The reality is that the Christian life is kind of like a wheel. The diagram posted below has always been extremely helpful for me in assessing where I am at in my Christian walk.
You see, there are 3 main parts of the wheel below.
The first, and most important, part of the wheel is the hub. Jesus Christ (Yahshua) must be the center of our lives or we will quickly find ourselves in a mess. Ask any strong Christian what has happened when they have drifted away from the Lord. Inevitably their lives started going downhill and things started getting out of control. The same thing would happen quickly to any wheel if you took away the center of that wheel.
Galatians 2:20 says this:
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
Once we have Christ as the center of our lives, then we can focus on getting the vertical spoke and the horizontal spoke working correctly.
You see, the Christian life is about our relationship with God and our relationships with others.
In Matthew 22, Jesus (Yahshua) summed this up perfectly when he was responding to a question about which commandment is the greatest:
Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
Do you see what Jesus (Yahshua) is saying here?
He is telling us that we must love the Lord with everything that we have, and we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
In fact, if you look at the 10 Commandments, the first 4 deal with our relationship with God, and the last six deal with our relationship with others.
That is one of the reasons why I love this wheel diagram so much.
The vertical spoke is all about our relationship with God. In order to have a healthy relationship with God, we need to be talking to God through prayer (and fasting) and we need to be letting God speak to us through His Word.
The horizontal spoke is about our relationship with others. We need to be in regular fellowship with our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and we need to be sharing the love and truth of God with the world through our evangelism.
If any of these areas are a weak point for you, the good news is that if you work on them you can strengthen your walk with the Lord.
I would encourage all of you to meditate a bit on this diagram and to evaluate where you are at in each area and where you can make improvements in your own Christian life:
2 comments:
Great post! I love the breakdown. It makes this very easy to follow..particularly for someone who is perhaps newly come to Christ.
I am very glad that you were blessed by it.
Someone once blessed me with this diagram and now I am "paying it forward".
Post a Comment