How Big Is Your Life?

Paul Tripp wraps up his excellent book, A Quest For More: Living For Something Bigger Than You with this - I hope it encourages you to wrestle with the realities of the life we live between two kingdoms.

What kingdom shapes your decisions and sets your schedule? Have you shrunk your life to the size of your life, or have you expanded everything you are doing to the size of God's kingdom? These final questions are designed to help you accurately evaluate your lifestyle, and my hope is that they will produce in you a quest for more.

1. Are you doing the concrete things in your life regularly because you are living for something bigger than your own personal definition of happiness?
2. Do you live aware of the deceptive nature of the kingdom of self (remember, it really is a costume kingdom), regularly examining your motives and how you are investing your time and energy?
3. Are you living that form-and-freedom jazz life that God has called you to? Are you committed to staying within the boundaries of what he has written, yet enjoying the freedom to improvise in the situations and relationships where he has placed you?
4. Are you dissatisfied with the broken world that you live and work in every day? And do you work for its restoration to wholeness in any way you can?
5. Have you allowed yourself to be so busy with work on earth that you do not have time to long for heaven? Or is everything you do done with one eye on the present and one eye on eternity? Are you able to deal with the pain and disappointment of today because you really have embraced the promise of a day when this world and everything in it will be made completely new?
6. Do you hold loosely to your plans, your schedule, your agenda, your expectations? Are you always looking for way to be part of what God is doing wherever you are, no matter how mundane the moment is?
7. Do you live with a deep appreciation for the Lord Jesus Christ and the gift of grace that has fundamentally changed you and the course of your life? Do you work to keep your love and worship of him fresh and new? Do you live with a sense of humble privilege that not only have you been chosen to be a citizen of his kingdom, but his ambassador as well?

We were never made or remade to live for ourselves. We were created for transcendence. The borders of our lives were always meant to be way bigger than the borders of our lives. When we live this way, by his grace, we not only become part of the most important work in the universe, but we are given back to our humanity.