Taking God Seriously

Each year when Father’s Day rolls around, I find myself thinking about the legacy he left me—how the wisdom, counsel, and instruction he (and my mother) imparted in my earliest years have had an incredible influence on my life. So periodically on the blog over the next several weeks, I’d like to share some of these insights and principles that have helped me reap incredible blessings throughout my adult life.

 

I want to start with what for my dad was the bottom line of everything—take God seriously. 

 

My dad came to know Christ in his mid-20s, after years of rebellion, foolish choices, and broken relationships. From that point until the day he went home to be with the Lord twenty-eight years later, he never got over the wonder of what God had done for him. It never ceased to amaze him that God would have saved him and given him a whole new life. 

 

For him Christianity was not just a compartment of life, like school, a job, hobbies, and relationships. Christ was everything. He wasn’t a part of my dad’s life; He was his life.

 

My dad believed that a relationship with Christ is supposed to affect everything about our lives. It affects our reason for living—why we get up in the morning, why we exist. The whole goal and purpose of his life was to glorify God, to reflect positively on God, and to seek God and His kingdom and His righteousness above all things.

 

My dad felt he owed everything to the Lord. He knew he had no life apart from Christ, so he realized he couldn’t call anything his own—his time, his possessions, his influence, his family, his plans, his future, his life. It all belonged to the Lord.

 

He never could understand how people could be half-hearted or nominal Christians. That whole concept made no sense to him at all. To him, if you were a Christian, you were a new person. There simply was no reasonable option but to take God seriously. 

 

My dad’s life verse was Acts 20:24, where the apostle Paul said, “But life is worth nothing unless I use it for doing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus—the work of telling others the Good News about God’s mighty kindness and love” (TLB). 

 

To Art DeMoss that meant it’s not our business endeavors that matter. It’s not our friendships or hobbies or any other temporal thing. What matters is that we do what God has saved and called us to do—to make Christ known.

 

Paul says it a different way in Romans 11:36: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.” It’s all about Him. He is the center of our lives. 

 

I believe if we have any regret when we see Christ face-to-face, it will likely be this: that we did not take God more seriously. That we frittered our lives away with meaningless things, with things that didn’t have eternal value or significance, because Christ wasn’t at the core and the heart of our existence.

 

What about you? Do you take God seriously? As you consider this question, here are a few more to ask yourself: