Are You "Living Your Best Life?"

I've been hearing the phrase "they are living their best life" a lot lately. Most of the time, when I hear people say this about others or themselves, I wonder if this is actually true about that person. What we need to examine is: what does it mean to live your best life, and can we truly say that we are living our best lives today? I think this phrase can get attached to how we feel about the way we are living. Recently, I have been going through a study created by The Daily Grace Co. about emotions, our hearts, and how the two fit together. The study does a beautiful job of using the Bible to show us the true realities of our emotions and the way God designed them to operate. As I have been doing this study, I have realized a few truths that I think everyone needs to be aware of.

• Our emotions were designed to be good. God created man wholly good, in his image--this includes our emotions. Genesis 1:26-28

• Because of sin, our emotions get twisted. No longer does our heart gravitate towards good, godly things on its own. Mark 7:21-23; Genesis 3:1-7

• Jeremiah 17:9

"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it?"

Without Christ, our hearts wander in the wrong ways and we are easily deceived; we are desperately sick. Something I want to point out about this truth is that our emotions can play into the deception. An example of this is that someone might be genuinely feeling happy, comforted, and excited but be fully indulging in sin that separates them from God. "The heart is deceitful..." Jer. 17:9 We cannot, and must not, live solely based on the way we feel. Our flesh is prone to wander away from the one true holy God, and the devil loves to help our hearts do these things so that God will not be honored, and we will be destroyed. In John 10:10, Jesus tells us, "The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." In this verse, the thief is Satan, the devil, the evil one. One of Satan’s favorite ways to steal, kill, and destroy is through the act of deception. Little by little, compromise by compromise, the devil deceives us into believing that gratifying the desires of our flesh is the way to live. Little by little, he deceives us into thinking that sinfulness and doing what our flesh wants will always make us happy, always be exciting, always feel fulfilling. The scary thing about this deception is that when we begin to be deceived, when we compromise what God’s Word commands us to do, we eventually find ourselves in a place of darkness that we never intended to be in. The other scary part about it is that sin has consequences. We begin to wonder how we got to such a frightening place emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually.I think part of the deception we are faced with emotionally is that we think if we are not feeling "good" emotions that something is not right for us in the current life we are living. Culture validates this thought. How often does the culture encourage us to do what makes us feel good, do what is best for us, do what will make us a better person? Have we come to believe that emotions that feel good are the only ones that produce a life worth living? Are you being deceived? Are you actively living in and pursuing sin?

The first step to living your best life is most definitely finding salvation in Jesus and nothing else. It is absolutely impossible to live life as intended without salvation from our sin. Jesus also says in John 10:10 that he came to give us life abundantly. Romans 3:23-24 says, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ." This basically says we have all done wrong, and can never do anything good enough to amount to or face God’s glory. God cannot be near sin because he is such a good God. Since Jesus came to the earth, lived a perfect life of no sin, died on the cross, taking on the sin of the world, and then rose again 3 days later, defeating death, we can be saved through him. John 3:16 says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." Romans 5:8 says, "But God showed his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." The Bible tells us that when we believe in what Jesus did for us, confess our sin, and begin to follow Jesus, he will give us a helper. This helper is the Holy Spirit. There is no way to truly experience our best lives without salvation, because without salvation, we are separated from God forever due to sin. To live our best lives as humans, we have to first find salvation in Christ.

The second step to living your best life is to use the Bible and the Holy Spirit as a guide and our emotions as a gauge as we go through each day. This is because, "Sometimes we do not understand why we feel the way we do. We could be feeling a mixture of emotions, or our emotions could be clouding our propensity to see them for what they truly are. " -GDC Like I said, someone can be experiencing positive emotions but be indulging in sin. In the same way, someone could be feeling negative emotions, but they are warning signs to make a change in their life. This is the reason emotions should be used as a gauge, not a guide. When we let our emotions guide us, it can get so confusing! "Our aim in understanding our emotions must be to remain faithful to what God tells us to be true... Therefore, may our best efforts in understanding our emotions be a pursuit of the scriptures to transform our hearts and minds to love and worship God even through our misunderstandings." -DGC I love this because most times in life we can’t grasp why we are having certain feelings and sometimes we have a hard time understanding God’s word. Sometimes we have sin in our lives, and we need God to show us so that we can repent. The hopeful part is that God can give us understanding and so much more than that. We just have to seek and trust him. 1 John 3:20 says, "God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything." "Entrusting our motives to God, we can confidently depend on him to lead us in the way which is higher than ours."-DGC

The third step in living your best life is obedience. We have to obey God’s word and his leading in order to dwell in what he has for us (and what he has for us is so rich, beautiful, and good!).

I really wanted to write this blog because I think sometimes Christians find themselves flowing in culture and sin but also claiming Christ. Sometimes Christians listen to how they feel rather than seeking and obeying the God who they claim to serve. We have to know God through salvation, read and use the Bible and prayer as a guide and our emotions as a gauge, and obey God. The only way to experience truly living our best lives is to do just that. No matter how far you feel from living this way, God will always meet you right where you are. Nothing is too much for him to handle. Have hope. God is faithful. He loves you and truly wants you to live your best life in his perfect will for you.

So, are you living your best life?