Eternity scale

"As a prisoner for the Lord, then I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love" (Ephesians 4:1-2)

"live a life" (peripateō) - to conduct ones life
"calling" (klēsis) - station in life

My church back home has been doing a series on comparison. The more I hear about comparison the more I realize that "comparison kills contentment"(not my phrase, heard it somewhere). So where do we get our value? I know the quick and easy answer to that is "from our heavenly Father," and I can speak "Christianese" with the best of em as well. But when we really sit back and look at our lives, what are we measuring ourselves by? What if Michael Jordan would have only tried to be the best basketball player on his team? Well he would have shortchanged himself because when he becomes the best on his team and then stops working as hard as he can then what? He doesn't reach his full potential because his scale was off. So I'll ask it again, what are we measuring ourselves by? Well... Paul says that we should "live a life worthy of the calling you have received." So that means we shouldn't look around and gauge our successes and failures by whats going on around us but on the "eternity scale."

For me when I put highs and lows into the scope of eternity it has a way of making things shrink. And Paul isn't simply asking this, but he is urging us to do this. But he doesn't just stop there he spells it out for us, "be completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love." I think its perfect how the first thing he speaks of is humility. We all know that the more we care about our world the smaller and less important everyone else's world seems to get. Gentleness is next and is not to be confused with weakness, it is just another form of humility. And the last two thoughts in the verse are patience and love, which for me always seem to go together. The longer we spend on something or with something the more we appreciate it. I like the translation of "bear with" and "in love". We need to bear with each other with love, because the "with love" part makes it a lot more complex for me. I can bear with someone while I'm giving them a hard time in my head, but no thats not what we are called to. We are called to a higher standard than that. Its easy to hang out and spend all our time with the people that we enjoy, but lets get out of that cycle.  Lets live worthy of the calling we have received and not by our power but allowing the Holy Spirit to guide and direct us.

- Andrew Kown