How Your Attitude Determines Your Relationship with Jesus
In my last blog, How Changing Your Attitude Will Change Your Life, I talked about how our attitude plays a major role in our perspective on life. This applies to how we make the most of our everyday life as well as when we face trials.
However, it also applies to our relationship with Jesus.
Two Different Attitudes
Recently, I was thinking about how Jesus was treated by different people.
In John chapter six, Jesus was teaching to a large crowd. After He gave some amazing revelations about His identity and communion, many of His followers left Him because they were offended by His sayings.
The Bible says in John 6:66,
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
How sad.
They didn’t ask questions or even try to understand. They just took offense and left Him.
At the Last Supper, Jesus sat at the table with his twelve disciples. One of the twelve disciples, Judas Iscariot, leaves to betray Jesus.
Immediately after Judas left, Jesus started dropping so many pearls (deep revelations) about the Father, the Holy Spirit, Heaven, His identity and assignment and so much more. (see John 13-17)
I find it so interesting that He didn’t give these treasures to the large crowd. He didn’t give them to the traitors.
Instead, He only gave them to His faithful friends.
The Wrong Attitude
The wrong attitudes are:
Offense
Betrayal
Apathy
The Right Attitude
The right attitudes are:
Loyalty
Hunger for Him
Pursuing Him alone, not His gifts
Just like we can choose to steward our current season for maximum Kingdom impact to those around us, we can choose to optimize our circumstances in order to know Him deeper.
If we’re apathetic or if we allow trials to push us away from Him, then we’ll stay stuck in the same place.
But if we continually practice an attitude of increasing desire to know Him deeper, then we will receive the deeper revelations of who He is.
We will find the pearls, the hidden treasures that only the faithful and hungry have access to.
There’s a price for the pearls, but it’s more than worth it.
The Invitation
I think a lot of times we stop too soon in developing our relationship with Jesus.
Maybe we don’t get offended like the large crowd in John 6, but we might feel like we’ve hit a wall in our relationship with Jesus.
We feel like we don’t know where to go from here. We feel like we don’t know if there’s more with Him.
But what if that wall is actually a door, an invitation to go deeper with Him?
He only gave the deeper revelations to those who stayed with Him, to those who loved Him and wanted more.
Don’t give up, because there’s always more to discover in your relationship with the Lord. There are no limits!
He is faithful to reward our hunger for Him.
I’m so thankful I continued pursuing Jesus through intense spiritual warfare where the enemy wanted to destroy me and my relationship with Him. I wouldn’t have such a passion and hunger to know Him deeper had I not gone through those trials.
Everyday there is an invitation for us to seek the Lord, to get to know Him better. We are the ones who determine how close we will be to Him. He has given us that choice.
James 4:8