Jan 31, 2022
What is real life? What does it mean to really live? How do we experience this life? Let's talk about that today.
Welcome back to the Follower of One Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Henry Sr. And I'm grateful to be here. I've struggled a little bit with COVID for the last several days, and I'm catching up in my podcast recordings and I wanted to talk about 1 Thessalonians chapter three, verse eight.
From the New American Standard, it says, "for now we really live, if you stand firm in the Lord."
I thought this was a fitting place to kind of restart my podcasting efforts. It's interesting how drained I felt when I was experiencing the symptoms of COVID. It was like a really bad cold. But I got to thinking about this because this passage, which is one that I like to come back to from time to time, challenges me a bit.
I don't know if you ever saw the movie Secondhand Lions, but there's a play on this phrase at the end of it.
"So they really lived?" "Yes. They really lived."
It's like we get to live two different lives. We have a temporal life, the one that's going to end. And we have this eternal life. The one that we're given. We were dead to it, but we're given that life when we trust Christ as our Savior. We re-enter eternal life. We become alive to God. And this real-life, this really living, becomes something that takes place on this plane, where we interact with the Holy Spirit and with Jesus and with God and with fellow believers.
This real-life is what we get to experience when we know that our friends are standing firm in the Lord when we're encouraged about the relationships that we have with fellow believers. It's a different level of life, a different kind of life. People who don't have that life don't understand. And part of our job is to live in such a way that they might see that life and want to take part in it.
That's part of the idea behind the Five Daily Activities for Follower of One. We want to challenge people by praying for them and appreciating them and serving them. And we also want to be able to challenge them by being able to explain the difference between this real life that we have that's eternal, and this temporal life that we have that will pass away.
Paul is actually celebrating the Thessalonians here. Timothy had brought a letter to Paul from the Thessalonians. And Paul is celebrating that. He's saying "We're glad to hear that you are standing firm in the Lord."
And therefore I'm drawing a parallel here. I'm going to challenge us to remember that our real life is growing in Jesus. It's standing firm in Jesus. Real-life is what we communicate and what we live when we can operate in our eternal life plane and not just on our temporal life plane.
Life is much more than what we eat or drink or even the experiences that we have by being a tourist or by going someplace or traveling. Those are all great things. And you may experience the blessing of God through nature or through friendship. But as we stand firm in the Lord, as we rely on our relationship with him, that's when we experience real life, the real-life that never ends.
Today, I want to challenge us as marketplace Christians. Let's live that real life. Let's be those real living people in and around our friends and in our workplaces. As we stand firm in the Lord, as we pray for others, and as we give away pieces of our life because we trust Jesus, we stand firm in him and we experience this real life.
I would like to encourage you to join us in this real life as well. We've created a community called FollowerOfOne.org. You can join us there. Go to https://FollowerOfOne.org and click on the community link and join us in the online community. And there you can take part in the next Marketplace Mission Trip. Thanks very much for living your faith and for making a difference with your faith. It matters. Everything you do as a follower of Jesus matters forever. Thanks very much.