I’m one of those Christians who, like Elijah of the Old Testament, is very jealous for God, or on God’s behalf. In Exodus 20:5, God said that He is a jealous God. He is jealous concerning His glory and the worship of His people. My jealousy, on His behalf, is because I want Him to receive glory. I am grieved when I see people turning to the gods of this world, and the gods of people’s imagination. When I see people exalting Santa Clause as the god of Christmas, I am provoked to a godly jealousy. When I see people allow Christmas to become a time of financial burden, instead of a time of Spiritual blessing, I experience this jealousy. When I see people having no time or true devotion for the Christ, yet becoming excited over Christmas, I am grieved and experience godly jealousy. I would love to see people give sacrificial gifts to the furtherance of the gospel and not such sacrificial gifts to those who neither need them nor appreciate them. I’m dreaming of a Christ-centered Christmas.

A small boy was given explanation that his grandfather had gone to heaven.  He accompanied his family to the funeral home, and when he saw his grandfather’s body in the casket, he said, “So this is heaven!”  The funeral home isn’t heaven, but this earth isn’t heaven, either.  The fact that this earth is not heaven, is perhaps the best explanation as to why we are not exempt to problems.

I believe it was Rick Warren who said that life isn’t so much mountains and valleys,  as we tend to think, but is actually more like the two parallel rails of a railroad track, with both good and bad taking place at the same time.  There are always good things, and there are always things that aren’t so good.

Just last week, I talked to someone who said, “I have lost all faith in the goodness of God.”  This person had gone through a heart-breaking relationship problem.  What do we expect?  Do we expect no problems?  Are we to gauge God’s goodness by the level of our comfort?  If we have to have those answers spelled out to us, we would be too dumb to understand it, anyway!

There is a heaven, and God has revealed that it is a place that stands in stark contrast to this life.  When we are told that God will wipe every tear from eyes, the implication is that there are tears to be cried while we are here.  There is pain, sickness, sorrow, and crying here, because this isn’t heaven.  This is the funeral home!

Everybody feels the pressures of life, regardless of age, stage, or station in life. The short, biblical answer to the proper handling of it is found in 1 Peter 5:7, “Casting all your care upon Him, because He cares for you.” There are some common-sense intermediary steps we can, and should, take, but ultimately our ticket to living abundantly is going to be our ability to cast our cares on Jesus.

The most elementary step in being able to do this is to know Jesus in personal relationship, then committing ourselves to trust Him completely. It is important that it be a settled matter in our mind and heart that God is good, that He loves us, and that He will shoulder our burdens for us.

As to the common sense things that we need to do, we need to realize that we can’t be everything to everybody, and we can’t do everything that everybody might want us to do. In short, we are to make priority decisions by focusing on what God would have us to do. What would God have our number one priority to be? What should be second? Third? Once we learn this, we must focus on these things and not let other things, no matter how worthy they might seem, to detour us from our top priorities.

The other thing that I will mention here, is that we must seek God’s will for the decisions we make. A large portion of the pressure that comes upon us is a result of decisions that we have made on our own, or the decisions that we are trying to make on our own. Before Jesus called His disciples, we are told in Luke 6:12 that Jesus prayed all night. This was a big decision with far reaching effects, so He sought the will of the Father in an all night prayer meeting. There is a lesson there for us, also.

God does not intend for us to be so pressured that we get high blood pressure, and a host of other problems. He intends that we have peace that passes understanding and joy unspeakable and full of glory.

There are basically two kinds of churches in our modern-day world: the comfortable church and the great commission church. In the comfortable church, the people, and the organization, exist within a comfort zone in which they are not in any way threatened. in the great commission church, the number one priority is spreading the gospel of Christ no matter what the cost.

The majority of churches today are comfortable churches. They talk a great deal about the spread of the gospel, they do studies about it, they even give money toward getting it done, but they never really do themselves. In the comfort and safety of their four walls the gospel is proclaimed, but the society in which they exist is pretty much unchanged.

The great commission church is consumed with getting out the gospel, beginning in its own community. The life of those on the inside regularly intersets with those on the outside. Sadly, it is much more difficult to get those inside the church mobilized than it is to get those outside the church evangelized.