the life God intended

Sometimes in our walk with God, we find it impossible to contemplate living a godly life. We conjure up images of living this way as I will never sin again, I need to follow a bunch of rules and regulations or even worse, we compare ourselves to someone else and realise we come up too short. So maybe before we all give up and get into condemnation, we look at what living a godly life may be like. We find some of the answers to this in looking at the life of Jesus and how He conducted Himself. But for the purpose of this blog, we will consider the verse in 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 3.

It states, ” By His divine power, God has given us everything we need to live a godly life”. What I love about this verse is that it is by God’s divine power. It is not in our own strength that we can live this type of life. God has given us all we need. There is nothing else that we can find in this world that we can add to it. It is all there.  It doesn’t come from me but from God. That takes the pressure off us because we can’t produce this. The other thing is that it is non-discriminatory. Everyone can access this way of life, even children! So what’s this life!

We will need to look at the next part of the verse to find out more. It states ” We have received all this by coming to know Him”. This means we can only live a godly life if we know God. Most people say they know God because they have heard of Him or the things He has done. It is like knowing a famous movie star like Tom Cruise. We say we know him but we don’t really. Knowing someone means being acquainted with them on a personal level. It means being able to ring them any time and getting them and not their secretary, going to dinner with them and having them over to your house. Of course, that’s impossible for most of us in reagards to Tom Cruise as we don’t know him in that way. In the same way, we have to know God. Knowing God means accepting what Jesus did for us on the cross and allowing God to come into our lives and walk daily with us. It means being free to walk into God’s throne room and pray and knowing that God’s presence lives in us and with us wherever we go. If you don’t know God like that, talk to Him and ask Him to come and live in you and with you – that you accept His gift of Jesus. That’s all there is to it to start with.

Now let’s continue with verse 4.  It states that God has given us great and precious promises. Where are they, you may ask? In the Bible – that is God’s Word to us full of His great and precious promises. This book tells us how to live that godly life – not through rules but through a change in our attitudes and behaviours. GOd wants us to have the fruit of the Spirit working in our lives – the love, joy, peace, patience etc.  We can’t get those things in our lives through rules – we will just frustrate ourselves and give up. We have to let the promise of God that we can live like this get deep in our hearts through talking to God and allowing the Word to get deep inside of us. How do we do this? By not only reading the promise but saying the promise over ourselves until it becaimes a part of who we are. That’s how it works for every single promise.

Once those promises start showing in your life, you are living a godly life. One that will please God and enrich your life and others. But don’t stop at one promise – keep going – until you can see all of them working in your life. This may take you a lifetime here on earth and beyond but that’s okay. 

From glory to glory God is changing you and I and allowing us to live the abundant life He promised. So this week, find yourself a promise, say it until it comes to pass in your life. That way you can keep living the life God intended for you!