Living Life Like Everyone Else

I edited a book for Dr. Ed West, who wrote, “A Christian who is exhausted by living life like everyone else should repent and start over.”

Think about that.
Do you ever get exhausted by living your life like everyone else?

Maybe it’s always being busy, busy, busy.
Maybe it’s striving for achievement or happiness.
Maybe it’s trying to impress others or be an ideal somebody.
Maybe it’s buying and paying for things the world says you need.
Maybe it’s feeling that you have to do everything and can’t miss anything.
Living in these and other ways can indeed become exhausting.

The Lord speaks through the prophet Habakkuk something that is profoundly shocking when you think about it and let the meaning set in: “Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing?” (2:13, NIV).
Our hard work is “fuel for the fire”? Nations of people “exhaust themselves for nothing”? Really?

In God’s universal and eternal perspective, living your life like everyone else can be an individual expression of fuel for the fire and exhausting yourself for nothing.
Repenting and starting over becomes a great option—a liberating option.
Jesus calls, and by his Spirit enables, us to think and act differently—to be different. As the world gets crazier, being different increasingly becomes a wise option.

Habakkuk next prophesies that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). This could in principle be true now and will be in fact true in the Millennium.

For us here and now, whenever you or I find ourselves living like everyone else, I hope we feel deeply exhausted—as a wake-up call. And may we live differently as followers of Jesus—that the knowledge of his glory would be like the waters that cover the sea.
And it will be glorious.

Image: Gerd Altmann | Pixaby