Live openly and expansively!

Dear, dear Corinthians, I can't tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn't fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren't small, but you're living them in a small way. I'm speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively! 2 Corinthians 6:11-13 MSG

Via Paul's challenge to the Corinthians, God is challenging us to look at the potential in our lives through His eyes. It is no longer good enough for us to say, "We are only one person, nothing that we will do will make a difference". We are not 'only one person'. Once you make the decision to ask Jesus to become your Lord and Saviour, and invite the Holy Spirit into your life,  you become a person with the Holy Spirit inside of you! The very same Holy Spirit who is part of the trinity!

Your life then is no longer small. As God says to us in Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."  He wants us to 'open up our lives' to Him. He wants us to take up the challenge with the help of the Holy Spirit, the counselor and comforter, and 'live openly and expansively'.

So what does living openly and expansively look like? Using the definitions from the Oxford dictionary it means we would be living 'frankly, honestly; publicly without concealment; able or tending to expand; extensive, wide-ranging; effusive, open, not inhibited, lives. Putting that definition in the context of God's kingdom, I would add to it, 'for the purposes of furthering God's kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.'

God, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit has given us all we need to live that exact type of life, an open and expansive life. Of course it will look different in each of our lives as we all have our unique God given gifts and talents. We have been given those gifts and talents for a reason, so don't hold back in using them. Pray for boldness and courage. Take a step of faith to use them fully as God intended. Remember what Jesus said to the disciples in the storm in Mark 6:50, 51 Take courage! It is I, Don't be afraid. Then he climbed into the boat with them, Jesus is with you every step of the way. He wants you to live openly and expansively today.