Live to please Him. In every area of your life.
When I was deciding what to call this ministry, I didn’t have to think hard to come up with the core passion that resides in my heart, the one that inspires me to preach God’s word and equip the church. The exhortation of Paul to walk worthy.
Since my days studying at Fuller Seminary in the mid 90’s, I have known my mission. My calling. It was dropped into my heart then, and it hasn’t changed since.
“To train and equip the church through preaching and prophetic word”
I feel called to the church. This does not mean I am not called to reach the lost and take a bunch of folks with me into heaven. That is a part of ALL of our callings. This just means that I have felt compelled for many years to raise high a standard for believers, to exhort them and to encourage them to live a life that is pleasing and honoring to their God. To walk in humility, morality, honesty, justice, purity and love.
The church is in a tough place right now. Many of our rules (gasp! I said rules!) for moral behavior are considered outdated. Because of this we appear to be irrelevant to the world around us (which many churches treat as a great sin). Churches often have a dysfunctional response to this. They scramble to be “cool” and begin to value relevance over holiness, marketing over the utilization of the Holy Spirit, and grace at the expense of truth.
This trend has nurtured a type of nominal Christianity that I am seeing across denominations. A Christianity that skirts the passages about walking in the light, skips over the scriptures about how we should talk and behave, and downplays the call for believers to be living sacrifices and to walk worthy of their calling.
Church, if we are going to reach a world that is spiraling into darkness with a shattered moral compass, we are going to have to reflect the light of Jesus. It is that simple. We have to carry Him about in our clay jars, shining his light and love, and working out our salvation to become the “little Christs” we are called to be.
We must Walk. Worthy.
For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light. For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
- Col 1:9-14
In the New Testament, the apostle Paul exhorts believers several times to “walk worthy”. We are called to walk worthy of God (1 Thes 2:12), to walk worthy of the gospel (Phil 1:27), to walk worthy of the Lord (Col 1:10) and to walk worthy of our calling (Eph 4:1). What does this mean? Does it mean we have to live our lives in a desperate attempt to become worthy of his sacrifice? That is simply not possible. We will never be counted worthy of what Christ has done for us.
The greek word for worthy is ἀξίως:
Axiōs - suitably, worthily, in a manner worthy of
Worthy is defined as:
of commendable excellence or merit; deserving.
To "walk worthy of the Lord" means to walk in a way that the Lord deserves from us. After all he has done to save, deliver, call and adopt us. And in light of his great sacrifice on the cross…
He deserves ALL of us.
In gratitude to him, we live sacrificially, we love like him, we seek the lost, we walk in holiness and purity. We watch how we speak, we guard our eyes from evil, we build up and don’t tear down. We act in a way that fits the great value and glorious nature of God, and the gospel, and our callings.
Walking worthy of Him is to live to please Him. We demonstrate to Him with our behavior that what He has done for us matters to us.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God--this is your true and proper worship.
- Romans 12:1
We are called to a life of sacrifice. And a lifestyle that non-believers expect of us. They expect us to walk out our lives like Jesus.
Let your walk add to God’s reputation of being good, pure, loving, and faithful.
Let your walk bring credit to Him.
Let your walk make Him proud.