And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way. (Colossians 1:10a, NIV)
You don’t have to be a churchgoer to be familiar with the expression, “Sunday best.” Though most churches welcome casual dress these days, you’ll still find those who pay special attention to their choices in church clothes out of traditional respect for God.
We golfers should understand this, for we often talk of respect for the game. You may not think of this in terms of attire, but Arnold Palmer did. He once said, “I’m an advocate of the unwrinkled straight collar shirt, creased pants, shined shoes. All of those things are, I think, key to dressing with an emphasis on neatness. Golf is about precision.” We might go so far as to say that a golfer who dresses with such attention to detail is worthy of the game.
We need to review how Christ lived and how he ignites us to live.This line of thinking gets us to considering our passage today and wondering about lives worthy of the Lord. We know that our sin makes us unworthy of salvation, and that only the grace of God rendered in the death and resurrection of Jesus gives us access to eternity with him. But we cannot escape this prayer of Paul and his fellow ministers: “May you live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way.”
So let’s first make sure that our ducks, as they say, are lined up. We cannot, apart from Christ, please God. We can neither placate his wrath nor wash away our sins. Only he can do this, which he has done through his Son. If we believe this, we are in Christ. And once we are in Christ, we can please God by the way we live our lives.
Practically speaking, our lives consist of three things: our thoughts, our words, and our actions. When we align these three with the ways of the Lord, we can be said to be living a life worthy of him. But be careful. We’re not talking about the traditions of men. “Sunday best,” for example, is a fine idea but not a directive of God found in Scripture. Instead, we need to review how Christ lived and how he ignites us to live. The way we do this is to keep reading the Scriptures. Here we see what God would have us do to please him. When we move the words off the page into our hearts, we begin to think, talk, and act as Jesus did.
Worthy living is “Christian living”—that is, living in the pattern of Christ.
—
Jeff Hopper
November 16, 2018
Copyright 2018 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
OTHER DEVOTIONS IN THIS SERIES
Praying for Better 1: Intentionality
Praying for Better 2: Knowledge
Praying for Better 4: Bearing Fruit
Praying for Better 5: Growing in the Knowledge of God
Praying for Better 6: Power
Praying for Better 7: Joy
Praying for Better 8: Our Motivation