Breaching the Walls of Your Comfort Zone

"So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is.” Colossians 3:1-2 The Message (MSG)

By Alexandra Copeland

There’s no shortage of complaining about what’s happening in Washington. The divisive rhetoric is unlike anything we’ve witnessed as each side seems to jockey for how low they can go. As Christians, we might look at this and shake our heads, but we presumably know the power of God’s love and the unity of which Christ calls us, and we are as divided in many ways as those responsible for governing. The life of Christ calls on us to check ourselves continually. We have to ask the Lord if we’re allowing religious silos to keep us isolated from a move of Christ that many are witnessing. Because if we are, life will become stale and blessings will begin to dry up.

Colossians 3:1-2 The Message (MSG) tells us, “So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is.” God is encouraging us to set our hearts on heaven, and not on what is going on in the world. It is true that God has given us earth as our place of habitation, and while we’re here, our physical bodies are bound by its laws. Our minds and hearts, though, must be anchored in heaven. 

The earth is not our home, we’re just passing through. It may seem strange to be grounded physically in one world, and have our chief concerns set on another one, but the other one is the home of our powerful and loving Heavenly Father. He adopted us through His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. The Way that He has ordained dictates that we stand in our sonship through faith. A Christ-centered faith brands us in the earth’s domain, and a heavenly mind-and-heart-set of faith must be our aim, so that we maintain communion and fellowship with our Creator. 

  

As citizens of heaven living on earth, we cannot live as the world does. We must live as our Big Brother and Redeemer lived when he walked upon the earth, because he gave us the keys to the Kingdom, and is teaching us to be Kingdom dwellers through the Spirit that indwells us. The work that Christ has done for each of us is work that we could never do for ourselves. He has given us a way to masterfully navigate the corrupt terrain of this world, and secured for us an unprecedented glory beyond what any of us could imagine.  

This should topple limitations that we have perceived at times in our lives, and solidify the importance of aligning our thoughts, confessions, and deeds with the Spirit so that we may advance forward. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:5-8 (MSG), “Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.” 

Too many of us have our heads in the sand. We are so concerned about what is happening in our own little worlds, and so taken aback by the incredulity we see around us, that we’re missing the call to come together. God is calling the body of Christ to unify, so that we can receive His tremendous outpouring and usher in further expansion and elevation of His power within this domain. We’ve become locked-in by the bars of our own moral muscle, and we’re on the verge of imploding internally from ineffectiveness and arrogance. 

  

I see Christians walking around every day, cemented to their routines and behaving as if they don’t have a destiny to fulfill.  The voice of God isn’t silent. He’s moving in miraculous ways and many of us are experiencing His glory like never before. He’s calling each of us to breach the walls of our comfort zones, to walk across thresholds, and breakdown barriers so that we can bask in the richness of His Kingdom right here on earth.

Have we become obsessed with ourselves? Is attention to God leading us out in the open, into a spacious and free life, or are we becoming more and more isolated from each other, even though we’re equally important parts of a whole? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘yes’, then God has a solution for us. We need to trust in HIS action in us. In Hebrews 13:21 (MSG), Paul tells us a little bit about this action. He prayed, “May God, who puts all things together, makes all things whole, Who made a lasting mark through the sacrifice of Jesus, the sacrifice of blood that sealed the eternal covenant, Who led Jesus, our Great Shepherd, up and alive from the dead, Now put you together, provide you with everything you need to please him, make us into what gives him most pleasure, by means of the sacrifice of Jesus, the Messiah. All glory to Jesus forever and always! Oh, yes, yes, yes.” 

What Jesus Christ has done for us is the most miraculous, extraordinary act of love imaginable. It is not some fairytale that someone made up. You and I are living, breathing miracles, and every day we have the distinct honor and pleasure to walk in the glory of all that Christ made available to us. We can do better, and we need to do more. Let’s breach the walls of our comfort zones and hold ourselves accountable for greater outreach to the body of Christ and to those that want to know him. This is what we have been called to do, and it will bring honor and pleasure to God through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! ■ 

Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.