When I was a lot younger than I am now, listening to adults give me advice was the last thing on my list of to-dos. I imagine it was the same with most of you who read this blog. When you were a teenager adults didn’t know anything. As you get older you realize that they did know more than you did at the time but you didn’t want to listen to them or their advice.

Lots of times we are the same way in the church. When we are there we may hear what the sermon is about but we don’t listen to it very well. How do I know this? Because I did it myself. If you asked me on Monday what the sermon was about on Sunday morning, I couldn’t tell you. Actually, I could tell you this time. It was about the vision that Ezekiel had of the angels who marked those in the city who were concerned about the sins of Israel and those who were not. Those who were not even included some who served in the Temple and it was those who were killed.

God cares about everything that we do but He is very interested in the things that we care about that align with His. When you love those things and people that God loves and hate those things that He hates, then you are more like Jesus which is what God desires for us as His followers. Life is promised to those who follow Jesus’ ways and do the things that Jesus told His disciples to do.

When I see the news today and hear the things that are going on today, the only conclusion can be that we are living at the end of the last days. I pray that you will seek to know Jesus if you don’t know Him as your Savior yet.

We need to be ourselves because Jesus called us to be His. He chose you. Not someone that you will become with more education or study. Although the studying and the learning will come with following Him, He called you as you are to be…well, you. Each of us has a specific trait that He needs and that the body of Christ, the church, needs. There is something that you can do or say that nobody else can. You can reach someone with His message that the pastor can’t reach. You can tell the story of how Jesus has touched your life and that will make a difference to someone.

Christ touches our lives when we believe in Him for our salvation but He also lives through our lives to take His message to others. His Spirit lives in you if you have believed in Him for your salvation and it is this life that others will be able to see. Taking His message of love and forgiveness to the world doesn’t mean that you have to go overseas to be a missionary. You can take His message to your family or to those you work around or work with every day.

When I said that you don’t need to have degrees to prove that you are serving God that is what I meant. All of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen but they had been to school at their synagogue. They had learned and even memorized a good bit of the Old Testament by the time they were teenagers. The Bible is the best book to teach us about God and about life too. God’s wisdom is contained in His Word so the more you know about His Word, the better you know Him. That is why I read through the Bible at least once every year from Genesis to Revelation. Then…I go back to the beginning and start over.

I used to wonder why people would do that but I found out that God’s Word doesn’t really repeat itself. You do read the same words every time but the message that your heart and your Spirit get from it is different every time. God’s Word is what we should read to learn what His will is for your life but it also is alive and it reads your Spirit while you read it. So your Spirit will receive the wisdom from the same words that you need right now. Just because you have read Psalm 23 many times, the words and the wisdom change when God sees that you need a different message.

God gives us all of the wisdom that we can handle and it is contained in His Word. His love for us is beyond anything that we can imagine or conceive in this life. On the day when we stand before Him, we will know the depth of His love and feel it too. If you don’t know Him as your Savior yet, I suggest getting to know Him soon.