Christian living: 10 ways to make Jesus the center of your existence.

According to Christian author, Mary DeMuth, she describes herself as “a fellow struggler who is learning that what we think about God matters, how we allow Him to reign in our hearts matters, and how we obey Him in the moment matters. It all matters. Everything.”

DeMuth said she has been abused, foreclosed upon, abandoned and betrayed. She has been pressed and drained till it was too much. But it was just enough to bring her to a place of surrender, piece by precious piece. In that surrender, she found the freedom of giving everything to God. And through Scripture, community, and the work of the Holy Spirit, she gives it all over again, every day.

Here, she shares in Beliefnet 10 ways that you can make Him your “everything,” too.

1. Discover the Adventure - “Life in Jesus is an adventure, full of daring risk, and spiritual thrills!” writes Mary DeMuth, author of Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus. “It can be when we learn the secret of letting go of control. We are like those pesky Israelites. God wants to grow us up, to bring us to new vistas and Promised Lands aplenty. He created us for adventure, not ease. “Instead of obeying in the moment and experiencing powerful spiritual growth, we wander around in circles chasing ease, trusting in ourselves to solve our problems, living a Godless life. We arrive 40 years later, looking back, and wonder why in the world we didn’t grow, and why God seems terribly distant.”
2. Turn from a Scarcity Mindset to an Abundant One - DeMuth continues: “Sometimes we’re guilty of hoarding blessings. We look at the bloom of them, carry them to ourselves, and want to keep them in that forever spring. But God doesn’t bless us with blooms so we can pine over them. He gives them to us to display, to show His brilliance. “He asks us to spend our splendor. To receive beauty from Him, then outrageously give it away. It may be hard, but do it anyway. It may feel like you’re going to burn out, but God will supply more blooms. Trust Him. The gifts He gives are to give again, in order to show this dying world that He is the splendor.”
3. Dare to Heal from the Past: “We forget that greatness rides on the shoulders of trials,” writes DeMuth in of Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus. “We fail to remember that the burden of any injury is God’s means for freedom and grace in our lives. It’s OK to look back, to open wide the door to our past for the sake of healing. Not to dwell on. Not to obsess over or dismiss it. Not to stay Super-Glued to. But for the sake of divine healing. “It’s OK if you feel your heart can’t heal. We humans are a frail lot, unable to enact something so big, so dynamic, so new. But we serve God the Creator of all things, who knows us intimately, who fashioned us. He can take our brokenness and replace it with health. God uses injury in the past as the very means to bring us into new phases of growth.”
4. Dream a God-Sized Dream- DeMuth continues: To follow is to give up our lives, particularly our expectations of how our lives should be. We need to let go of our presumptions about the life we should have and let Jesus dream a new dream for us. A dream where others are changed through the Holy Spirit in us. A dream we can’t even fathom. We shortchange ourselves when we delegate our Christianity to a compartment of our lives, managing it on the side, doing Christian things, going through the motions. We miss the mystery, the daring adventure, the growth. Remember this truth: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
5. Think Highly of God: “It is a discipline to think ‘astonished,’” writes DeMuth. “Often we are bewildered by the details of our lives, forgetting about the bigness of the God we serve. He made everything. He is utterly other. Yet He chose to redeem us. He sees us. And if we are His followers, He lives within us. We are simply His followers, dependent on Him for new life. “The author of Hebrews sums up our need for astonishment. ‘Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:28-29, ESV). “May our thoughts be consumed with our awe-worthy God. And may those thoughts translate into astonishment-based living, where we live to make much of God and less of us. That is the heart of the gospel, after all—the six-letter-word that should change our thinking forever.”
6. See God as the Great I Am: We serve the Great I Am, not the great “I was” or the great “I will be.” God exists in the now of our lives. He has redeemed our past so we can joyfully pursue the next. What are you waiting for? Be an “am.”
7. Preach the Gospel: “When we stop and consider Jesus on that Cross, though, we reorient ourselves back to this radical, life-altering call. In thinking about His death, we realize His call to follow Him cannot be easy because following Him leads to death,” writes DeMuth. “We can’t turn away from His thorn-poked brow, the blood running earthward, hands pegged to a rough hewn beam, His cries of forgiveness even then. It’s there, at the base of the cross that we understand afresh why those crazy apostles suffered much for Jesus, why they counted their lives as nothing in light of sharing the gospel with others. “The Gospel they shared was simple, but it earth quaked the foundations of people’s lives. It called for allegiance, total adherence, but it promised the Holy Spirit, the One who would empower them to live out that kind of commitment. Unfortunately, the gospel we hear most often in our pulpits or even friend-to-friend, looks nothing like this. It sounds more like platitudes and self-help manuals.”
8. Take Risks: “Growth comes from undecorated obedience. We can study and meditate (and these are worthy exercises), but we really learn the deeper truths of God perched on the precipice of risk, when we dare to jump off into the great unknown of obedience. “In that frightening place, we learn His availability, His provision, His guidance, much more than if we merely read about His exploits. That’s why Christianity should be experiential. The more we dare to obey, the more we experience God,” DeMuth writes in of Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus. 
9. Obey to Grow: “Some of the wisest, most spiritually infectious people I’ve met have grown not simply because of biblical knowledge, but because they dared to obey,” notes DeMuth. “Here in the States, with radio and podcasts aplenty keeping us theologically sound, we exegete the life out of Scripture. Blogs, papers, books, sermons all attempt to keep us on the straight and narrow. I’m not disparaging that. I’m married to a theologian who thinks deeply about Scripture and feels closest to God when he’s wrangling the Bible. Thinking correctly about God is essential. “But there’s more to growth than knowledge. The Pharisees had bucketloads of knowledge but they missed understanding Jesus. God in the flesh stood before them, and they dismissed Him. Why? Because they didn’t understand the importance of obedience and how it correlated to spiritual understanding.”
10. Give Up Control: “Could it be that we are guilty of flawless Christian performances?” writes DeMuth. “That we’ve taken up ownership and control of our own relationships with Jesus? If we desire to live sustainable, growing lives, we must get to that place where we understand our effort, even what we perceive to be holy effort, cannot accomplish God’s purposes. “Our need for control shoves away God’s ownership in our lives, and it keeps us at the helm. In relinquishing control, growth flourishes. We learn to trust the Sovereign One with our lives, to no longer micromanage even our relationship with Him. That type of journey thrives from the inside out.”