Anchoring Your Year in the Truth
At the beginning of 2022, I want to challenge us to put first things first. This is an ideal time to reset our priorities, rethink our values and reorient our lives around those things that matter most. It’s a time to check our anchors, those non-negotiables that keep us firmly tethered to the truth.
To help us, I want to quote from the Steward Declaration, which we launched last week. The first main section is entitled ‘What We Believe about the Stewardship of Our Relationship with God’. Here we seek to establish one of these anchors by naming a lie we must avoid and speaking a truth we must embrace in its place.
First, hear the lie: We reject the lie that there are things in this world that can bring us more pleasure, happiness, and peace than knowing God intimately.
We chose to start the Declaration by naming this lie because it testifies to so much compromise inside the body of Christ. It speaks to a watershed truth, an ‘all or nothing’ axiom of our faith. In the face of this teaching that rejects every accommodation, we are continually lured by a variety of versions of a comfortable middle ground.
We try to follow Jesus alongside those things we believe will bring us pleasure. We hope we can hold together our pursuit of our own personal happiness with our faith. We want to experience some sense of peace amidst an avalanche of bad news and hope God is somewhere in the mix.
The enemy always wants us to separate the things our heart desires from Jesus, turning him into an accessory to our lives. C.S. Lewis confronts this distortion head on, “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
For the follower of Jesus, there is only Jesus. Jesus is our pleasure. Jesus is our happiness. Jesus is our peace. When we seek these things in any other place or believe they can be found in any other form than Jesus, we buy the lie.
In the Declaration, we proclaim the truth that knowing God more intimately must be the greatest, highest, and most passionate desire of a follower of Jesus because intimacy is his idea and his greatest desire for us.
As you begin 2022, is intimacy with God your ‘greatest, highest, and most passionate desire’? Will you reject the lie that would have you spend 2022 pursuing happiness and peace from the things offered by the world? Will you refuse to relegate Jesus to an ‘add on’ to the rest of your life?
I pray you will anchor your year in the Truth, Jesus Christ. Let him be your peace, your happiness, your greatest pleasure,and your deepest joy.
Last Thursday we launched the Steward Declaration. Already we have over 100 signatures and the word is spreading quickly. As a reader of this Steward’s Journey blog, I pray you have read it and will be adding your signature to it as a sign of your support and prayers. Here is the link: www.thestewarddaclaration.com
