Do you remember diagramming sentences? Finding the subject, verb, adverbs, and adjectives? I don’t know if I was very good at finding anything other than the subject. Even with a father who was an English teacher, I struggled. But I did learn one thing: the subject is the most important. Without the subject, nothing else matters. Life is like that, too. Without a subject, what’s the point?

Proverbs 29:18 states that without a vision, people perish. Essentially, it means that without a purpose, there is no direction. Life must have purpose. You may not have thought about it before, but we all live with a purpose. It may be centered on your happiness or on making a lot of money, but we all have one. Some focus their lives on others. Mother Theresa’s life might be explained that way.

A few years ago, a good friend passed away suddenly. For some reason, it’s been on my mind lately. He wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, yet he died without warning. One moment he was running a race; the next, he was slipping into eternity. He was a pastor whose message for the coming Sunday was “What Leaders Leave Behind.” Ironically, he prerecorded it in case he didn’t make it back in time for the Saturday night service. He didn’t. 

My friend often said the subject was, and is, Jesus. Doing anything else didn’t matter. Living life and pastoring a church would be governed by the subject we live by. If it wasn’t Jesus, then what was the point? For Christians, the subject should always be Jesus. Everything we do and everything we are needs to be defined by the subject. My friend lived and died with Jesus as the subject. Moving forward, hope has a name: Jesus. As a Christian, if Jesus isn’t the subject, then what am I living for? Think about it.