What we do in life echoes in eternity

"God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the called"

i just recently finished reading Max Lucado's most recent book entitled Out Live your Life, a truly fascinating and challenging book.  Each page is engrossing, and convicting.  Its the type of book that leaves you with a heart ready to impact the world, and a heart broken at all the ways you haven't yet.  Sometimes it seems almost overwhelming, but if taken one step at a time, this can become a transforming life challenge.

Out Living your life isn't just a pithy title, it is an outright challenge, and a biblical one at that.  We are called to leave a lasting legacy for God's kingdom on this earth.  i must confess the failure to leave this kind of legacy is my deepest fear, "what if i don't out live my own life?" i often wonder in a state of dissatisfaction and contempt at my inability to live the life Jesus calls me to.  The best thing about this book as that the idea of self-service is never considered, it is all about serving God, so inspiring.

This fall i have been volunteering as a football coach at Pullman High School, and have asked on many occasions to the players i interact with daily "what kind of legacy they want to leave?" Clearly this centers around football and the answers are as expected.  However, i am also a leader for Real Life on the Palouse Fierce Youth - Pullman; along with my gorgeous girlfriend Devon, and our friends JT and Kelsey (recently wed), and some of the players are also come to our weekly small group and the question shifts focus.  What i am trying to do is get them to have the same focus on the field as they do off, and vice-versa.

As my dear friend Leandre Daniels will readily attest to football is not forever, and that your life is about so much more than the activities you are involved in.  It is the influence and impact you have in that circle of interest, either seen or unseen, that is what truly defines us.  It is not just how we chose to respond when we are standing atop the mountain, in-fact it is more so how we respond when we are down in the valleys, when everyone else would understand if we surrendered.  Your legacy is not defined in a single moment, but in the entire span of your life.

Our legacies are about how we as individuals lived Kingdom lives, about the times we stormed the cave, and the way we stood against Satan's strongest attacks.  Our legacy is ultimately not even about us, it is about God's work in and through us. It is about how God uses us when we bow before him and say "your will be done, not my will".  The legacy is about how present and real we make the Kingdom of Heaven in our daily lives.  The good news is; it's never too late to alter your legacy, no matter what you have done in the past you can change it through God's redemptive and forgiving power.  The question is will you let God, shape you so that you can out live your life?

Here is my challenge, read this book one chapter a day, read God's word each day, and spend ample time in prayer about how each chapter is meant to speak to you, how you are supposed to respond to the challenges with in it.  Then respond to those challenges, and see how God works through you when you embrace his Kingdom, and his will.  Dare to out live your life through the Kingdom of Heaven.  Dare to truly know God.

"What man is a man who does not make the world better?"

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