LOL: Bucket List

Memory/Meditation Verses: In the same way, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not addicted to much wine. They are to teach what is good, so they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, to be self-controlled, pure, homemakers, kind, and submissive to their husbands, so that God’s message will not be slandered. ~ Titus 2:3-5 (HCSB)

Living out Loud (LOL)....

I came across this familiar piece of scripture above this weekend and it really grab my soul. I have been reflecting on my daughters own life as she has graduated high school and how I as a mother failed her and helped her. I felt the Holy Spirit nudge me to reflect on my own life. Our study of Galatians 5 in our community Bible study addressed the offense of the cross and I haven't been able to release those words "the offense of the cross". I find that it drives me spiritually just as it has driven other Christians to reflect on their life, their living and breathing of each day.

The offense of the cross is so powerful and should drive each of us. Mel Gibson portrayed it so well in The Passion of Christ...the inhumanity and cruelty of an innocent God-man's journey to a cross for the failure of human kind to God. It so easy to look away due to the repulsiveness of it but instead we need to look at it strait on and allow it to change us and drive us closer to God. Man-kind wants to alter the value of the cross, our lives should instead model the worth of the cross.

The cross offends men and women, because it is contrary to their ideas of human worth." 

~ Charles Spurgeon

Does the offense of the cross, the injustice and inhumanity of an innocent God-man for our own selfish choices, draw you to change and to live life on purpose? Do you have written goals for your life? 

A Christian author in my current reading wrote she and her husband had written goals for their life when they became Christians and still lived to those goals. They have been very successful in this world and successful spiritually. Today, we have people in the spiritual and secular world talking about having a "bucket list". So I ask, do you have one?

The offense of the cross and my devotional reading yesterday of Titus 2 lands me here contemplating a "bucket list" of goals for my life. I couldn't help but cringe at my own failure towards these verses in Titus 2, those things that drew Jesus to that cross. My longing to change grew as I reflected on the implication of these verses. What a good "bucket list" for the Christian woman. Read it again...

³ In the same way, teach older women to be holy in their behavior, not speaking against others or enslaved to too much wine, but teaching what is good.⁴ Then they can teach the young women to love their husbands, to love their children,⁵ to be wise and pure, to be good workers at home, to be kind, and to yield to their husbands. Then no one will be able to criticize the teaching God gave us. (NCV)

The Christian woman's "Bucket List" would entail...

1. To love the Lord her God with all her heart, mind and soul and to love others more than herself (Matt 26:36-39)
2. To be godly in behavior (vs 3)
3. T be truthful and kind in speech (vs 3)
4. To be disciplined and self-controlled (vs 3)
5. To be a teacher and encourager of good things (vs 4)
6. To be devoted to her husband and honor him (vs 4)
7. To be a blessing to her children (vs 4)
8. To be discreet and wise in her actions (vs 5)
9. To be chase and pure inside and out (vs 5)
10. To be focused on her home (vs 5)
11.  To be a message of Christ (vs 5)

To be holy so that others are drawn to Jesus...to put others before yourself and be free of selfishness...to be a model wife and mother...to love God above all other things...driven by the offense of the cross.

What would you add to this  bucket list" for the Christian woman? How does the offense of the cross compel you?

Striving to Live Out Loud~Pamela