The Truth About Right Living

This book has been written to share what I discovered during a unique experience in late 1989 and early 1990. While that experience was not very pleasant, the discoveries that I made have more than made up for any of those anxieties which I felt. After having been a Christian for a little over twenty-two years, I suddenly and without warning lost my job. Since at that time I had been faithful in the Lord's work for over fifteen years plus had also done very well within my profession, being released from my employment did not seem logical. Therefore, from the very beginning, I acknowledged my predicament as having come from the Lord.

In all, I was out of work for almost five months from the end of November in 1989 until the middle of the following April. As I faced each day, I had a very sincere desire to understand what the Lord wanted me to do and also to determine if He was trying to show or teach me something special. I did not realize it at the time, but He was about to reveal to me what He truly desires from each of us. For a number of years, I had not been completely clear about whether He simply wanted us to be very good people, whether He just wanted our money, or just exactly what He wanted. I must point out, though, that my confusion was not related to my faith in Christ or to my dependence upon His finished work at Calvary. Instead, it was related to how a devoted Christian should go about this thing of Christian service.

What the Lord revealed to me through my ordeal of unemployment may not seem so earth shattering to many. In fact, I would have to say that His special revelation was probably what we would all suspect anyway. Yet many Christian people, in my opinion, have gotten this thing of Christian service all turned around. God does want us to work on His behalf. However, He does not want that until first we have given Him our heart, our whole heart. Lukewarm Christianity, which is so commonplace in our time, is not honoring or pleasing to Him. But merely working hard, without first giving Him the complete love and devotion that He wants and deserves, is not either.

This book is not very complicated and hopefully should not be difficult to read. In writing it, my desire has not been to eliminate the cart, but rather to ensure that we as Christians are not getting the cart before the horse. Chapters two and three present God's simple Plan of Salvation. After that, the rest of the book is a presentation of the simple teachings of Matthews 22:37-39, Matthew 6:33, and Romans 14:10-13. My desire is that the reader will find this material easy to understand and accept and that it will be beneficial to him or her in their everyday walk.

The second edition of this book was written to clean up some of the poorly worded statements in the first edition and to show important Bible verses rather than just refer to them.