Sometimes I don’t get around to blogging because everything I write is so long and takes an hour to write.

I wrote the following on a
young friend’s blog, and I thought I should make it my own blog post.

She wrote:

I was just thinking about how we say that we want to follow Him, and we deny ourselves, but only one time. And then when someone asks us what we’ve given up to follow Him, we bring up the one big thing we’ve given up to follow Him, but in our daily lives, there’s so many things we hold on to.

Insightful, isn’t it?

Anyway, I didn’t leave it alone. I added, in her comment section:

One thought on giving up things. One other way that we fool ourselves is to give up things that are easy and never notice the places that we don’t let God in.

The example I think of is the rich, young ruler. He came to Christ, and he’d kept all the commandments, but he knew he was lacking something. When Jesus asked for that something–selling his possessions, giving to the poor, and following Christ–the young ruler went away sad.

There’s a righteousness that’s ours, and there’s a righteousness that is from God by faith. The righteousness from God will touch the areas we don’t want touched. Our own righteousness will sacrifice where it’s easy, gloat over it, condemn others who aren’t where we are, and hide the “one thing you lack” in our self-righteousness.

 

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