Victory in Jesus!

I found an interesting book at the local used clothing store recently. It’s by a very popular contemporary Christian author who used the pages to inform her readers how to live victorious lives.

It is a good read, but I tell you our Christian bookstores are overflowing with books of the same nature.  We all want to live victorious, joyful lives, and we all want new and enlightening answers that will give us those results.

For me there is something exhilarating about finding THE book at the local book store, paying for it, going home, and sitting down with a cup of coffee to start the journey to victorious living. 

While reading the book progress is made and, for a short time, after the book is done.  Then the search begins for the next book that will give me some more new and enlightening answers to jump start my journey to victorious living. 

But after many books read, I now have the perfect synopsis for every “how to live in freedom” book out there. (I also have the perfect centerfold photo idea for every women’s exercise magazine: a close-up of a push lawnmower sitting on about five acres of lawn stretching out into the horizon behind it.  Just thought I’d throw that in here.)

Anyway, here goes: You take a piece of paper and you write these phrases across the top:

Read and meditate the Scriptures

Pray every day

Go to church at least once a week

Say, do, and think only what would please God

And then along the side of the page you list the days of the week so that you can check each item off each day as you do them.

Now I’m not saying you literally have to do this, but I am saying that this is the basic prescription for a victorious, joyful life.  We don’t need to read long, albeit interesting, books to achieve it, we need to simply do what we already know we need to do. 

“But my problems are so complicated, this simple approach won’t do,” you might say. The Lord says, Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all the rest will be taken care of. 

When I let go of the complicated mess I have been trying to untangle and return to the simple to-do list above, the mess starts to get untangled because God is doing the untangling. 

Living a victorious life does not mean living a life of leisure and a life free of problems, it means having the strength to keep our eyes fixed on what is eternal while all else rages around us. That is victory!