We are destroying our minds

Scripture — in both the Old and New Testaments — warns us against investing in things which cannot give us anything in return, in pouring our affections and attentions toward the worthless and temporal. Much of that is what many people are doing today. Looking at their phones and at games and tablets. Liking this and texting that and commenting on the new dress that someone bought that you don’t even know. Sometimes praying for people who are hurting from the loss of a loved one but most of the time we spend useless hours looking at things which have no real value to us in this world or for the next one.

Can we get away from this destructive addiction to Snap chat or Facebook? Can we get away from any one of a number of “social media” platforms which are taking too much of our attention away from God and His purpose for our lives? Yes we can but for some it will be a very hard break from a platform which has consumed our attention morning and night for many years. It really is an addiction when you look at it that way and it is getting worse. How can we move back to our lives which we enjoyed before the Internet and Facebook came along? Truthfully, many young people won’t be able to. They have grown up from the time that they could hold a phone or tablet until they are nearing pre-teen years and TV and movies just don’t have the same impact on their lives as their social media does.

They don’t look at it as an addiction but that is exactly what it is. Anything that you begin your day with and go through your day with very little break from it and then you take it to bed with you…I would call that an addiction. It isn’t drugs or anything like that but the opinions and ideas that you are exposed to all day every day get into your mind and into your thought patterns. Eventually those ideas will become your ideas and your opinions.

Christians are supposed to meditate on God’s Word and read it daily so that we can protect our minds from the temptations of life and those from Satan as well. We are not immune from those and if we don’t have God’s Word in our mind, helping us to resist those temptations to say something or do something that we shouldn’t then he will be victorious over our witness. I would rather be addicted to reading God’s Word than to any social media that is available today. Follow Jesus and read His Word because there is at least one person that you will meet tomorrow who needs to hear about your Lord and Savior!

Who are you?

Have you ever wondered this to yourself? Who am I? I don’t know you, but God does. Have you ever thought about that? Why would God want to know me or love me? I’ll tell you why…because He LOVES you! He has loved you and me and everyone else who has ever lived with a love that we can’t understand. Because He is our Creator! He knit your molecules together in such a way that there is no other person nor has there ever been another person exactly like you!

Who are we? If you are a believer in Jesus as your Savior, then you are a child of God and an heir to everything that God wants to give you and He will give it to you. When it is His time to do so. We want it now, today, but God knows that much of His love and the blessings which He has prepared for you and me are not useful right now. Our heavenly home is waiting for us but we can’t live in it right now. The horse that we will ride behind Jesus is waiting in heaven for us but we can’t ride him or her right now. The city which has streets of gold is there but we can’t experience it until we are there. We are blessed and loved and highly favored in God’s sight but we won’t know how much until we get there.

We are blessed and loved and sanctified in Jesus and we are each part of God’s family and it will be a BIG family gathering one day. When that day comes, the world will mourn our disappearance but we will be in the most wonderful place in the universe! We will be with God! How amazing will that be? Living in heaven with our Father, our Creator and our Savior for eternity. Will we be doing anything? Of course we will. God doesn’t save you from the punishment of hell and then condemn you to a life of boredom. We will be working for Him in every capacity that He can give us the ability to do. Consider Who He is. Our Creator and our redeemer. We will have any ability that He wants us to have whether we lived that way in this life or not. Whether we have been a leader or a carpenter or a welder or a police person or a doctor, God can give each of us the knowledge and ability to do His will all through eternity and He will!

Who are you? We are whoever God says we are. We are able to be whatever He says we can be. We are able to do whatever He says we can because He loves us and He never leaves us. He is our Creator and our Redeemer and He is able to give us abilities which we would never have unless He gave them to us and gave us the knowledge to accomplish them. We are His children and we need to be grateful and thankful for each breath we take. Yes, we are loved and we are forgiven and we are His!

Who am I? I am in Christ!

Your life is a battleground

If you are a Christian then this is true. Satan is always trying to catch you in some way to say something out of character for a Christian or maybe even do something which would make someone think that you aren’t a Christian. It happens every day to those of us who are Christians or even claim to be. If you don’t believe it, look at the story about Jesus and His forty days in the desert fasting. At the end of it He was hungry just as any of us would be. Don’t tell me you can’t fast because I have done it. Granted, I did it with water and juice and Jesus didn’t have the juice but it is possible to do. Getting back to Jesus’ story…after forty days He was weak in his body and very likely He could imagine all kinds of food around Him. That was where Satan came to Him and began tempting Him with “If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into bread to satisfy your hunger“.

Jesus countered that with “Man shall not live on bread alone but by every Word which comes from God“. Satan even had the audacity to say, “If you are the Son of God”! He knew Who Jesus was and he knew that Jesus could’ve done exactly the thing which he was tempting Him to do, but to do so would’ve been against the will of the Father. We are tempted every day with thoughts and feelings and other kinds of temptations from our past lives, the life we lived before the Holy Spirit took up His home in our heart. But, we have His Spirit and it is this Spirit that we should listen to every day because He can teach us more about our Savior and our position as His disciple.

Are we disciples of Jesus? If we are truly Christians and have asked Him to come into our heart and our life and cleanse us from our old ways and bring about a change in our life then we are His disciples. We also need to be walking with Him each and every day reading the Word of God and learning more about our Savior so that we can use His Word to counter any temptation that may be thrown at us during the day. Don’t be misled, Satan and his demons will send all kinds of thoughts and temptations your way to cause you to stumble or just make your witness for Jesus ineffective. It only takes one misstep that someone sees or hears to ruin any credibility that you had as a Christian and that credibility can be hard or even impossible to get back.

Pray that the temptation will be light and that your faith in Jesus is stronger. Read God’s Word and use it to counter any temptation that comes your way because in perseverance in your faith you can show that you are saved and sealed as a child of God in Jesus Christ.

Thank you, Lord

How much do we owe the Lord in gratitude? Everything. If it weren’t for Him we wouldn’t be alive at all. If He had not seen us in the fullness of time from the very beginning, knowing that we would need His strength and His mercy in our lives…we would be lost and without hope. But God did see us and He chose each of us to come to know Him through Jesus Christ, His Son. There are so many things which we owe our thanks to God for until I couldn’t begin to list even the things which He does for me on one day, regardless of considering my life or the world around us!

God provides us with the air that we breathe and the world in which we live, yet there are many who either choose not to believe in Him or just don’t want to believe in Him and His Son. We have been given a wonderful gift through the knowledge of Jesus and His sacrifice for our sins. We should be thankful for that gift and live our lives accordingly because one day soon, He is coming back and He will be coming as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Amen

The Lord is my Rock and my Deliverer!

And he said, The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; The God of my rock; in him will I trust: he is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence. I will call on the Lord , who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies.
2 Samuel 22:2‭-‬4 KJV
https://bible.com/bible/1/2sa.22.2-4.KJV

Why should Christians be afraid of anything that man can do when we have a Deliverer Who is our Lord and Savior? While it is true that in today’s world there are evil men and we are experiencing evil times with diseases and wars and natural disasters happening all around us, God is still in control. He knows what is happening and He is allowing it to happen true enough, but His plan and the outcome of His plan will be glorious beyond our imagination. Consider living in squalor today but you have faith in God and in Jesus. What a wondrous joy it will be to walk the streets of purest gold one day!

Jesus said that He was going to prepare a place for us and that He would come again and take us with Him to be there in that place. We look at all of the “things” which we can have in this life and we usually think that “life couldn’t get any better than this”. But, eternity is going to be so much more than we can imagine now until it will likely be days before I can pick my jaw up from the floor! God would not have made those promises to us if He wasn’t going to fulfill them. So, we need to make sure that our life is in His hands and that we are ready when that day comes. Amen?

Have mercy on us, Lord!

We who are sinners should seek God’s mercy and grace each day. We are given so many blessings that we tend to take our days and those blessings for granted. We are given another day to serve the Lord, we have food and a roof over our heads, and our health has not failed us, yet we still ask for more. God is merciful and gracious toward each of us every day but many of us don’t notice it. Truly, life is a blessing in itself but many don’t notice the blessing of it until some part of it is diminished by disease or an accident.

God loved us even while we were sinners and haven’t given our hearts or our life to Him but most don’t see it that way. Many just go about their lives complaining about how life isn’t fair and their job isn’t fair, etc. When the real problem is that Satan is keeping your life at this point so you will complain and whine about life and especially blame God for your life being so bad. When your life feels this way, seek out the One Who created life in the first place! The God of the Bible was there before the first light was shown in the universe. He flung the stars and commanded that they give their light to the Earth for seasons and for the marking of time itself. The stars are also there to prove that God did this for His glory and to bring wonder into our lives.

If the night sky was just black with a moon shining in it and the other planets in our own solar system moving around the Sun, what wonder would emerge from that? Not much I’d imagine. You can’t imagine a sky at night without stars and constellations and galaxies all around us because there has never been a time that the human race looked up and saw emptiness in the heavens. It would be too depressing and scary too. Looking out into the blackness of space and the only points of light are the planets. I don’t think it would’ve inspired us to imagine anything outside of our own solar system. There would be nothing to imagine.

God created all of the universe, as big as it is, in order to inspire us and make us wonder about a Creator that made all of those stars and galaxies and black holes and all of the nebula which can birth new stars. Our telescopes show us much more wondrous and magnificent parts of our universe than our eyes can fathom from our own planet. When you see all of these, for some of us it is a confirmation of our Creator. For some scientists it is confirmation of their theories and the complex math which can explain much of what they see. All that I want to do is to look at those stars and galaxies and be humbled by how magnificent our Creator must be that has created our eyes which can take in all of the wonders around us.

In many ways, when you think about all that is out in the vastness of the cosmos, it makes you wonder why did God put us on this little ball of dirt in our solar system? Why does He love us so much that He was willing to die on a cross in a most painful and horrific way in order to pay the penalty for our sins? Because…He is God and He loves us, that’s why. His mercy and His grace is given to us with each breath that we are given for the time that we have. What more could we need beyond life itself? A relationship with Him forever that is what we need! That is all that we truly need.

Each image in this group is a galaxy and each one has thousands of stars, yet God chose us.

Does God care?

When you see the devastation of hurricanes and flooding which is happening on Grand Bahama island you wonder if God cares. Yes, He cares because we are part of His creation. He is in control although many would look at the storm and what it is doing an wonder “Why God?”! What have we done to deserve this? The truth is that God is in control and He allows the “ruler” of this world to do these things but He is limiting the destruction which would happen if He did not.

The truth of our situation on Earth is that Satan hates us with just as much passion and vitriol that he can muster. His hatred rivals the deep abiding love that God shows toward us every day except that his hatred is intended to hurt God through the pain and suffering which he can cause to us who carry the image of God. His hatred is pointed at humanity everywhere and the more suffering that he can cause to us, then he will do so because he knows that God cares so much for us. So through the pain that we feel every day, he is striking at God.

God LOVES each person on this Earth and He does care more deeply than we can imagine. He does limit the damage which the fallen angels of Satan’s group can do to us because of His love, but that doesn’t stop them from inflicting suffering on humanity in any way they can. We are at the very edge of the time which is just before the church being taken away. There is no set date for this, other than the date and the hour which only God knows.

Don’t forget, many passages in God’s Word speak volumes about the love of God toward us and His love is far beyond anything that we experience on a daily basis, even from our own family. He sent His Son Jesus to be the Perfect sacrifice to pay the penalty for ALL of our sins! He paid for the sins from Adam all the way to the very last person who will get saved before God takes us home. Granted, there are many who will not accept His gift of grace for our redemption and our salvation but the ones who will accept it, He will not turn them away if they are sincere in their repentance.

Humanity has changed how they view the Bible and God’s promises because of our idea of what we want it to say to us and the “rules” which God has in place. God designed each of us for a purpose and only He knows that purpose until you are convicted by His Spirit and feel the NEED for Jesus in your heart. Then your life can conform to His purpose for your life. Until that point, you won’t care about His purpose for you and you won’t seek Him until the Spirit brings your Spirit in alignment with His purpose for your life and His glory!

Oops is not in the Bible!

God is not surprised by anything, least of all what happens with His Creation. That means that nothing in your life or anywhere on Earth surprises Him. God has been in charge since before the universe was brought into being. So why do we seem to think that He either doesn’t exist or that He is out of touch with us?

Even though it has been two thousand years or so since Jesus walked with His disciples, God is still in control. None of His prophecies have fallen to the ground or failed in any way. Jerusalem and the Jewish people have come back together in the nation of Israel and their language is still intact. This has never happened in history before 1948 and it won’t happen again. Many other prophecies which were foretold by His prophets have come to pass as well and the only one which hasn’t taken place is the coming of our Savior to bring His children home.

Jesus said that He would come back for us and since God cannot lie, He will. The signs of which He spoke in Matthew 24 and in the beginning chapters of the Revelation which John wrote down are all around us today. No, God is not surprised by our behavior or by anything which is happening on Earth or in the cosmos.

Do we doubt Him and His Word? Yes, and mostly it is our own ideas and faults which we see in the world. God is allowing many things to happen so that we will turn to Him and many are doing that. But there are thousands, possibly millions who are accusing Him of not caring about us or completely pushing Him away because they don’t like what is written in His Word. Remember, love cannot be forced and He allows us to follow our own path until we realize that we truly need Him.

Don’t push Him away from your life or family because of a word or a phrase that you don’t like. We can’t pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe. Either you live by it and believe all of it or you don’t, there really isn’t another way to put it. God is in control but He still allows us to choose, so choose to believe in Jesus as your Savior. The alternative is an eternity without any life, any hope or any good thing at all.

Praise God!

How many people wake up each morning and thank God that they have one more day to do His will on this Earth? I do, some days. Then there are days, more than there should be, that I just get up and go about my daily routine and I don’t thank Him for anything until I’m about to eat something or maybe I read or hear about something that causes me to think about Him and what He does for us every day that we live. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m normal, whatever that is. God loves us when we are normal and also when we are not…normal. But, do we give Him our love in return? Do we praise Him when we see a hummingbird fly by or see a rainbow in the sky?

We live and move in this world not because of our own power and ability but because God placed us here and it is His will and purpose for us to be the person that He made us to be. Some of us may not find out who or what His will for us is until kinda late in life, but that’s okay. Maybe He was waiting until you were old enough to be the person that He knows you can be. Many of us are too ignorant to do His will when we are young because we think we know it all. We believe that we can do those things which come to mind even though we usually find that we can’t. We just thought we could. Sometimes those lessons hurt us physically and emotionally too. Usually, that is when we begin our search for the One Who can give us the ability to do His will and not our own.

Sometimes that search takes a long time and sometimes we find Him as we are beginning our search. We find Jesus when He knows we are ready, not when we think we are. Because we think we are ready at point A and He knows we won’t be ready until we reach point C or D. Wherever those points are in your life and at whatever age you reach them, the time and place was appointed by God. It did not come about because of your idea of the time and place, it followed God’s plan and purpose for your life. Whether we know it or even acknowledge it or not, God is and always has been in control of everything that happens on Earth. The election of whoever may be the President or the King or ruler in any country is under His hand and control too.

Since God knows when even a sparrow falls to the ground, don’t you think He cares about what is happening in your life and mine? Since His eyes see every life which He created on this Earth, animal or human, isn’t it wonderful to just breathe in the air which He created for all of us to breathe?

My peace I leave with you

John 14:1-14

Jesus Comforts the Disciples

1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. 4 And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

5 Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? 6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

7 If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.

8 Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. 9 Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? 10 Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake. 12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. 13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

Jesus comforted His disciples with these words because they heard Him speak of going away. God is always near us and with us in every trial that we face. There is only one Savior and that is Jesus Christ. The whole of God’s Word speaks about Him and points us toward belief in Him, so whether you believe in Him or not is your choice but the evidence of His love for you was shown on the cross that day. When you feel the Holy Spirit touch your heart and you know that you truly need Jesus, don’t hesitate because that time and opportunity may never come again.

Remember, we are not guaranteed tomorrow or even the next minute of our lives. Choose to give your life to Jesus today because it is always possible that you will meet Him tomorrow or even tonight. Eternity is a very long time, make sure of your destination before you arrive.