Forgiveness

Be grateful that God doesn’t stay angry with us because all of us deserve it. God loves us which is why He sent Jesus to pay the penalty for our sins.

Where the Love is…

Jesus came to show God’s love toward people and it was this love that held Him on the cross for you and me.

Fixing things…

It begins in the church. The humbling for the world and the United States in particular begins in the church! We, as Christians, need to give up ourselves and seek God as our Lord…but we don’t know how. Even when we’ve been in the church all of our lives. So many of us spend every day looking for a path and we haven’t turned loose of ourselves yet!

We have to crucify ourselves daily like Jesus said, to realize our place in His calling to us. God’s call on our lives is more serious than most of us realize because of the “things” we need to give up. Our problem is those “things”, whatever they may be. To some people, those are big items and sometimes we have a hard time even considering giving up our personal “idols”.

Nowhere in Scripture is it referenced in a way for us to know the “how” of giving up ourselves and the parts of our lives that have become “idols”. That is the part that makes Christianity and being a Christian hard to understand and do. Truthfully, we don’t know how because no one else knows how to teach the “how”. Reading and studying God’s Word prayerfully and sincerely will teach us a little bit about the “how” but it’s not an easy lesson. We are not taught in our lives how to place our lives down as a sacrifice daily and follow Jesus in His teachings.

Sometimes we don’t find a way to do this until we are broken in our spirit by something happening in our lives. It could be a loss in your family or it could be God getting your attention by your own “demons” like alcoholism or drugs or something else that brings you to your knees. Until that happens most of us won’t surrender our lives to Him until we hit that wall and realize that we can’t do it on our own.

Leave the 99

Just as Jesus said this to His disciples, it is relevant to us today. If your child was lost in a store or a mall, it wouldn’t matter how long it took, you would drop what you were doing and look for that child until you found them! Most of us would discipline that child when we did find them but the point is we would search diligently until they were found.

That is what God does with us. When we are His and we have truly given our hearts to Him, when we go astray He will seek us to bring us back. The desire of your heart will be to get back to Him because we know Him and He knows us. If you only think you know Him, this won’t work. You can step away from Him and after a little while you won’t even feel the need to go back to Him because He wasn’t in your heart to begin with.

Unfortunately, there are many people today who fall into that last group. They might be a member of a church or they’ve been raised in church for most of their lives. They know scripture and have been in Sunday school many times. They have plenty of “head knowledge” of Jesus. They know about Him but they don’t know Him. This is where the revival in the church needs to begin today…in the church!

The ripple effect

Where does your ripple stop? Every word that we say in this life affects someone else. Sometimes, someone in our family or nearby hears what we say and it touches them. For good or bad, it has touched their soul and the ripple effect goes on from there. We may never know how far it goes in this life but in the life to come, we will find out what our words did.

If you look at the Gospels and see how Jesus taught His disciples and the things that He did, the ripple effect is evident. The church began with those twelve disciples and the letters that they wrote about Him and what He did. Then they took their experience of Jesus and used His name to heal people and tell them about His Kingdom. They told everyone who would listen about His love for them and that it was the love of God that sent Him to provide a way of salvation through belief in Him. Love is the key and without it, you can’t open the door to eternity.

We live our lives going through so many motions of acceptance and rejection, yet we are also looking for something that sometimes takes years for us to realize what it is. Some of us are given this answer when we are young and some only find it after heartache and pain. Many Christians seem to question whether they have found it or not. Why? Because they look around them and see all of the problems and wonder when will God fix this, will it be fixed in my lifetime or not?

It is not for us to know the time when God will fix the world because He will do it in His time. It is God’s timing that we should look for and be patient in waiting for Him to do His will. As Jesus told His disciples “Do not worry about tomorrow” because worry is practical atheism. You can do nothing about tomorrow because it isn’t here yet. Do God’s will today and seek to do His will today because only God knows tomorrow and what is in it.

God loves you!

Sing to the Lord…

Decisions

I’ve heard many preachers say that we have to decide to “trust in God’s ways and give our life to Him”. This is true, but the Holy Spirit must convict us of our need for God before we will make that decision. We can’t just go through life and one day decide on our own to ask Jesus to be our Savior and make it happen because on our own, without the Holy Spirit’s conviction, we won’t do that. Before I became convicted that I truly needed Jesus as my Savior I didn’t think I needed Him unless something was beyond my control. Even then, if I prayed to Him about it and it worked itself out like I thought it should I would sometimes say “Thank you”, and go on my way. I didn’t give much thought to the process or the One Who is really in charge until I became a Christian and began studying His Word.

Mankind, in his/her natural state, will not seek God’s help until their circumstances force them to. When you come to the end of your ability then you will seek the One with the ability to take care of the problem, whatever it may be. God loves us but He didn’t want people who would be like an automaton and not love Him too. He will allow us to mess up our lives, sometimes spectacularly, to the point that we realize we are at the end of ourselves, and His Voice, the Holy Spirit can get through all of our “chatter”. We hear Him and realize that we need Him more than anything else.

The reason for our need is not because we made the decision to follow Jesus on our own but because we realize through the prompting of the Holy Spirit that we can’t live our lives without Him. For some people this is when they will tell God that they can live without Him just fine…and they will. But they will be doing it on their strength and in their ways. God won’t be a real part of their life other than as a little voice that reminds them occasionally that He is still there…waiting for them. Sometimes they think that because they hear or feel this “small voice” they are His and are “all right with God”. Satan is the one telling them this. Remember, Satan convinced one-third of the angels to follow him in rebellion so he is very good at deception.

Many in the church believe his lies. Some of them are in the pulpit. The church has become weak in its faith because of the lies and doctrines that have been made up by twisting Scripture out of context. The church at Laodecia and the letter written to them is a prime example of the church today. The church today, regardless of its denomination, has become prideful and “self-sufficient” in its beliefs. I pray that anyone who reads this will ask God to show them where they are in their walk with Him.