BECOMING ALL THAT HE WANTS ME TO BE
As a personal trainer my training motto was, “Be the best you can be.” l used it in all my advertising, it was the daily mantra of my clients. They were the words l would remind my clients whilst l was taking them through grueling training routines, which stretched them to their limits. They were the words they needed to fall back on when looking at the chocolate cake and snacks that beckoned them, and when the alarm went off at 5am for our training sessions.
When you first start out with a trainer, it starts out hard because your body is unaccustomed to the change in routine, diet modifications, and excercise. But after a while you get used to it, if you can endure the first few weeks, and then you enter the ‘comfort zone.’ That’s the ‘danger zone.’ The client becomes comfortable with the trainer, and prefers a good chat, rather than a pain filled session of excercise, this is where they start to sneak those comfort foods, ‘because they’ve earned them,’ where they don’t show up to all the sessions because, whilst they’re not where they want to be, they’re happy to settle for what they have. But it is at this point that trainer needs to re-fire the client, because there is so much more, and if they stop here, the reality is, they will more than likely, end up where they started and perhaps be worse off.
When we first come to the LORD, we are enthusiastic, we want to devour all the books we can, we read the Bible everyday, we eliminate the aspects of our lives that clash with God’s world, and we are all on fire. We see the changes in our lives, others see the changes in our lives, we’re excited and hungry for more. Then after a time we hit the ‘comfort zone’ where we are comfortable in our relationship with Christ, and where He has brought us from, our time spent in the Word drops off, the things that we once eliminated out of our lives start to sneak back in, and we dismiss it all with some rational excuse.. which usually has ‘grace’ attached to it, or ‘God understands.’
The beauty of our trainer Jesus, is that there are no limits to what He wants us to experience in our relationship with Him. Our thoughts of what can be, fall far below what He wants for us and what He can do in us and through us. When our talk time with GOD drops off, when our passion to be in the Word becomes diminished, when Church becomes a burden, when we become numb to sin, we are in the ‘danger zone’ which comes as a result of lingering in the ‘comfort zone.’
It is time to re-fire, it is time to start the talk with God again, it is time to read the Word again, it is time to come to Church and be with people who are passionate for God and let it rub off on us, it is time to get vicious about sin in our lives.
In the ‘comfort zone’ we will never know what it means to become all that He wants us to be, we need to come back to our first love memory, to remember the excitement of discovering about Him, we need to remember the feeling when He spoke to us as, we read His Word, we need to remember from where He brought us and re-kindle the flame.
John 10:10 tells us that Jesus came to give us ‘abundant life,’ not merely heavenly life, but abundant life now, a life of meaning, a life of fulfilment as we allow our trainer to lead us and to guide us into the life that He has for us.
