It’s hard for me to remember life before Jesus. I remember turning to Him at a young age. I remember trusting in Him to forgive my sins, to keep me from dating the wrong boys, and to help me make major life decisions. But now that I’m in a fairly uneventful day-to-day routine, sometimes I forget to need Him. Forget to love Him. Forget Him.

Jerry Bridges writes, “Now, the sad fact is that many of us who are believers tend to live our daily lives with little or no thought of God. We may even read our Bibles and pray for a few minutes at the beginning of each day, but then we go out into the day’s activities and basically live as though God doesn’t exist. We seldom think of our dependence on God or our responsibility to him. We might go for hours with no thought of God at all.” Bridges calls this the sin of ungodliness and defines it as, “living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God.”

For Lent, many people give up something and try to fill up that empty space with Christ. They sacrifice caffeine, or chocolate, or TV, or Facebook, or gossip. This year what I need less of is myself. I need to be more aware of my own sinfulness, inadequacies, and weaknesses. I need to give up reliance on self and fill up with reliance on Christ.

40 Days of Depending on Jesus from Impact - sandrapeoples.com

What I want for the next 40 days (and beyond) is to become more aware of Jesus in my daily life.

I woke up this morning and looked for Him in the tomb, in the small corner of life I’ve pushed Him into. But He was not there. So I will search for Him and find Him where His early followers did—in the garden, at their meals, where they worked, walking down the road. He was with them everywhere and every minute. I want to remember He is with me too.

I want to glorify Him and not myself. I want to live through the power He gives, not my own. I want to love because He first loved us, and I want to remember what that loves feels like, looks like, acts like. I want to do things out of my comfort zone, praying for His guidance and strength. I want to sacrifice with Him as my example, and not compare myself to those around me. I want to depend on Him like I depend on His blessings of water and food.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Psalm 63:1

As Jerry Bridges writes about the fight against the sin of ungodliness, “Let us then seek to be as mindful of Him as He is of us.”

{Throughout Lent, I will be sharing updates here on the blog and on my Facebook page if you want to keep up.}

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