The following is a Bible Gateway exclusive Sneak Peek and First Listen of Jesus Over Everything: Uncomplicating the Daily Struggle to Put Jesus First (Thomas Nelson, 2020) by Lisa Whittle (@LisaRWhittle). Order the book and unabridged audiobook on CD in the Bible Gateway Store.

By Lisa Whittle

I never got the simple life I wanted.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and thinking back to the simpler days, when I was six. I didn’t know much then about real life—about the highs and lows, the successes and failures. I just knew how to play. And to cuddle kittens. And to dream. And to love Jesus. As much as I wish I could go back to that place where I didn’t know about real life, I can’t. And if I had, I would have missed out on the journey, so I don’t truly want to.

What I want now is to have a beautiful, meaningful life that feels full and free. For Jesus to use me. I want the same things you want. Peace. Good food. Laughter. To feel loved and known and cared for. And there’s something else. Even though I have a beautiful house and a family to spend my days with, I still live with a somewhat curious hunger for home. My friend, author Lore Wilbert, says it best:

We are born homesick, every one of us. We who live in this fractured world have eternity written on our hearts; we are longing to be home and are digging the tent pegs of our lives in as deep as we can get them until we arrive on eternity’s shores.

It’s true. No matter how good of a life we have, we will always long for our real home. It makes sense. We will never be satisfied here, because this is not the home God made us for.

It is no wonder, then, that we struggle to live with the realities of our situation on earth: a complicated life made more complicated by the choices we make, often ruled by the flesh we want so desperately to die to. Bless us. It is a situation we are all in.

But it is not a situation without hope. God doesn’t work that way.

In this life, the life where there will be trouble, according to John 16:33, there is also choice. The next nine chapters are dedicated to daily choices that support our Jesus-over-everything lifestyle, and my prayer is that with God’s help you will find them more relatable, doable, and even delightful than you may think. There’s nothing you can’t do with Jesus. Now’s a chance for you to put that belief into action.

To do this, you’ll need to see your deadly overs (that is, you over Jesus) and Jesus over everything as two opposing lifestyles, and you’ll have to decide which one you want. The land that puts you in charge is guaranteed to stay complicated. You will keep overdoing it, keep picking the wrong “over” and live with the repercussions from that. I won’t lie; it will often be the easier choice. And it’s possibly the one you’re most used to (I speak from experience). But it will have hidden problems, and it won’t bring you the simplicity of good things you truly want in the end.

On the other hand, the Jesus-over-everything land comes with a different kind of guarantee. If you choose to put Jesus in his place of preeminence, he will bless your life. He will sort things out that you’ve never been able to sort out before. He will do a perfect job at managing the imperfect life you haven’t been capable of managing on your own. If that sounds good to you, I would just ask you to dive in and read this book to the end for the full picture.

Let’s choose the Jesus-over-everything life, together, and as we do this, imperfect as it will be, I’m praying that the Lord will guide us. I’m asking him to point out the pitfalls and awaken us to the scorpions waiting to sting and help us keep our eyes on the land we’ve chosen to live, never looking over at the other land we think looks better at the moment because Satan is using some kind of filter to brighten those weeds.

I know that right now, the thought of Jesus over everything may seem overwhelming or simply aspirational. What does that even look like? How is it possible, in our day-to-day and in practical situations? If Jesus is our everything, we have to put him over all things, and daily we have plenty of opportunities to live out that kind of life. We’ve already determined that living in the land of the deadly overs has made our lives more complicated than it needs to be, so don’t mentally complicate the Jesus-over-everything lifestyle right off the bat. It’s actually quite simple. Life is about choice, and you’re already making choices, every day. You just may just need to make some different ones. Every chapter we dive into from now until the end of the book will be daily lifestyle choices that either support the Jesus-over-everything lifestyle or move us away from it, and they are plain and simple. Real over pretty. Love over judgment. Holiness over freedom. Service over spotlight. Steady over hype. Wisdom over knowledge. Honesty over hiding. Commitment over mood.

In every chapter, we will break these ideas down practically, to see what they can look like in our everyday life. We will talk about these things to help us see what the Jesus-over-everything decision is, how a Jesus-over-everything life is well within our ability to live, with the help of the Holy Spirit, and some Word-driven things to help. Jesus wouldn’t have told us to put him first if he wasn’t willing to help us with the execution. The good news I’m telling you is this: you can absolutely live this kind of life.

And in all of this, I’m reminded of the famous verse Joshua 24:15: “Choose today whom you will serve,” and Joshua’s own determination: “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (ESV). As I was praying for the Lord to give me some Scripture to ground this book, he gave me this verse, and I started diving into it to learn more. I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you I’ve been around our Christian community so long, I’ve probably seen this verse 700 times on a laser-cut wooden sign and 8,000 times in a fancy font on a coffee mug, but I’m not sure I ever fully grasped what it meant. Joshua wasn’t making a statement for the back of a marriage ceremony bulletin. He was using his leadership to plead with a promise-breaking group of Israelites to do something new and radical for a change: to take their spiritual lives in a new direction. He was recapping God’s goodness, just as Moses had done before him, in Deuteronomy. He was reminding them of the only way their lives would work from that point forward, even as they lived in the blessed promised land. Through Joshua, God was pointing out that even after all he had done, they had still chosen the other, less livable land. “With your very own eyes you saw what I did. Then you lived in the wilderness for many years” (v. 7). If I could offer my pedestrian paraphrase for the sake of the context of our conversation, it would be this: “You put me over everything and saw how well that worked . . . and then you went back to that other land and put yourself back over me and it all fell to pieces.”

And in a place of choice, once again, God asked them which land looked better and where they wanted to be.

Having experienced life in both lands, they knew.

“But the people answered Joshua, saying, ‘. . . We are determined to serve the LORD” (v. 21).

And with that, Joshua tells them the way.

“‘All right then,’ Joshua said, “destroy the idols among you, and turn your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel” (v. 23 ESV). Lisa’s translation: Put Jesus first.

It is where we, too, begin.

The above is a Bible Gateway exclusive Sneak Peek and First Listen of Jesus Over Everything: Uncomplicating the Daily Struggle to Put Jesus First (Thomas Nelson, 2020) by Lisa Whittle (@LisaRWhittle). Order the book and unabridged audiobook on CD in the Bible Gateway Store.

Jesus Over Everything: Uncomplicating the Daily Struggle to Put Jesus First is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway.

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