The Need to Conquer...the Harder to Fall

The longings of my heart is to pour the gospel message into people’s lives. I am not so much of a brain surgeon—I am into doing the heart-surgery thing on people’s lives. But the intertwining thought that continually tangles my mind is how can I be the person God made me to be. It wasn't long ago that my role seemed so complicated compared to everyone else.

I would assess and evaluate and seek counsel and look everywhere for that fit. All of this has led me back to the same mind-boggling questions and the same desperation I’ve always had. And I wonder if there’s no other way than to aggressively and intentionally go.

That’s the way my journey with Christ began. I went…hard! I found wavering souls and fed them the food of God. Lives began to change. My life was like a sailboat…and I glided with the wind of God. I didn’t have time to think…only time to proactively pour my life into the word, prayer and the powerhouses of teachings in all kinds of books, tapes and the men of God to spend time with. The overflow of all of that was to step out in faith and point people upward to Jesus and then to help guide them into a similar walk I had. The power was eminent!

Then things started to unravel as I found something to conquer.

Beforehand, I had nothing to conquer, only everything to lose. My life revolved around losing in order to gain; giving in order to receive; staying weak as the only way to be strong. But in college I found something to have and enjoy and settle on.

Of all the things in the world, it was a relationship with my future wife. We had something that was truly incredible, a story only God could weave. But the moment we acknowledged to each other that we were going to be soul mates for the rest of our lives, in my mind I felt like a conquering hero.

At the top of my game I began to let the very thing that brought so much joy to my life take me down. I really had no idea this was going on. I was in love and at the point where I had it all—a walk with God, a very fruitful life, and a wife very few people get to have.

This was a woman who is special and everyone who knows her can see it. She’s as true of a Proverbs 31 woman of God as you’ll ever find, even at a young age. So I had my trophy now and everything else seemed less spectacular. The high of my game became the unraveling.

Success is such a danger isn’t it? The more you obtain, the more you have to lose. Even the good things in a life can become the idol that brings you down.

There’s something to be said about the man who maintains a perspective that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The more we learn and the more we become can eventually become our biggest threat.

The constant fight – to be more consumed with God than anything else – the world, the becoming, the having, the wanting, the expectations, and even the pursuit. It’s God’s deal or nothing at all. We are meant to be slaves of the Master in word and deed.

Ravi Zacharias noted in This We Believe:
“A modern-day writer, jack Higgins, was asked at the pinnacle of his success what he now knows that he wished he had known as a younger man. ‘I wished I had known that when you get to the top, there is nothing there.’”

Three pertinent questions that can take you towards God or separate you far away from him:

What am I after? What do I want? What do I want to live for?