How much do you need in this life? God gives us everything that we need every day but most of us take that for granted and we still wonder, “Where is God when I need Him?”. As someone who has grown up in America and has so-called “privileges” because I live here, I can tell you that those privileges are few. Some think that because I am “white” I have everything but I don’t. Life and friends can be cruel at times even when the “friends” don’t intend to be. Life is what we make of it or so I am told and in many ways that is true, but when you see many people who are wealthier than you are, don’t assume that their life is a happy one all of the time. Nobody can be happy every minute of every day regardless of the amount of money they have access to.
Joy, on the other hand, can be had by someone who lives in a cardboard shack. Why? Isn’t happiness and joy the same thing? Not by a long shot. Joy is not fleeting. It is a feeling that you can have just because you were able to get up this morning and walk to the kitchen. Many people in the world don’t have that blessing. Happiness comes and goes and depends upon your situation at the time. Joy can go on forever.
Where am I going with this? In many parts of the world poverty is so crushing that even having rags on your body may be all of the clothes that you have, and yet some of those who live in this situation are joyful because they are believers in Jesus. In America, we can’t imagine being impoverished to that point, yet there are some in our country who do live that way.
God watches over all of us whether we are rich or poor, but many still don’t acknowledge Him as their Savior because when they felt the need for Him to intervene in some way for them, He did not. We can’t know why He didn’t heal or fix a problem or disease but He does. He may use a doctor or a prayer to heal but the answer is always up to Him. As Christians, we have access to Him all of the time but many of us allow the world to dictate when we seek Him. We try all kinds of treatments and other ways of healing us before we, as a last resort, turn to Him.
Being joyful in the face of a medical problem that feels overwhelming is not something many of us even consider, but one of Jesus’ disciples said that we should “count it all as Joy”, the good and the bad days. If you have given your life to Jesus and are walking through the world feeling sad or even angry because of a prayer that hasn’t been answered, ask Him to show you why it hasn’t been. God uses the good days and the bad days to give us strength and increase our faith. We may not like the way He does it but we will see the outcome one day and realize that it was for our good and His glory that it happened that way. Seek Him today and know that He loves each of us warts and all.
He is enough.
We are living a life that is so fleeting that it is described as a puff of smoke, why do we think we have plenty of time to accept Jesus Christ as our Savior? If you have asked Jesus into your heart but you are still living the life of a sinner, one that doesn’t look like a Christian life, then you are fooling yourself by saying “I am a Christian”.
When Jesus is truly asked into someone’s life and heart and it is sincere…there is a change that comes over your heart. Yes, you will slip up and say things that you shouldn’t but you will be convicted by the Holy Spirit, that what you said or did is wrong. You feel the wrongness of it because you do belong to Him. If you never feel that conviction, then you don’t belong to Him and you are not saved.
Saying a prayer and having someone tell you that you are a Christian doesn’t save you. If your behavior doesn’t change, then you haven’t received Jesus as your Savior. There is always a change in your life and your heart when Jesus comes in to be your Savior. Your life changes because the Holy Spirit comes into your life and into your heart and you are saved by believing in Him and the sacrifice that He gave His Life for all of us and it is a gift from God through faith in Him by our acceptance of Jesus as our Savior.
Salvation comes to each of us by belief in Jesus. Many people question this today and many others don’t believe in Him at all. Some don’t even believe He existed but God’s Word doesn’t lie, He came to give His life for all of mankind and He did. Then, three days later, He walked out of the grave and taught for forty days before He ascended to Heaven.
The children recognized Jesus in many ways more deeply and completely than His disciples did. We should come to Him as the children did, with complete child-like faith. Our problem is our adult knowledge and acquired disbelief that many of us have after our time in jobs and life in general. We doubt many things, even Jesus, to the point of needing some kind of “proof”. God’s Word is the proof because He cannot lie but we must believe!
Believing that He existed isn’t enough. There are many historical proofs outside of the Bible that prove He existed and was crucified. Your belief for salvation must come by your heart not just knowledge but spiritually believing that He died for your sins to cleanse you of those sins, no matter how small they may be or even how big they are. He came to bring many people into God’s Kingdom through this kind of belief and when the Holy Spirit convicts you that you NEED Him as your Savior, don’t ignore this conviction. Many people have done so and put it off for years until they died without Him and began serving eternity in punishment because they didn’t believe in Jesus while they could.
Our life here is extremely short compared to one million years and that is just the beginning of eternity. Jesus came to give us Life in eternity with Him, the Creator of all. Eternity is not going to be boring as some think. We will have many things to do for Him and living in His Presence will be far more than I can describe here. More beautiful than the most beautiful place on Earth. Most of the prophets and disciples of Jesus who were given a glimpse of Heaven couldn’t describe it other than saying “it is more than we can imagine”.
Rain forests and mountains on Earth are beautiful but those same places in the presence of God, Who gives life to everything, they would be more green, more alive than they look here. I’ve read some descriptions from people who had near-death experiences that everything in Heaven is more complete in every way. Even after seeing it, they couldn’t give a better description than that. Just like the prophets and apostles who saw a little bit of it, their description from our perspective could not do it justice. Just as a picture of say the Grand Canyon is beautiful but being there and seeing it with your own eyes…can’t compare to a photo.
Seek Him while He can be found in your life today. When the church is taken up, you truly want to be counted in that number. The next seven years after the church is gone will become “hell on Earth” for real and not a movie.
The Living Message of Christ 