Read His Words and then obey His commands. Belief is an action word. The proof of your faith and your belief is your actions and your life. Following God takes commitment, faith in Him, and belief in Jesus for your salvation.
Growing in your faith and in your walk takes time in God’s Word and prayer so you can gain wisdom from His Word. Anything you don’t understand in the Bible can be cleared up with a prayer. Just ask the One Who inspired the writers to put it on paper or papyrus and He will give you the meaning you seek.
God loved us so much that He sent Jesus to die for our sins. All we have to do is believe in Him and His sacrifice to be in heaven with Him, just like the criminal that was crucified with Him.
This was from 2017. These numbers have gone down since then. I pray that anyone who reads this will seek to know for sure about their salvation through Jesus Christ.
Many times we wake up with pain. Some people say that it proves you’re alive for one more day. The way I’ve come to look at another day is this: be grateful for the gift of waking up because some people didn’t.
God gives each of us a certain number of days before we are born and when those days are used up, He calls us home. Sometimes it seems too early when young people die and are taken from this world but God knows His reason for doing so. Then there are those times when someone is given a long life and their life and the witness they have touched many lives because of the way they live it.
Yesterday is in your past, tomorrow is not here yet so it is a mystery. God has given each of us who are reading this today and it is His gift to us, that is why it is called the present. Use the minutes that you have today and the blessings that He has given you to be a blessing to others. Why? Because you don’t know if today is your last day or not.
I was angry at God and my father when I was younger. I tried to kill myself with alcohol during my teenage years. I tried to keep my Mom and my grandparents from discovering what I was doing but they eventually found out.
I felt that my parent’s divorce was because of me or that I had something to do with it. But the reason was not because of me, although I didn’t find this out until I was almost thirty years old.
When you are a child, you believe that everything revolves around you and in some cases it does. But the reasons for the divorce and the break-up of their marriage and other things had nothing to do with me. Nevertheless, I drank alcohol when I was a teenager. Enough that I had at least one wreck that totaled my mother’s car and put me in the hospital for about a week. Even when I wasn’t driving and drinking, I had alcohol stashed in the air-conditioning ducts in our home, so I had access to it even when I was “at home watching TV”.
My Mom tried to give me as much “freedom” as possible which can be a good thing but not exactly in my case. I had the alcohol stashed and I had some marijuana hidden in my dresser. When I was a junior in high school, she lived with my grandparents and let me live on my own in the trailer across the yard. So that could’ve been much worse than it turned out to be but I think my grandparents were praying for me at this time. I didn’t care about going to church or God or a relationship with Jesus.
To cut down the length of this story…I wrecked my Mom’s car one night. I was coming home from a Friday night football game although I hadn’t gone there to play or even watch the game. I went there to get drunk…period. I achieved my goal because I don’t remember much about the drive home except when the car went airborne. I went off the road and hit a culvert and a driveway which tore the transmission from the back of the engine. The car came down on a fence and flipped over, smashing all of the windows in the car. After a time I came to my senses and crawled from the car and then stumbled to a house nearby and called my Mom. In a way, the fact that I was drunk probably kept me from being killed.
All of this happened over forty years ago. I reconciled with my father. My mother passed away in 1995. So much of my youth had been wasted by being angry about my family being broken apart when I was about five years old. I didn’t have anything to do with their break-up but I was angry with them for depriving me of a “normal” life. Who has a normal life these days? It seems that few people have ever really had a “normal” life really. So many have problems that plague their family’s past and present and many of us today try our best to fix our family’s past by committing to having a real relationship today. Some of us try to model our family relationship on our parents or our grandparent’s relationship but if theirs wasn’t based on a relationship with Jesus it won’t work.
Today’s family needs to have a relationship with Jesus Christ as the foundation of their family at the beginning of their relationship. Because if He isn’t the foundation and the anchor of your relationship with each other, how is that relationship going to be interpreted by your children? While I went a bit overboard with alcohol when I was younger, God finally brought me around after about twenty-five years or so. I pray that my story might give some of you a little inspiration of what NOT to do and Who you need to have in your life in order to HAVE a Life.
Seek Jesus as your Savior. Believe in Him and learn about Him through reading the Word and growing in your faith.
God’s Word gives us life-sustaining advice and rules to live by. Just like God is speaking to us from His Word, which He does every time you read it. Make it a daily habit in your life to read the Bible so you will have His Word to guide you and keep you in everything that you do.
Jesus came to each disciple individually. In their situation and in their life, He came to them where they were. He came in their problems and in their need. We are called to be His followers and live our lives as though He is walking with us and is…every day! People need to know this and see Him in their lives when it is going good and when it is not going well at all.
Jesus loves us and He is with us in every situation. When He called Nathaniel to be His disciple, Nathaniel didn’t know that He was with him in his situation until Jesus told him that He saw him under the fig tree before he came to meet Him.
Jesus Calls Philip and Nathanael
43 On the next day He desired to go forth into Galilee. And He finds Philip. And Jesus says to him, “Follow Me.” 44 Now Philip was from Bethsaida, from the city of Andrew and Peter.
45 Philip Finds Nathanael and says to him, “We have found Him whom Moses wrote of in the Law, also the prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
46 And Nathanael said to him, “Is any good thing able to be out of Nazareth?”
Philip says to him, “Come and see.”
47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and He says concerning him, “Behold, truly an Israelite, in whom there is no deceit.”
48 Nathanael asks, “From where do You know me?”
Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, you being under the fig tree, I saw you.”
49 Nathanael answered Him, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God; You are King of Israel.”
God loves us on our good days and our not-so-good days. I pray that anyone who reads this will seek Jesus to be their Savior.
The Living Message of Christ 