Thursday, September 10, 2015

What's the goal?




As a new believer in God it's common to wonder what's the goal with all this? What's the goal with my faith? Is the point with me getting saved that I can be sure that I will go to heaven the day I die?

There is a peace that comes from knowing that the day you die you will be in heaven with God and with all the other people who went before you, but there is a lot more to being a Christian than that. We don't choose to spend the rest of our lives believing in God just so we can sit back and relax because we have been saved. Although, among some Christians this view still seems to be common. The point with you being saved is about something much bigger than just your life.




After we have been saved God invites us to a life following in Jesus's footsteps. Jesus was the most powerful man who ever walked on this earth, but he didn't use his power to assert himself above others, he used his power to serve others and to tell everyone the good news about God. The goal with our faith is that we too would become more and more like Jesus every year. We are called to be servants of others, to be radically generous and to love self-sacrificially. We are called to abandon our own selfishness and live to serve others everywhere we go. Loving God, loving ourselves and loving other people is our mission.

Last year our church talked about a thing called "Stages". Stages is tool that can help all Christians grow in their faith, I personally found Stages to be very helpful and inspiring. There are seven different stages of spiritual growth:

1.) Not curious (about God)
2.) Curious (about God)
3.) Seeker (Seeking the truth about God)
4.) Believer (Believing in God)
5.) Disciple (Following after Jesus)
6.) Disciple Maker (Helping others follow Jesus)
7.) Servant (Living to serve. Loving God, yourself & others wherever you go)

Each Christian finds herself somewhere on the journey from Seeker to Servant. Some Christians go all the way to Servant during their lifetime, while others may be stuck in the same stage for many years. We will also go back and forward between different stages during different seasons in life. A person who is a Disciple Maker for example might find herself back at the Seeker stage after experiencing a great loss in her life that she is working through.




You will find some Christians eager to grow in their faith and you will find others who are holding back and don't want to grow. Growth always comes with some growth pains and becoming more like Jesus also means you need to let go of some things. You will need to let go of things like selfishness, greed, arrogance etc. which can be both difficult and uncomfortable. As we go from Seekers to Servants we at the same time go from living self-serving lives to living lives serving others.

You can't become a servant without giving something up. When you become generous you start giving to others rather than to keep everything you have to yourself. When you become a servant you stop working only to get more money, prestige or power for yourself. You now work to bring more love into the world and to help those who are hurting. It's an others-centered lifestyle versus a self-centered lifestyle, that pretty much sums up why many Christians are still holding back. Us humans like to live self-centered lives, it comes naturally for us, living to serve others is something we have to learn.



I get my motivation to continue to grow in my faith from reading about what the servant stage can look like. The keyword in the Servant stage is sacrifice, it's about laying down one's life for others, just like Jesus did. The servant stage include challenges like "Pick a particular place and people group that you will spend the rest of your life serving". You might pick the homeless in New York, the orphans in Uganda or maybe it's youth at risk in your city that you feel passionate about serving.

The Servant stage also includes doing short-term mission projects and discerning God's call on your life. "God's call" means God has created each one of us with a certain set of skills and passions so that we can do a certain type of work in this world for him. Our job is to figure out what that call is. Are we called to move abroad to start and orphanage or maybe God is calling us to teach in a school in a poor neighborhood? Each call is very different because God has created us all different, the only thing we all have in common is that we are designed to love God, love ourselves and love others.




I would say that I'm probably just entering the Disciple stage in my own spiritual journey. I still have very far to go before I will be at the Servant stage, but I'm excited to keep growing every year. I also get inspired to keep moving when I hear about what other Christians are doing. I hear about Joanna Eliasson from Sweden who sold her own company and moved to Kampala, Uganda to start an orphanage. I hear about Ben and Katie who moved to Haiti to become teachers. I hear about Jessie and John who decided they were not going to have their own children so that they would be able to adopt some of the 100 000 foster children in the US who are waiting to be adopted.

There are so many stories of incredible human-beings who have chosen to abandon their selfishness and live the rest of their lives serving others. I hope that one day in the future when I have worked on my own issues and selfishness that I get to be one of those people. If you ask me, living to serve others for God is the absolute best way you can spend this life on earth.


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