What symbolizes our Savior and the salvation that He bought with His blood? The crucifixion. Two pieces of wood and three nails or spikes depending on how you look at them. Our Savior was trained as a carpenter and He was very good at it I’d imagine. Considering that He built a bridge for us to get to Heaven with very little lumber, three nails, and His blood and His Life. This was no small sacrifice. His humanity allowed Him to die on the cross for our sins but it was His sinless life that paid the penalty for all of humanity’s sins. No mere human could do that.
God is the God of the impossible. Most people think that forgiveness for their sins isn’t possible but God forgives if you can forgive yourself and accept His grace and mercy for your sins. Sometimes, forgiving ourselves is the hardest part of accepting forgiveness. Sometimes, forgiving others is easier but not by much. Many times it takes humbling yourself and asking God to help you forgive yourself or others for the hurts and the pain that has been caused by sin. Regardless of how long ago it was or how deeply the hurt went, forgiveness has to be given before it is fully received.
God gives us grace and mercy, neither of which we deserve, but He gives them to us because He loves us. He has loved us since before creation began. I pray that all of you who read this will seek Him out to be your Savior. Your eternal home depends on your salvation and you can only get that by accepting Jesus as your Savior.
Some of us actually do worship the God Who is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe because He is God in the Bible and because He made it possible for us to be saved from hell by our belief in Jesus. But there are some people who make god in their own image and likeness. They don’t like God from the Bible. They want him to be manageable and understandable. When you do this you are worshiping your own idol. A god that you made in your mind that you can relate to and one that isn’t so “all-powerful and all-knowing”. In other words, you have placed god in a box that you can understand and call on when you want him or need him but otherwise, you can push him away and not think about him until it is necessary.
God never gave up on humanity so why should we give up on Him? If He was like us we would be in a lot of trouble. More than that, He would’ve started over many more times than He did. But…He didn’t. God loves you and me and every person on Earth but He doesn’t like our sins at all, whatever they may be. He especially doesn’t like being “made in our image” because we are bringing Him down to our level and God doesn’t share His glory with anyone especially an idol that we create to “represent Him”.
God is THE Creator and our God. Nothing should ever be above Him and there is no representation of Him because none of us knows God well enough to try to do such a thing. Worship Him, follow Him and give your heart to Him because one day you will bow to Him whether you know Him or not and it will be too late.
Life is full of troubles and pain and sometimes…joy! It is also filled with disappointment and other problems that we can’t fix…but God is always near us. Many times we look around and see so much pain and problems and we feel that God doesn’t care and He isn’t in our lives. If you have never given your heart to Him, He still cares about you. He loves you more than you could imagine because He sent Jesus to pay the price for your soul and for all of the sins in your life and mine. Yes, God cares for us even when we feel alone and abandoned by everyone else He is still there.
Where are you in your relationship with God? If you have only attended church occasionally or on holidays then you have heard about Him and you’ve heard about Jesus but that isn’t enough. Your eternity is still in the balance. If you don’t believe in Jesus for your salvation and choose to turn away from your old life and follow Him then your eternity is going to be with the fallen angels and Satan.
If you feel His touch in your heart and you choose to follow Him as your Savior then your eternity will be with Him. Just as the thief on the cross believed in Him and he was with Jesus in Paradise that day! We can’t do anything to determine our eternal home except to believe in Jesus for our salvation because He is the only way to Heaven! There are other religions that claim to have an eternity in store for them but only Jesus paid for your salvation and He is coming back one day to rule the Earth for one thousand years!
Make sure of your eternity while you still can because only in this life can you choose. Once you have died, the choice has been made and your destination is set. Make sure it is an eternity with Jesus.
God’s love stretches from one side of the universe to the other. It also reaches from Heaven all the way to Earth. The width and depth and length and breadth of God’s love for us encompass all of Creation. So…why do we doubt His love for us sometimes? We see some bad things happening or we get a diagnosis that isn’t good for us or someone we love and we ask, “Why me, Lord?”. God allows bad things to happen but it is usually because we need to learn something. Sometimes that lesson isn’t easy to learn and we have to learn it the hard way.
God’s love is still there. He never leaves us and what He allows in our life, good or bad, is usually for our own good. We don’t see it that way but after the trouble is over or we make it through the problem, usually we will see the reason for it. Sometimes we don’t see it immediately or even a year or so later but as long as we don’t move away from God and seek His answer for the reason, we will find it one day.
Romans 5: 5,8:
5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us. 8 But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
John 3:16,17: 16 For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.
Ephesians 2:4,5: 4 But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our trespasses. It is by grace you have been saved!
God’s love for us is shown through the sacrifice of His Son for our salvation. But…God’s love also shows up in unexpected ways almost every day. Most of us don’t notice. A cool breeze on a hot day. A large cloud that shades our workplace wherever it may be. The rest we get after a long day, even if it takes a while. Finding our keys when we have lost them.
Some people may not think of these small gifts as showing the love of God, but they do. He cares for us far more than we can imagine. I believe that the fact that God loved us long before we were even born is the hardest part of His love for us to take in. He knew about each of us before Creation morning. Remember, Scripture says that God puts our sins away as far as the East is from the West. That is an infinite amount of space between Himself and any record of our sins once we have accepted Jesus and the atonement of His blood.
Jesus told His disciples to allow the children to come to Him and it is their innocence and complete faith that He desires. The problem that we have is our “grown” ideas and the fact that most of us want to help out even when we ask Him to take care of a problem. All of us want to pitch in and help but when it is cancer or something that we can’t do anything about we need to learn to depend on Him…like a child.
Even a pet or companion, like a little dog/Dachshund, depends upon us for their care, food, and well-being. We need to learn to depend on God for those things as well. We are hard-headed though and we tend toward trying to help God when He doesn’t need our “help” to take care of things. Even when we know that we can’t “help” Him, we still try to and most of the time we get in His way or even try to take whatever we have prayed about back into our hands so that we can fix it.
God’s love for us, and all of His Creation, is far more intimate and deep than we can imagine. Remember, He is the One Who knitted our DNA together in the womb before we were born. He knows the kind of personality you will have and how smart you will be long before you are born. Every molecule that makes you and me who we are was designed and placed in us by Him. There is no part of you that you can keep from Him even when you want to keep something secret.
There is something else that we need to think about and remember about God’s love for us: He came to Earth as a human to give His Life to ransom us from hell and if we believe in His atonement on the cross…we will have eternal life with Him. If that doesn’t demonstrate God’s love for every person that He knows will accept His gift of grace…I don’t know what could.
“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope . . . because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:3–5).
The Bible does not say that we have to experience suffering to learn patience or to increase our faith in Him. Jesus did say that we would have trouble and persecution in this world. Although suffering did happen in Paul’s life and the apostles’ lives after Jesus was taken up. Suffering has been a part of the church since the beginning but it brings our faith and our patience to be perfected in our faith in Him. This is part of life and all of us have experienced it to one degree or another.
Remember, God is Life and it is by His pleasure that we live and have our being. Each breath and every heartbeat that we have is given to us by Him. That is why we need to seek Him every day before we go anywhere or even get out of bed because He provides us with the ability to talk, walk and live in His Presence every day. Just remembering this and doing this is not an easy thing for us to do because we’ve been brought up to think that we can do it ourselves…without His help. But, God will allow us to do that until we realize that we truly need His help in all of our lives and in everything that we do. Many times it takes something drastic to happen in our lives to force us to give Him the wheel of our lives and direct us toward a better outcome than we could’ve possibly steered our lives toward.
The Living Message of Christ 