Christian Living

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His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. -2 Peter 1:3 NIV

Today is the first day of a work week. How we begin our week will most probably dictate on what the week will be like. Are we excited, bored, apprehensive, anxious, defeated, depressed, skeptical, faithless?

The verse above tells us that God has given us everything we need for life and godliness. We only need to appropriate what God is giving to us so we are able to live a good life, not only for this week, but week after week.

Here are a few Godly resources that we can appropriate:

1. The right attitude. The Book of Romans exhorts us to "be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom. 12:2 NIV). This has much to do with attitude. However, oftentimes it is not easy to go from the negative to the positive at the spur of the moment. Thus, having the right attitudes entails a building process. This brings us to our second point.

2. Godly habits. Aside from the elementary ones such as reading the Bible and prayer, one habit we must appropriate is to be a blessing at least to one person every day. Living a good life is never selfish. One foundation to living a good life is to help others live a good life. The principle of sowing and reaping applies very much here.

Another Godly habit is worship. A good way to start anything is to offer our best to God. Excellence should be a way of life. If we want the best to come our way, we must be willing to give the best of ourselves. A mentor once told me, "Offer God your best and God will do the rest."

3. Faith. How do we appropriate faith? By believing that God's goodness will always prevail. It will prevail over our needs, circumstances, situations, problems, family, relationships, our life itself. The bible tells us he "called us by his own glory and goodness." Thus, the counterpart of believing in God's goodness is to be grateful for Gods goodness. The Book of Hebrews states that "Faith is the substance of things hoped for" (Heb. 11:1). Belief produces hope; gratefulness produces the substance.

All of the above are appropriations of the inner man. The good life is produced by what's inside of us and not by external factors. Yet, when the inner man is able to appropriate God's resources, then the external changes as well. What happens within us radiates towards what's outside of us.

Simply stated, the good life begins in the depths of our heart.

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