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A Morning View From the Patio

Looking around me at others and then looking intensely within me I am wondering if Christians really get it. We proclaim new life in Jesus Christ pointing us toward eternity in heaven and in turn we continue to live like hell on earth. 
I am most critical of me. It is easy because I know me best and I know the inner thoughts and outer actions which are not always pleasing to God. I should be living a life of complete surrender to God and I do not do well with surrender. Honestly, there is some strange sense of comfort holding on to the selfishness of sin in my life. 
Are we willing to be comfortable in our salvation, avoiding our need to surrender? Colossians 3 tells us to focus on things above and not things on earth. I know we must live in the world, but it seems we, maybe just I, place our focus on the world and not things above. 
I have been stepping up to a challenge to read a chapter of Ephesians each day. My thoughts are spurred on by the scripture I am sharing at the end today. 
I am so blessed that God has not given me what I have earned in my selfish 58 years of living. God has shared grace with me, yet I often choose to live outside God's gift of grace. Then I look around, read posts and see examples of proclaimed followers of Jesus Christ living the same, and worse. 
Are you authentic, I mean really authentically a Christian? 
Are you mired in that old stagnant life of sin? 
“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.”  - Ephesians 2:1-6   The Message
For a moment, how about we forget all our struggles, pain, doubt and obsession with the world and get our lives straight in the company with Jesus, our Messiah! 
Peace, 
PB

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