My Lifetime Verse

Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and I want to tell you about my life verse.

Usually whenever someone opens his heart to Jesus Christ for the first time, you know they’re encouraged to choose a life verse from the Bible. Well, I remember when I first came to Christ and started regularly attending Bishop Cummins Reformed Episcopal Church—it’s a little conservative evangelical church in Baltimore—I chose Galatians Chapter 2, verse 20 as my life verse. My pastor, who was leading me through Confirmation class, suggested it to me. It says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” To me, that pretty much summed up my decision to follow Jesus.

To this day, Galatians Chapter 2 verse 20 is still my goal. Every time I’m tempted, every time I want my way, every time I may bristle about my disability, I force myself to remember that, hey, I’ve been crucified with Christ. Come on, years ago, I nailed my desires, as well as my earthly hopes and dreams, I nailed them to the cross, along with Jesus. The old Joni who always wants her way, she doesn’t live anymore, even though she tries to act like it. No rather, I no longer live. I don’t want to follow the old way. Instead, I want to follow Christ because He lives in me. And everything I decide and do is by faith in Him. Yep, Galatians 2:20 is a great theme for the life of any Christian.

And that verse from Galatians has opened my eyes to the beauties of many other life-changing verses in the Bible. Like where it says in Colossians 3, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” For when we die to self and live to Christ, we cannot help but have hearts burning with a passion for future things; we can’t help but be on fire for kingdom realities that are out of this world. When we die to self and live for Christ, we are aflame with heaven-hearted hope, and we have an outlook of pure joy that affects everything about the way we live. We become like that “city on a hilltop” described in Matthew Chapter 5 or “a lamp placed on a stand” as it says elsewhere in Matthew 5. When we die to self and live for Jesus, everyone around us will be encouraged to look heavenward.

But you know what? A perspective like this does not happen without suffering. It’s affliction that fuels the furnace of heaven-hearted hope. People whose lives are unscathed by affliction have a less energetic hope. Oh, they’re glad to know they’re going to heaven; for them accepting Jesus was a buy-and-sell agreement. Once that’s taken care of, they feel they can get back to life as usual—dating and marrying, working, vacationing, spending, saving.

But suffering, it obliterates any preoccupation with earthly things. Suffering wakes us up from our spiritual slumber and turns our hearts toward the future, like a mother turning the face of her child, insisting, “Look this way!” Once heaven has our attention, earth’s pleasures begin to pale in comparison. This is the natural outcome–no, rather, it is the supernatural outcome of my life verse, Galatians 2:20. For when we’re crucified with Christ, it really is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. And when Jesus fills your heart, you learn how to welcome that trial as a friend. You learn how to embrace suffering and rejoice in it, and so doing, you find your heart is a-fire. It is a flame with heavenly hope.

© Joni and Friends