Are you Doing the Best Things?

The best people I know are doers, go-getters. And I truly thank God for them.  They’ve made my life better by passing on to me a hard and noteworthy work ethic, a desire to dream big for God. These men and women fought against the status quo, against the average and attainable, and dream about what is unlikely and impossible.   They are the ones that see the snow-capped peak, saved their money to buy the expensive climbing gear, have surveyed all the possible routes, counted up the possible risks, set the date, and have begun their climb. They have chosen life’s best for themselves and I want to be like them.

Can I ask you a serious question?  Of all the things you are doing with your life, brief as it is, are you doing the best things?  When you plan your day or week, when you sit down with your family, do you deliberately and with purposed intention choose to spend specific moments doing the very best things you can do?  It’s a hard question isn’t it; especially when it’s so easy to be like everyone else.  So many of our neighbors, co-workers and familiar faces at the grocery store have settled into lives of ease, choosing paths promising comfort, roads that lead to nominal and non-lasting, fading detours that deliver discouragement and despair?  So are you doing the best things?  Take an honest evaluation of your week so far.  Would you say that your normal routines and daily patterns betray the subtle reality you often are willing to trade, like the masses, many eternal and glorious realities for what amounts to pond water: can’t drink it, won’t swim in it, wouldn’t think of washing our clothes in it?  My friend Shai said it this way: “We were made for so much more than what we settle for.”

So why do we settle for less than best?  Are we just lazy?  Do we fear the pain that comes from doing hard things? Have we sold out to the easy things that bring immediate, temporary pleasure instead of discipline and self-control that brings greater, future reward?  Perhaps we forgot that life is more than what we hoped would come from our camp-decisions and personal resolutions.  Life is not what we want to do, or planned to to, or could have done, or wished to finish.  No, your life is what you’ve done and are doing now.  Life is the stark reality of all the decisions you’ve made, great and small, both the significant and the insignificant.  And it is the examination of this long string of moments, this linear web of decisions that reveals what truly is important to us. What you do is proof of what you love and believe.  Look behind you to the path your feet have walked.  If you continue, where will it bring you by the end of the week? Month?

Unless we see the various ways we lay waste to the precious few moments we have and begin in our hearts to loathe them, we will likely continue in the paths our feet have lead us before.  These roads lead us in circles, never advancing, never learning, never decreasing our distance to the summit. Many wandered these paths and fell from the icy cliffs of discouragement and despair.

No doubt, you and I have friends or maybe even family members who daily trade the best things for the common; like trading in your pure gold jewelry for the yellow-colored bling you’d find in a gum-ball machine. They spend more time eating than exercising.  They brush their teeth longer than they read books.   They engorge themselves in endless electronic entertainments more than they explore the immensely beautiful world God has made.  They prefer instant over investment, reaping over sowing, consuming versus working, producing and sweating.  They do what everyone else does.  You don’t have to look at our culture too long to see they prefer depravity and virtual reality over the delightful fruits produced by the actions (and results) of love, duty, and discipline.

What is better than the person and presence of Christ?  Has the One True God ever uttered a Word that declared there is someone or something more supremely valuable and worthy than He is?  Aren’t then the best things in life the pursuit of God and the joy that comes in His presence and service?  The Bible says, “But let the godly rejoice. Let them be glad in God’s presence. Let them be filled with joy” (Psalm 68:3).  And this is no isolated example in Scripture; God’s Word is permeated with the sublime reality that God made His people in His own image and built them to need Himself and to be satisfied with the power and presence of the Lord God Almighty.  And yet every week so many professing Christians live as any other citizen of the world; they chase the immediate and ever-present demands of our modern society.  They’re simply following the person ahead of them.

Pursuing God is the ‘best thing’ you can do – it’s what He made you for and one reason why He sent His Son to die on Calvary’s cross.  If you’re not pursuing Him, then you’re the fool who trades his gold for garbage.  The Good News is this: repent of your sins and put your trust in Jesus alone.  When you find yourself doing the ‘best things’ in life, you’ll find yourself in the presence and power of God.  What are the trifles and time-traps you need to lay aside so you can do the best things?

The Summit calls you to a mountain-top experience.  Will you go?

Article by: Zach Zajicek