When Jesus was here His disciples were preoccupied with their ideas about the Messiah. Who He would be and what He would do occupied their minds so much that they nearly missed the One Who chose them to follow Him and learn from Him. In some ways, this same preoccupation keeps many people today from becoming disciples of Jesus. They hear all of the wonderful gifts we are given through our belief in Him, but they seem to have blinders that keep them from seeing Him as their Lord and Savior.
It’s like we are too busy with “things” in our lives that get in the way of our commitment and desire to know and follow Him. How can we commit some time to studying His Word every day? The only way I know is to have a Bible study app on my phone and follow it daily. Life gets in the way of our commitment to Him, which is the problem. We should give our troubles and our cares of this life to Him so we can learn how to be His disciples.
Many who go to church hear this wonderful news and yet their life gets in the way. Everyday worries and troubles cause them to become distracted from following Jesus. They don’t believe that they have become distracted because they still listen to God’s Word and pray but your day should begin and end with His Word and with prayer in between to keep you on your pathway.
God doesn’t get preoccupied. He takes care of the whole universe and He is interested in your daily life as well. Most of us don’t understand that God cares that much about each of us, not just as a whole but individually. Remembering what Jesus told His Father in His prayer for the disciples is humbling. “I pray that they will be one just as we are one”. His hope for us was to be as one and not splintered and divided like the church is today.
It seems that many of us get distracted from our walk with Jesus. Sometimes it happens as we leave the church on Sunday and it carries on through the week until we are back at church again. Think about Jesus being distracted from His mission. How would that have played out? Not very well I’d imagine because if He can get distracted then He can’t be God in the flesh! I’m sure He was tempted to “take a day” but He couldn’t. That is what I imagine those times that He went off by Himself to be with the Father were about.
It is a radical idea for today but God says we are supposed to support and help each other as Christians. That doesn’t mean that we pay each other’s bills or buy each other’s groceries but don’t put a church down because they believe differently. Pray for each other and support every part of the Body of Christ, the church! Do we do this today? NO! We attack each other on social media and in other ways too. Why? Only God knows the real reason and He doesn’t like it at all.
Please pray for each other regardless of which church or denomination you are. If there is ever going to be a revival in America or the world, we MUST pray for each other.
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.
Jesus came to show God’s love toward people and it was this love that held Him on the cross for you and me.
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.
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!
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.
The Living Message of Christ 