Jesus Over Everything: Uncomplicating the Daily Struggle to Put Jesus First

by Lisa Whittle

I’m not proud now. I’m embarrassed. For months, God had been readying my heart for Shari’s passing comment to be my moment of cataclysmic conviction. It was not about the amount of money I spent on clothes or items for my home. It wasn’t about if I technically could afford them or if I bought things without going into debt. It was about what I had chosen over God sometimes to numb myself or give myself a high when I was sad or happy or bored. It was about what had become for me a “deadly over”—overindulging my visual wants and cravings and grossly making my life more complicated as a result. My having so many clothes that I didn’t even know what to wear was the small symptom, but the big symptom was the angst, that nagging feeling of being out of control, which led to the cycle of guilt, regret, and justification when shopping. If I’d been honest with myself in so many of the moments I’d hid behind my swiped debit card, Jesus could have helped me. It was in that moment, in my closet with Shari, that I realized how I’d been putting myself over Jesus, even with the silly shopping I usually thought nothing of.

The truth is, I can’t choose my way over Jesus’ way anymore because I can’t afford the scars. A Jesus-over-everything lifestyle is a Jesus-take-over-me-and-my-lifestyle so I don’t ruin my one precious life.

When we start to think we might just want to take another crack at it and see how it goes, Jesus first. Right now, • look at all Jesus has done for you. • remember who He is. • decide if that is worth making Him number one.

A lot of us are chronic overexplainers. We feel our first stab at words wasn’t good. What we are saying doesn’t feel adequate. We may be trying to couch a hard truth that needs to be said, so we say it . . . and then say it again, and again, and maybe again, if we feel it necessary.

That “no is a complete sentence.” A big and hard-fought amen to that.

Work is a precious, good thing, and we’ve often abused it. I’m not sure we even know how to do it balanced anymore because it’s become such a part of our culture to burn the candle at both ends. I asked my friend Alli not long ago if there was a way to know if you work too much because, as you already know from reading, I struggle with that myself. Hard workers can become workaholics, content creators can become discontented, and influencers can become influenced by the need to produce before we know it, so Alli’s wisdom was important: “When it becomes about you trying to earn worth through your work, you know it’s gone too far.” She added, “When the people around you that love you start telling you it’s too much, it’s too much.” Such simple but solid and powerful litmus tests to go by.

Most of all I wish I had understood what scholar N. T. Wright said: “The authenticity that really matters is living in accordance with the genuine human being God is calling you to become.”3 I didn’t know how to be me because I misunderstood the process of becoming. Too often the unfinished us is blind to what the Spirit-shaped us can be over time. Lies have felt true, damning, and permanent. We aren’t weak for falling for them. We are human. But we need to put the truth of Jesus over them now.

I don’t want you to go on believing any untrue things, like I have, so let me say it to you: real is the best pretty because it

doesn’t ask you to lie. Besides the fact that Jesus created us to be the real us, things get complicated when we try to live our life making it all look pretty; it’s exhausting and discouraging to the rest of us who need someone, like Luke, to be real—about how hard the cancer is—about how adoptions aren’t all roses even though we adore those...

It is always the love that calms the most afraid, draws in the skeptics, brings back the prodigals, and changes the hardest hearts. Judgment can never do that.

I won’t spend even a paragraph of this book trying to convince you not to judge. If we don’t understand why love is better than judgment, five thousand words won’t convince us. That’s a heart matter no writer can solve.

The better use of this conversation is to talk about why we turn to such a dead-end relationship option when we know, cognitively, it will never work and it complicates our lives by having us fulfill a role of decision-making that we are not capable of fulfilling.

We judge when we’re afraid.

We justify judgment with our Bible.

This is the worst misuse of the Word, but I dare say we’ve all done it a time or two.

It’s true that Jesus did say we can draw conclusions from the fruit we see (vv. 15–20), but putting ourselves in the judge’s seat reserved for God is not a wise plan.

We judge because we recognize in others what we don’t like in ourselves.

Love is safe, and love is also strong. It is as easy a choice and as disciplined as an ongoing matter of prayer to be able to live out.

We may think loving someone is about them. But, ultimately, it’s about Him.

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN HATE

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN PASSIVITY

It’s in our nature to self-preserve. But when we love like Jesus, when we choose the Jesus-over-everything life, we move past our own self-interest. It is not possible within our flesh, but with Him, it is.

Self-preservation is at odds with the Jesus-over-everything life. It is as my friend, author Sharon Hodde Miller said to me: when we want people to like us and thereby continue on in our passivity, we “set them up to continue on in error.” (A request to my friends: please love me enough that you don’t keep letting me make some bonehead mistake if you see that’s the way I’m headed.) This mind-set shift may also take a bit of retraining. Self-interest over love is a long-held reality for most of us. It won’t die easily, so don’t give up.

The gospel, on the other hand, promotes accountability and unified community. Uniformity isn’t love. Unity comes through humility, not in morphing to all look and sound the same.

sense: loving ourselves too much has gotten a whole lot of us in trouble. It got Eve in trouble, too, and every person since. I’m not talking about indulgence, though, just as I’m not talking about going too far the other way and not loving yourself at all and treating yourself unkindly. That’s what people like me, who can be too strict with themselves,

THE PROBLEM WITH WESTERN CHRISTIANS IS NOT THAT THEY AREN’T WHERE THEY SHOULD BE BUT THAT THEY AREN’T WHAT THEY SHOULD BE WHERE THEY ARE. —OS GUINNESS, THE CALL

Holiness over freedom is a daily choice (that you already make, by the way) for or against divine submission. It is also a choice not to let your freedoms overpower you in their subtle governing that can eventually turn to a radical takeover of your life. Adamant author and Bible teacher Lisa Bevere said it best: you will never have authority over something you are entertained by.1 And therein lies the reason many of us walk around feeling weak and defeated many days.

Focus on, as Os Guinness put it, “not . . . where [you] should be but . . . what [you] should be where you are.”2 The “where” tends to fall in place after that.

Some great questions to ask Jesus as you dive into this chapter are these: 1. What freedom(s) am I enjoying more than Your Word? 2. What is distracting me from living all in with You? 3. What am I resisting letting go of by way of justification that I sense You speaking to me about?

I’m faced with things I can do but am not sure help me in my holiness pursuit: 1. Is this a Jesus-first choice or a me-first choice? 2. Will this choice help me become more like Christ?

2. Refrain from doing anything that takes you back or keeps you mentally in a sinful state of mind.

Holiness over freedom is what this chapter is about, not personal habits or preferences.

Freedom from something is a breaking away, and in the sense that we are free from legalism, this is true. (“So it is clear that no one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say, ‘It is through faith that a righteous person has life.’ This way of faith is very different from the way of law, which says, ‘It is through obeying the law that a person has life’” Galatians 3:11–12.) This freedom is the divorcing of an unhealthy spiritual mind-set where judgment and shame reign, and that’s not of God.

But the holiness-over-freedom lifestyle we are talking about that leads us into a Jesus-over-everything life is not a freedom from legalism.

It’s a good and sober reminder that God isn’t playing when it comes to holiness. That just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. It’s more than just picking between our liberties and our holiness—in this choice we ought to have shoes off, trembling as we walk on the holy ground. Israel had the liberty to choose either freedom or holiness, and they chose freedom.

Holiness is about not contaminating the purity of our relationship with the Lord.

The way to remedy a massive downfall of our own is to choose the opposite way, the Jesus-over-everything way of service in daily doses.

Kingdom importance is where this issue of service and spotlight often breaks down. When it comes to our purpose in life, a lot of us want to serve God, but we go on usability symptoms and stop there. Usability symptoms—what appears to be favor, success, or importance based on levels of human measurement—cause us to go or stop and determine much of how we view our viability.

We know such things, will agree to them, yet in our flesh we continue to struggle for the significance we mistakenly believe is in the something big. How many times do we have to read the story of the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17), who was used by God to keep Elijah from starving during a famine—and, because of her obedience, keep herself and her son from starving too—to believe that service will often be a God miracle

resulting from crumbs? God could have chosen any fantastic method by which to feed Elijah, but He sent him to a quiet, out-of-the-way home, to a widow with an open heart. There’s not one of us who can’t be that widow. That’s good news for those of us who don’t have much that seems exciting going on right now.

LIE #2: GOD FAVORS PEOPLE IN THE SPOTLIGHT.

We want to be a part of what’s working, not what’s not, and numbers are the way we gauge that. But that measurement is frequently antibiblical. The story of the loaves and fishes, the parable of the talents,

the widow’s mite, even the number of disciples Jesus had all surrounded miracles of the few or small.

In the kingdom of God success is simply doing exactly what God wants. The spotlight might seem more important, but it changes nothing about what you and God can do. He and a widow teamed to keep a servant of God alive. There was no crowd or stage involved in that. No one put it on social media. Nothing stops the power of God and your yes.

Serving God builds character. We are a society of people in desperate need of ways to build back our character.

3. Serving keeps us from the self-destruction of self.

Service is not about what we can gain, but what we lose in us for our soul’s sake—selfishness, pride, lust for power—and what we give to the kingdom to contribute to God’s great plan. Serve, and don’t worry about elevation. It is a powerful Jesus-first offering.

(95 percent of human resource leaders say that burnout is sabotaging workplace retention3) because we are now burning out over things that are supposed to be fun hobbies, like Instagram and Facebook—all because getting attention has become another job.

leadership giftings. I’ve personally seen organizations overlook using capable young leaders because they were misdiagnosed as power-hungry when, in fact, they were simply passionate to use their God-given gifts. As mature believers, we are responsible to be wise in this, give careful consideration, and not assume or write off someone at the first sign of charisma.

Your location and situation are bound to change many times in your service to God through the years. You’ll move. You’ll be in a different season of life. Your new house will take you to a different part of the city. Your new job will have you interacting with new folks, and your church will have a fresh emphasis and ministries to match.