How Can Your Life Become God-Centered?

Image bearers of God

“One of the saddest statements I have heard a Christian woman say is that she did not feel that Jesus' example in the Gospels had anything to offer her,” writes Wendy Alsup in The Gospel Centered Woman . “Jesus was a man, and she was a woman. How could He relate to her? I recently read an excerpt from a book in which the female author spoke of finding her all-time greatest inspiration as a woman from the story of Ruth in Scripture, and I was similarly bothered by her statement. I am a woman. Jesus is a man. Does this disqualify me from looking to Him first for my identity and inspiration? Not according to Scripture.”

Image bearers of God

Godliness with contentment does not mean pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. If the phrase fills you with guilt, you are missing the entire point. The gospel does not obligate you to contentment. It equips you for contentment. That battle with your sin, the temptation to gossip, anger with your children, church conflict, failing marriages, suffering, death—the gospel equips you to do battle with sin and suffering with the very same power that raised Christ from the dead. You have a lavish spiritual bank account, and this is an integral piece of the good news of all Christ has accomplished for you. Devotion to God coupled with such confidence in His sufficient supply is great gain.

Image bearers of God

Grace is possibly the most often used but least understood word in Christian circles. I learned the acronym for grace, “God’s riches at Christ’s expense,” in Sunday school as a child. But I did not understand grace. I understood that I did not earn my salvation, but my response was to start trying to earn it from that point forward. If God was that good to me, then I needed to start being a better person so that I could pay Him back a bit, or so I thought. But Jesus in Luke 6 sets a different criteria altogether as evidence of our understanding of grace. Jesus says the evidence of our understanding of God’s grace toward us is our grace toward others.

Image bearers of God

Our identity is our sense of self. It is the thing that gives us continuity in how we interact with others despite changes in our circumstances. We often identify ourselves by lesser things than how God identifies us. Some of us identify ourselves by our career, our relationship status, or our children. I have been a middle school, high school, and college math teacher, jobs in which I found a great deal of personal fulfillment. Now, I am a wife and mother. On the side, I am an author. Depending on the season of life, I have looked to each role to feel good about myself, to identify myself positively. But those are just roles I steward for a season. They are not my ultimate identity. Even being the daughter of a family firmly rooted for generations in the low country of South Carolina does not ultimately define me. Jesus Christ, along with all His name invokes, defines me both here on earth and for eternity in heaven. He is my identity because I am in Him.