Bring Your Best

Many times, God calls us Christians to give Him our best in all that we do for Him because He doesn’t want anything less.

A couple examples: the difference between a good sacrifice and a bad sacrifice for Cain and Abel wasn’t meat versus plants, but it was the spirit in which it was given. Abel gave the best of his flock, whereas Cain gave only some of his produce.

The woman who gave two copper coins for her offering was considered as giving the better offering because she gave all that she had. It didn’t have anything to do with her offering being less valuable and the offerings of the wealthy being more valuable monetarily. It had everything to do with the position she was in.

I think we often get it in our head that what we give to God has to be equal to what other give, that our lives and abilities for the kingdom must be compared with others. I’ve already touched on this in another article, but it bears mentioning again. The life of a Christian is not meant to be one of synonymous walks with Christ. It’s meant to be one of uniqueness. Your walk, and your best, is different than every other person’s.

So, with that said, what does it mean to give your best? I have two parts of scripture to discuss to get at that answer. The first is Malachi 1:8. “‘When you present a blind animal for sacrifice, is it not wrong? And when you present a lame or sick animal, is it not wrong? Bring it to your governor! Would he be pleased with you or show you favor?’ asks the Lord of Hosts.”

The important thing to learn here is that your best requires a sacrifice on your part. Giving something to God doesn’t hold any meaning if it’s something you didn’t want in the first place. See, sacrifices must be something of value, and what value is an animal that is blind, lame, or sick? These animals were not valuable. They could not serve as good breeding stock, nor could they take care of themselves. They only used up resources the farmers could use for other purposes, so giving them up wasn’t a sacrifice at all.

Similarly, we must give our best to God. The best of our time; the best of our energy; the best of our skills. If you only give time to God when you have it spare, what good is it as a sacrifice to God? It isn’t any good because you didn’t have to give up anything. It was useless to you, and thus it is a useless sacrifice to God. This is part of the reason why we’re encouraged to give the first part of our morning to God because, for many people, it’s far more of a sacrifice to wake up 10 minutes early than to stay up 10 minutes later.

Your skills and energy are the same way, too. God doesn’t want you to say, “I’ll serve you in this way, but I’ll keep my career to myself.” Your career is part of your best, and thus, it’s part of giving yourself up to God.

But why should you give your best? Because you made a promise that you would when you accepted the gift of salvation and gave your life to Christ. Malachi 1:14 tells this to the priests who were accepting bad sacrifices, but this isn’t just an Old Testament thing. When you pronounced Jesus as Lord of your life, you gave a vow that He could use you as He wished to accomplish God’s will.

It says, “The deceiver is cursed who has an acceptable male in his flock and makes a vow but sacrifices a defective animal to the Lord.” Even now, you are hurting yourself by giving a valueless part of your life as a sacrifice to God. You’re holding yourself back from potential blessings, and you’re breaking the promise you made to God.

Here’s the final note about bringing your best and your relationship with Christ. For this, I’m taking you to Revelation 3: 15-16, “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am going to vomit you out of My mouth.” This actually says that you are better off being unsaved than being a “lukewarm Christian.” See, being a “lukewarm Christian” means that you’re deceiving yourself into believing you’re a follower of Christ and will be receiving the rewards that follow that when you’re actually not.

There is no such thing as a “lukewarm Christian.” You’re either with God or not with God. You’re either filled with God’s righteousness, with the Holy Spirit, or you’re stuck in your sin nature. You have the gift of salvation or you don’t. There’s no in-between. You can’t choose to accept salvation and then give up nothing.

So, you have to bring your best because doing anything less is indicative of a life lived as an unsaved individual. It sounds harsh, but there is always the reminder that bringing your best is not something you can succeed at all the time. God’s grace allows for us to fail at that. While there is no in-between saved and unsaved, there is an allowance for our imperfectness, thankfully. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be giving God your everything, though. That’s how you become a “lukewarm Christian.”

Love is Sacrifice

For King and Country’s “The Proof of Your Love” is a quintessential contemporary Christian song detailing Christ’s love and how we’re supposed to follow up on that in a world that desperately needs to experience it because we’ve all been thinking of love all wrong.

Take your favorite RomCom or other romance and picture the relationship between the two lovers. What brought them together? What binds them together? Would their relationship last outside the confines of the screen or book?

Now, my experience with romances is fairly limited, but from what I’ve read and watched, I’d say the chances are pretty slim. We have this misconstrued vision of love. This vision has come about through a combination of faulty views on what love is and how relationships work. We’ve been influenced by fiction stories and movies, and also, I think, by our society’s lack of openness about love in our relationships.

Let’s take a look at your classic movie relationship: the lovers often come together via a hardship experienced by one of the two. The other attempts to help them through it, to fix them, and they eventually catch feelings for each other and get together.

When people talk to others about how they “fell in love” with their significant other, the phrase “we just had a connection” is used fairly frequently. And maybe they did, but that’s not how love works. But that somewhat harmless phrase has been perpetuated and misunderstood as it has been conveyed through our societies, and now we have a bunch of people searching for a connection that, frankly, they’re never going to find.

We’ve got this definition of love as a feeling, an emotion, a connection, a noun. It’s the butterflies in your stomach when you see someone attractive or connect with someone on a deeper level, but that’s just not it. Those feelings are nice, valuable, wonderful, but they’re just that: feelings. Love? Well, love is a verb.

So, if love is a verb, an action, and not a noun, a feeling, then how does it work? Well, let’s go to the best example of love there ever was: Christ. He died. He sacrificed his life for us. It wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t for him to boast about his actions. It wasn’t prideful. It was done with a heart that desired the best for us.

It’s oft used, but John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” God the Son sacrificed Himself for us. That’s what love is. It’s sacrifice.

You see, the thing we call love now can’t be love because it’s selfish. It’s “loving” someone because you get nice feelings from them. That’s about what you want. But love is about what others need, desire, want. Love is laying down your life, and I don’t mean dying, for someone else. I mean choosing to serve and take care of the person you love before you take care of yourself. It’s setting aside yourself for the sake of another. John 15:13 says “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

Love doesn’t rely on feelings, either. It’s a choice. Why? Because if we are to love like Christ loved us (John 15:12), our love must be unconditional because Christ’s love is unconditional. He does not love us more or less when we make mistakes. So, too, when those we love make mistakes, we should not love them more or less.

I’ll leave y’all with this pure definition of love from 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited, does not act improperly, is not selfish, is not provoked, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Don’t feel love. Do love.