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

by Lisa Whittle

We don’t always make it easy for people to love us, yet we aren’t exempt from it when someone makes it hard on us. Jesus modeled the choice to love without the loved party being deserving, a concept most disagreeable with our flesh.

Love is stronger than fear, betrayal, anger, resentment, doubt, disappointment, and, yes, judgment because we chose God and God is love—the ultimate love. It’s ours if we want it, choose it, and pray to live it, every day. When someone is unlovable and we love that person anyway, we are shadowing God. This is what being a Jesus follower means.

love denies self-interest even if it costs us. Love is not being passive so we can gather likes and cheers. It is loving people enough to risk losing popularity. It is loving like Jesus, which means we risk misunderstanding and even judgment coming our way and learn to embrace it for the greater good of the gospel. We can be popular, or we can be His. Self-preservation is at odds with the Jesus-over-everything life.

We are so afraid not to offend; we don’t want to say anything, and we don’t know how to do it without bringing far more flesh than Jesus into it because (brace yourself for an ouch) we have a lazy relationship with the Holy Spirit. At the core of it all is self-interest. We often do not get involved, not because we care about honoring others’ independence but because we care about preserving ourselves.

Self-love for me, at this point, is acceptance and confidence in my own God-given DNA and giftings. I’ve garnered a great deal of joy since I’ve been praying for that. If you don’t like the term self-love, then don’t use it, but remember that Jesus does want us to love ourselves because He wants us to love all of His creation, which includes you, so it is not sinful to do so.

Turns out that, for most of us, choosing love over judgment needs to start in the mirror.

Don’t let the lies in your head become your truth. It’s not about you being enough (you aren’t). It’s about you being loved enough (you are). Be driven from the place of perfect love versus a perfect life that your best friend, Jesus, offers you, every day. You have no right to withhold that love from yourself on your way to extending it to others.

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

The first question I would ask you to consider is, How fun is your life, really, with you running the show, and how complicated has it gotten? The next question I would ask is, Do you believe Jesus is for you and has your best interests in mind? If the answer to that is yes, then you must believe that His command for holiness was given with a motivation of love, which can be trusted.

you will never have authority over something you are entertained by.1

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?

Many of us are becoming enslaved by our own freedoms—where we go, what we watch, how we spend our money—choosing complacency and financial security over calling, binge-watching over exercising, relationship-building over study. You know the list. You could add a few things to it.

anytime I have made a choice to be holy over free, Jesus has lavished me with a greater measure of freedom than I could ever otherwise know.

And to be holy, we have to be willing to get rid of anything, even things that our freedom allows, that stands in between us and God.

I ask myself these questions when 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?

1. Choose sobriety from anything that you use to escape reality or to numb yourself. 2. Refrain from doing anything that takes you back or keeps you mentally in a sinful state of mind. 3. Refuse to participate in anything that goes against the Word. 4. Give up anything that takes time away from a pursuit of holy living. 5. Don’t settle for anything that mimics or manufactures true joy and fulfillment from Jesus.

You do what Jesus tells you to do and don’t make excuses for it.

Just remember as you read that holiness is about sacrificial devotion resulting in consecration to God, and just because a freedom is allowed doesn’t mean it will make us more like Jesus, which is the point here.

“Have integrity, even when it costs you something else,” “When you feel Me messing with you, let Me,” and “Say no to things your freedom allows but at the end of the day won’t make you more holy.”

Our freedom is a gift, but it will allow for things without the conscience and heart to determine their value or detriment. It will give us more leeway than we need. So, it is still up to us to use this gift in the way God intends, and it is to be enjoyed under the covering of our priority of consecration.

The irony of the Christian faith is that we live a humanly free-will, free-choice life. And yet we are called to simultaneously live a spiritual life of complete dependence.

It’s important to understand these things about freedom so we don’t abuse or misuse it as we tend to do with other Christian cornerstones, like grace. Our freedom is not an umbrella that covers all behavior, good or bad. It is not to be the card we play so we don’t have to own our choices.

The freedom of the flesh will be governed by you and will result in a predominantly self-run life. The freedom of the Spirit will be governed by God and will ultimately be a choice for holiness.

Perhaps nothing brings more complication than the chaos our own free choices can bring us.

You never miss the things that steal the abundant life out from under you when you are eating out of the Hand of Abundance.

As long as we make this about what we can do, we will forget about what God truly wants and the life goal of honoring Him. With a self-serving liberty mind-set, over time, we will lose our compass and heart. We can do a lot of things. Our freedom will allow it. But at the end of the day, it will take our life out from under us.

Denial of freedom, in cases where flesh would win over spirit, is caring enough about the soul and about Jesus that we deny things that won’t benefit our relationships with Him even though our freedom may allow for them. Soon we won’t want things that don’t digest into greater holiness. Our taste for them will diminish and possibly go away.

Daily survival for us in modern times increasingly requires denial of real life. Yet Jesus does not need additions. His real life is good enough. We constantly feel like something is missing in our relationship with Jesus, and I propose that something is not at all a thing but an us. We are missing. We are over somewhere else, trying to get high off some other thrill to keep us going in life. God is in the same place He’s always been, waiting on us to come back and settle down to get some heart work done.

When I reveal something to you that comes between us, do you pursue getting rid of it, or do you justify keeping it for as long as possible?

The issue is how we’ve become a Christian culture no longer shocked by our own casual acceptance of the world’s ideas.

If your life feels complicated right now, ask yourself (1) if you’ve chosen freedom over holiness (remember: just because you can doesn’t mean you should) and (2) if you’re trying to hold on to both worlds and love Jesus but do something else apart from Him a little bit too. Compromise leads to complication.

Because God uses the service of people to inspire us for the long term in ways the self in us never can.

Remember: Everything in the kingdom of God is big because God is big. There are many days and moments to be lived over the course of our lives, so if we are constantly in need of big experiences to be validated as useful to the kingdom, we will feel sorely unusable the majority of our life.

But we also have to help ourselves by immersing in truth versus participating in the world’s contest of hustle. Even in God’s great love for us, He will allow us to keep struggling in order to grow in dissatisfaction over a cultural system of self-focus that is at odds with a service-focused kingdom that we might crave dying to self to find joy in Him.

God, help us detox from the world’s lies about serving You.

The years of service have taken their toll on her—it is not the service itself that she resists but the feeling of being unappreciated and drained—very real aspects of service that cause a lot of us to resist working for God, especially when we let flesh invade our motive.

“There is a fine line between wanting God to use you for his glory and wanting everyone to know it.”

1. Serving God has long-lasting and ripple effects, in this life and on into the next, and this kind of fulfillment is unmatched.

2. Serving God builds character.

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

4. Serving uncomplicates everything.

When God uses us, we feel full, not empty . . . beautiful, not ugly . . . clean, not dirty. As we serve God, our eyes have to stay on Him and on the goal of true and biblical ministry, without need for repayment or earthly reward or yes, even human gratitude.

Instead of being who we are, we are becoming who we think people want. If we don’t get the response from others that feeds our need to be accepted and liked, we deem ourselves failures.

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.

Want more joy? Stop thinking about yourself. Want to be more fulfilled? Give every ounce of your gifts and talents away.

Sometimes God allows us to be in a position where people are watching us and following us, and, in that, it’s a higher burden than we might think.

1. We don’t retire from serving God.

In which case a detirement plan must be put into place. Otherwise, our unwillingness to do so may cause an early exit from serving God. Many early exits from ministry have happened because of an unwillingness to set healthy boundaries with people or, perhaps, because rest was never valued as part of the detirement plan. When we understand that longevity for serving God is the goal, we don’t make unwise short-term decisions—with our health, our relationships, or flash-in-the-pan ministry opportunities that make us feel or look good.

wise detirement plan will involve the trinity of ministry success: accountability (community), boundaries, and Sabbath rest.

2. There are times we need to pivot in how we are serving.