Sold Out

What does it mean to be sold out for God? What does it look like? How do you we move from being sold out in our minds to being sold out in reality, because that seems to me like the trickiest part. The idea of giving everything up for God is an attractive one. If you really love Him and believe what He has for you is better than anything you could possible bring to fruition for yourself, then of course I’d want to be sold out for Him. I want what is absolutely the best for me, I want to live a life better than anything my pretty in depth imagination could even so much as conjure up.

But if that is true, why do I find myself some what struggling with putting that desire into action. The complicated thing is God is capable of that which you can’t even imagine, and if you can’t imagine it’s pretty hard to bank on it. We have a tendency to want to control things in our lives and leaning completely on God is relinquishing all control.

People often complain about backseat drivers. But a failure to lean completely on God is the biggest example of backseat driving. You have decided to put Jesus at the helm, but at every point you a whipping out google maps to tell Him the best route to take, or complaining that your late so can He put His foot on the gas.

The most anxious backseat driving is when your location is a surprise only the drivers knows, like when God told Abraham to leave his father and his mother and go to a land He will show him. Abraham was on a journey with no location set out on the map and that is where so many of us are, we feel like we are following blindly,, but that is the premise of trust. Even when you’re not sure, because you trust your driver, you follow.

This walk with God requires becoming sold out. The bible constantly reminds us that Spirit and the flesh can not co-exist, the flesh hates everything the Spirit loves and vice-versa, so you will inevitably be called to a place where you have to choose one.

“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

- Matthew 6:24

The word mammon comes from the greek word mammōnas which really means worldly possessions. And Jesus is really saying that there is no such thing as joint first place. Something always means more the questions is it that thing, Me or is it your earthly riches. Because one day something will happen and you’ll need to choose between Me or mammon and which one will you choose.

“For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.”

- Galatians 1:10

Through this life God will be testing the posture of your heart to see if you are choosing to do what pleases man or do what please Him (1 Thessalonians 2:4). To be sold out for God is to trust Him outright, the problem is so often we only come running to God when we have exhausted all other options. When nothing else worked so we ran to Him out of desperation. God doesn’t want that to be the reason, He wants us to come to a place where we seek Him first. Where we don’t lean on our own strength or riches at every stage and only come to Him when out riches fail us. Because the problem with that is what sometimes looks like our riches coming through for us is really hurting us but we dont see it.

“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked”

- Revelation 3:15-17

You say to yourself you are rich but don’t realise you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked, God needs us to see that leaning on your own wealth will only end in death, The wages of sin is death.

“Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy.”

- 1 Timothy 6:17

The Bible warns us not to lean on our own understanding, not to depend on what we see and know because the ways of man are not the ways of God.

“There is a way that seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death.”

- Proverbs 14:12

People say the road to hell is paved in good intentions. The truth is it is what thing to be good it is another to be God led. And God led is our goal. What is good to a man is not the same as God. In order to walk with God our standards have to change. We cannot pick areas by which we commit to God and keep other areas to our own choosing.

“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”

- James 4:4

“(for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name isJealous, is a jealous God)”

- Exodus 34:14

I wouldn’t ask you if you are truly sold out for God, because if we take a long hard look we’d know the answer is most probably no, not completely, at least it is for me. Every day we need to kill more of our flesh so we can get closer and closer to truly being sold out for God, and growing in the full stature of Christ, which is really the goal.

“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head, Christ”

- Ephesians 4:11-15