Prepared to Thrive Not Just Rescued.

Imagine if you will with me, for a moment, that you are stranded on a desert island. What do you do first? Maybe food, water, shelter, the big three. Once you are alive, then you turn your attention to rescue a fire or message on the sand. But time goes by………… Have you seen Cast Away? How long do you keep up just surviving. Do you live with the bare minimum or do you build a nice hut and start preparing for better food?

In life we to often live like we are stranded on a desert island. I think there are few of us that would say we would give up the hope of being rescued and focus on making the best life on the island we can. Yet so many of us make it through life on just the bare minimum. It might be in our family, education, finances, marriage, or work but we don’t try to thrive we just get by, just make it through the next week, the next set of bills, the next school year. Did God design us to just get by?

Romans 8:35 &37 says “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.”

I don’t think it would be very loving of God to desire us to just get by yet many of us live in that life, we don’t strive for the best, we don’t seek to succeed, we just get by. This is most devastating and prevalent within our spiritual life.  We aren’t growing we aren’t learning, we aren’t studying, we just come to church and pray a little, and read a little, but we never break through much of any thing. But just like when you pay the minimum payments on your bills then you add more debt each week (the practice that got you there to begin with) you never get out, and the just getting by just makes it worse. The same thing in our spiritual lives we live the same lives that put us in need of a change and we don’t change anything, we just tinker around the edges.

So my challenges is stop tinkering around the edges of your life. Stop just getting by. Stop just living to get by. Get prepared to thrive not just be rescued.