Where are you?

Many people seem to be wondering this about God these days. You see and hear about disasters and wars and all of the diseases and droughts all around the world and many people do wonder about why they can’t tell if God is even interested in our lives today. He hasn’t gone away and He does care more for the entirety of humanity, those who believe in Him and those who don’t, and He cares enough that He sent His Son to give His life as payment for our sins. Your sins and mine!

God has not moved away from us, He is still on the throne and in His City but He is also near you in your problems and in your trials. He is the One Who strengthens us every day to get up and be about our business in this world and in our life on it. I pray that our nation and this world will seek Him before it is too late.

Why do I say that? Because we are standing at the edge of a dangerous place and time and I fear that the person who is in America’s White House may just tip the scale so that things may spiral out of control toward a economic and worldwide collapse like the world has never seen before. God is still in control, even when this happens but we won’t be able to look around us and tell it. Unless you are holding on to Him in this time and during the days and weeks ahead, the situation will look terribly bad.

God loves us, but just as He used other cultures and nations to punish Israel in times past, He will also do the same with America and the world because we have abandoned His teachings and His Law. You know that it is true because when you turn on any news channel, regardless of the country you live in, the Bible and Christians are being blamed for the problems that we face!

When the REAL problem is actually that we have pushed Him and the Bible out of public view and out of our children’s education and this is the greatest threat to our world because we have turned away from our Creator. We have decided that we know better how to run this world and train our children to seek their own way and their own wisdom rather than His.

The whole of Creation cries out for Him to restore the glory and beauty of what He began in Genesis because in the beginning all of it was perfect and good in God’s eyes. Nothing was out of place, nothing was wrong with any part of it until we, meaning Adam and Eve, chose to do things their way and go against what God had told them to do. Today almost all of humanity has chosen to go their way and do whatever feels right to them instead of learning about and obeying God.

I would rather be in God’s hands than to go against His Word and follow the crowd today. Please, pray with me for God’s mercy and His provision for all of us, because in the hands of mankind is only destruction, pain and misery.

If you will obey…

Have you thought about being a Christian? Are you a Christian in practice and not just on Sunday morning or Saturday or Wednesday night, depending upon when your church meets for services? God seeks people of faith who will obey His commandments and seek Him in all things. Why do I say this? Because God said so!

He told the Israelites to go into the Promised land and destroy utterly all of the pagan nations and people who lived there. Why? Because God knew that they would entice His people to “check out” their religion and their gods, and they would turn away from Him. Which is exactly what happened. But, before they crossed into that land, Moses gave them a sermon on obedience and the rewards that come with it.

I am not going to print the whole text of it but you can read it here. God told them through Moses that if they would obey Him and keep their belief and their faith in Him, that He would bless them mightily but He also said that if they did not obey, there would be consequences.

If you have ever read the Bible, particularly Exodus and Deuteronomy, you know what happened. They would obey for a time, then they would begin to follow the practices of those around them because they didn’t follow God’s command. It is like watching a child of two or three when you tell them not to do something and you go to leave the room and immediately they move toward the very thing you told them to leave alone. Like the cookie jar or some other treat which tastes so good, but you have told them not to eat more than one.

This happened all through the wilderness and it was the very reason why they had to wander for forty years. They refused to obey God or listen to His wisdom. He had told them that He would drive out the people ahead of them if they would obey Him and they were afraid. Only two men out of the twelve would go into the promised land and they were the ones ready to go because the Lord said that He would be with them and fight for them. They were Caleb and Joshua.

All of the others died in the wilderness from the age of twenty on up except for those two men. Caleb took his land away from those who were there when he was 80 years of age. Joshua led the rest of Israel into battle many times and he was 80 when they crossed the Jordan into the Promised land. After his death, the people forgot about how God had provided for them and they began to follow their own ways of living and to follow the religions of people who were living there, just as God had told them not to do.

Even when Israel demanded a king be placed over them, even the king didn’t obey God when he went up against another ruler. The very first battle that Saul fought after being crowned King, he disobeyed God’s decree. He had been told by the prophet Samuel to wait and he, Samuel, would come and pray for their victory over the Philistines. When Samuel delayed in coming, after seven days Saul put the priest’s ephod on himself and offered burnt offerings to God because his troops were afraid.

It is at this point that God told Samuel to find a King from among the people who had a heart like His. He went to a man named Jesse and chose David and anointed him to be King, but he wasn’t crowned King until after Saul had ruled for a long time.

The point that I am making here is that God requires obedience not sacrifices or outward shows of our loyalty. God doesn’t require a burnt offering but He does require our obedience to Him, but it usually is our pride which causes us to do our own thing and try to serve Him in our own way. If we would just learn from the failures of Israel in the Old Testament we could and would be so much more effective in our lives and in serving God today.

When things go wrong…

I don’t have to ask about this one, because we all have had days or weeks where things have gone wrong in some way or another. The reason that I am writing this is to encourage those who have been impacted by the hurricane on the East coast. I can hear many people saying “They don’t need encouragement, they need money and help getting their lives back together”.

While that is true, they do need to look toward God Who is the Creator and the Provider of all that they need. Some may be asking where was God when the storm hit? The answer is, if you are a Christian, He was there with you all through the storm.

Some people may ask why didn’t God push the storm out to sea instead of causing so much damage? Because we need to grow and become strong, just like trees do. If the wind doesn’t blow while a tree is growing, the roots will not become strong enough to hold it upright and it will fall. Everything that we go through in life either makes us weak, reveals our weakness or makes us stronger. Disease can make us weak, the Holy Spirit reveals to us where our weakness really is and when we realize this and pray for God to give us the strength to get through it…He will.

Many times I have gotten to a point in my life where I felt that nothing that I did or said was making a difference in my life or anyone else’s life. It is at this point that Satan will target your faith, especially if your faith has cracks in it and is not complete and whole in Jesus. He will knock a piece of it loose and start chipping away at your faith, your foundation. This is when you begin to doubt your self and God too. I have even asked God to just take my life and end my existence here because I am no good to His Kingdom, BUT God knows better!!

God can see beyond your weakness and beyond your pity party and He knows what you can do and what you will do, that is why He has never answered my prayer for Him to take my life. Your life and mine are part of His design and we all have a purpose in His Kingdom. What we do with that purpose and with our life is dependent upon our faith and our willingness to obey Him and His calling.

Do you know what He is calling you to do or what He has called you to do? Have you answered that call or are you ignoring it, hoping that He will call you for something that you like better? Our calling is our life in Him regardless of the size of the calling or the ministry that we are being called into. Have you accepted your call from God and determined to follow the path laid before you for His glory?

I urge you to do so, because the church, the body of Christ, needs all of its members to work and to do His work until He comes. Regardless of the doctrine you follow or the denomination that you worship in, whether it is Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Catholic, if your heart belongs to Jesus then you are part of His body, the church.