Do you feel like you are an outsider at times? All of us were at one time but God chooses people, even outsiders or those who feel that they are unworthy, in the way that He wishes. God chooses each of us when He deems that we are ready and useful. Sometimes, His call on our lives is the very thing that will change us and make us ready to follow Him. Sometimes His call on our lives does change us in radical ways. We become His followers and His Spirit changes us so much that “we are a new creation” from that point on.
We are changed in our heart and in our soul because of the Holy Spirit’s work after we have accepted Him as our Savior. From that point on we are “made new” in Him. Our witness for Him will be changed and so will our lives be changed when we learn and read the Bible and learn how we can serve Him from this point on. Many people think that our lives in Christ will just stay that way but we should sanctify our lives by studying His Word and learning more about Him and about our place in His ministry
The Bible is our guide to knowing how to serve God and be useful to Him. We must read it and study it every day, not just on Sunday at church. Being a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is not an easy task like many people think it is. Belief in Jesus is easy but following Him every day of our lives from that point on is not easy because much of the world and many people we are around during the week don’t make it easy. Even our “old self” is still at odds with the new person that we are living as Christ-followers, so we struggle to keep the old sins from overpowering our new way of life.
God loves each of us, whether we believe in Him or have asked Jesus to save us. Life has a way of confusing our outlook toward becoming more like Jesus, because we feel that we are truly at odds with our new nature when the Holy Spirit has changed us to be a new person in Christ. That is why we need to read God’s Word after we become Christians. We have the Holy Spirit that will help us understand His ways while we read it and the understanding will come later. Salvation comes the moment we accept Jesus as our Savior, we have the Holy Spirit in our heart from that moment on molding us into the person God intends for us to be but the understanding doesn’t come immediately. It is only after we have read His Word and prayed over it, sometimes for years, that the “light” will come on and we begin to understand the why and the reason for our salvation and the struggles that come with it.
So it is our job to learn more about Him and to do that we need to study His Word daily. Even a chapter every day will get you through the Bible and help you to understand more about who you and I are in Christ. Many pastors and churches don’t tell us that we have to study to grow in our Christian walk. The body of Christ, the church, should be involved in teaching new Christians to be more involved in reading the Bible and learning about God and our place in the church, the Body of Christ.
Seek to know Jesus as your Savior if you aren’t sure of your salvation. He died for you and we should put our old self to death and live for Him until the day that He comes for His Bride.
I used to hear people talking about partying in hell with Satan but that is not how Jesus described it. He told a story of a rich man who didn’t care for anyone but himself. A man named Lazarus was a poor man begging at the gate to the man’s home but he never received anything. One day, the rich man died and was buried. Lazarus died and was taken by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. While there, the rich man called out to Abraham to ask for a drop of water to cool his tongue. No parties, no joy, no meeting with friends in hell, just punishment and pain. Abraham told him that there was a chasm between them that was there to keep anyone from crossing from the place of torment to paradise or from paradise to them.
God didn’t make hell to punish people. It was created to punish Satan and those who rebelled against God by not accepting Jesus as their Savior. That is the key to staying out of hell…believing in Jesus as your Savior. No amount of money or works will do it. Life doesn’t suck bad enough to waste your time following things that will lead you astray. But many people think that it does. Some even take their lives over trivial things that, in the long run, don’t matter all that much. I know there are veterans and drug addicts who take their lives because of the “demons” that they are living with but Jesus can fix those problems too if you will let Him.
God loves all of mankind not just one nation or a few people. Jesus died for all of us but there are so many who just refuse to believe this. It is spelled out in the Gospel but so many people won’t read it or they look at God’s Word like it is just some book written long ago and it isn’t relevant for our time. God knows each of us better than we know ourselves and when you think that the Creator of the entire universe even considers individuals on our little speck of dust, that is amazing!
We have trouble believing this but if you have given your heart to Jesus, it is easy to live this way because the Holy Spirit lives inside you. He will give you the strength and the ability to live your life this way and to forgive those who have hurt you in the past. Seek to know Jesus as your Savior because hell is the punishment that never ends and it wasn’t made for you.
This is a core value of a Christian and their life in Jesus. When a Christian applies it to their daily life it separates church goers from disciples of Christ. Why should there be a difference? Because, people who go to church, regularly or not, are hearers of the Word but many don’t live that way. There are many who have heard many sermons during their lifetime but their life doesn’t reflect Him. It’s like a car that goes to the station for gas once a week. They get filled on Sunday and then try to run on that for a week or more. Their life and even their heart doesn’t show the transformative power of the sermon or of God’s Word.
I know that we aren’t supposed to judge people and I’m really not doing that. It’s just that there are certain things which show up in the life of a believer after they have given their life to Christ and for many “church goers” those changes aren’t there.
God’s one requirement for all of us, especially believers, is obedience. The Ten Commandments are a prime example of what all of us should be trying to follow in our lives daily. So many believers try to do this and many of us fall short. We let anger and frustration get in the way of our walk with Jesus. We let family squabbles get in the way too. Life is too short to allow things like arguments or hurt feelings get in the way of our walk with Jesus. It happens, but if you truly belong to Jesus, you are forgiven and can claim forgiveness from those sins, big or small.
There are so many things that are happening all over the world. In Asia, America, Israel and everywhere it seems, there is so much happening everywhere and the world seems to be ignoring a lot of it. Even the floods that happened in North Carolina have been ignored now that fires have destroyed so much of California. In North Carolina there were many houses destroyed and thousands who died but after a couple of weeks, this “news story” was pushed aside.
Why do the networks push aside stories so quickly? Likely because the new stories are more interesting, some because they are in California and near Hollywood. Flooding in the mountains of North Carolina doesn’t grab people’s attention like fires burning through cities in California.
These are just a couple of the news stories out there but you can tell how the news is decided. Why am I bringing this up on my website? Because there are many millions of Christians who are being tortured and killed in countries that don’t like Christians and we never hear about it either. We are living at the “end of the age”, the Church age, and life is getting harder to understand. Much of what we see depicted as “normal” today is not normal at all. God’s Word tells us that the world around us would become more like the world was when Noah built the Ark before the floods and it has become that way.
Read the sixth chapter of Genesis and then the 24th chapter of Matthew. The Lord describes much of what is happening today and He does it from 2,000 years ago. He is God the Son after all. My point is that we should be looking into eternity and where we will spend it. If you believe in Jesus as your Savior then your eternal home will be in Heaven. If you refuse to believe in Him for your Salvation and think that you can work your way into Heaven, your eternal home will be in hell. Take your pick.
The Living Message of Christ 