Category: Forgiveness

What would you think if I told you…


that I know what the secret to life is? You would think that I was completely out of my mind, and you would be right! I don’t know the secret but I do know the Person who does! Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit that we have as Christians living in us! Usually I start off a missive with a story or some other bit of information before getting into the “meat” of the message, but time is growing short and you need to hear this.

That’s what the Holy Spirit does for you. The Holy Spirit gave you the secret not only to life here, but to eternal life! He convicted you of your sin. He drew you to Christ (John 6:44). Don’t get the idea that anybody, you or I, can simply come of his own will and his own volition to Jesus Christ. No one could come. No one would come, except by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has given you the secret of life. And He has drawn you there Himself! That’s some best friend, wouldn’t you say? If you don’t want to know Him as your best friend, that is OK, but it is the biggest mistake of your life.

The mistake of living your life on your own, by your own rules will cost you your eternity. It is true that living without Jesus can be fun and there is no Spirit to convict you of any act or sin that you may commit, but our lives are short in comparison to eternity. I know that many don’t really believe that the Bible is the Word of God and some don’t even believe that it is true! My contribution to the world is small, but the One that is the focus of the entire Bible has changed the lives of millions of people around the world. His name is Jesus, the Son of God.

He is my Savior and I am bringing these words to you because I have to. It is my duty to tell others about my wonderful Savior so that you might want to know Him too. He has changed my life from one of sorrow and heartache, depression and fear to a life lived with the promise of eternal life with Him! I was a shy, introverted person most of my life. I was also angry because of my parent’s divorce when I was very young and I took that anger out on many people, but mostly on myself. I thought that I was the cause of their break-up and for a while I thought that if I wasn’t around they might get back together.

Foolish teen-age thinking is what all of that was and if God had not had something in mind for me and had been keeping me from really bad decisions, then I would not be writing this. I did a lot of stupid things like most do while in their teen years like drink alcohol and smoke pot. Granted, those are tame by today’s drug scene, but the drinking alone could have been deadly both to me and to others. My angels had a lot to do to keep me alive and well enough to get to a point where God could use me.

That is part of the reason that many people don’t like “church” I think. It is the serving part that seems to bother people the most, but consider this: Jesus gave up Heaven, immortality,  and eternal life to come as our Savior in human form with all of its limitations and pains so that we might be reconciled to God through Him! And, He did it before we were born!

God saw down through the ages of time and noticed each of us that would believe and come to know Him, and loved us enough to send His Son to die a human, agonizing death on a Roman cross so that we might be able to have a chance at eternity! How can you decide not to serve One Who loves you so completely? Ask Jesus to come into your life, and confess your sins to Him. Ask His forgiveness so that you can be made into a new creation in Christ. You will never regret it and you will have an eternity to enjoy it with all of your brothers and sisters who accepted Him too.

Patience and time


What do we need to do each day that requires all of our time? Very little actually. Nothing in your life should take up that much time during your day. So, what should we do about our time and cultivating patience?

practicethepause Prayer does wonders for your life, your doubt, your anger and hurt feelings, and your life. Prayer relieves stress and anxiety and the time that you take to pause during the day can yield time to think in a world that is so full of information.

Can you do this during your day? Of course you can, taking a few minutes to speak with God about what you need is no more intrusive than Tweeting or posting on Facebook and the results of your prayers are much more rewarding. Pausing occasionally can yield an awful lot of time, even when those pauses are only for a minute or two at a time. A pause during your day, during your drive to work or back home is more than enough for you to speak to God. The time that you have is given to you by God, the job that you have was given to you by God, your family that you love is a gift from God so when you do pray, thank Him for everything that you have.

The timing of God is perfect because He knows when you were born, who you would marry and He knew when and how many children that He would give you, and He also knows when  your last breath will be drawn. Your life is in His hand and where you will spend eternity is decided so all that you have to do is to make up your mind to follow Him and believe that He did come and die for you and your sins just as He died for my and your sins.

The only thing that you have to do is to believe that the work that Jesus did was enough. There is nothing that you can add to His death and resurrection that will help get you a better spot in eternity. The only thing that we have to do to receive our salvation is to believe Jesus’ sacrifice was enough and that He did it because He loves you. Believing “in” Jesus or God is not what is required because Satan believes “in” them because he knows Who they are, but he doesn’t have the ability to humble himself to them in submission to serve them. We can and should because it is necessary if you want to have a joyful eternity.

Your life doesn’t stop when you stop breathing as some people suppose. Your next breath will be taken in Heaven but before that you will stand for your life to be judged by God. If you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, then your life and your judgement is covered by the blood of Jesus and His righteousness. If you did not accept Him, then your eternity will not be enjoyable. The choice is yours now, so choose how you want to spend it.

Can racism be fixed?


It is a topic on many people’s mind for some reason, especially in America, but why is it so important? What is bad about racism? Why do we still have it, even after more than forty years of “the dream”!? What can we do about getting rid of racism?

For starters, we could just program our children to not notice the color of people’s skin. It is done in schools all of the time, the “programming” of our kids. But what about the adults, the ones that have lived through the sixties and seventies ad nauseam, where will it end? Those of us who saw the riots in Los Angeles, the shootings in Chicago, etc. cannot just forget. Then there are the family stories of lynchings and the slavery that was endured by great-great grandparents. Yes, all of this must be taken into account but what can be done about the racism of today?

Can we fix it? It cannot be apologized away. There isn’t enough gold or silver or any amount of groveling which will pay the price to a people who were taken from their home land, sold into slavery by their own people or who were conquered and then sold. Nothing that can be said or done in reparation for over four hundred years of slavery and bigotry and hatred!

I am a Caucasian male, born in the same year as our President. Yes, I have seen the terror in people’s eyes, the fear and anger during the late sixties when I was just starting school at about the same time that Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered and a few months later Bobby Kennedy was shot while campaigning! The thing is that none of my family, as far back as I can trace, has ever owned a slave. Yet, “crackers”, white people like me, are blamed for every slight, every injustice that has ever happened in the past one hundred years or more.

Why? Because of racism. Not our racism, but the racism that exists in our culture. I don’t blame African-Americans for this, it is not their fault. It is not my fault that racism exists in the South or in America as a whole. I believe that Satan himself has used racism to great effect in America and has used it to stir up so much hatred and enmity between people who don’t know each other, they just know that skin color and culture are different between us. God created mankind, He did not create certain races of people to do certain things and others to do other things in this world. God created one race that had many different shades of skin color because of the climate that they settled in, not because one is better or worse than any other!

God is the only person Who can bring about the end of racism and bigotry and when Jesus comes back and rules the world as King, it will happen! This is not an “if” or a “possible” outcome, it will happen because Jesus said so! At the end of the Tribulation, when the one-thousand year reign of Christ begins, there will be no more bigotry and racism and those who try to keep it going will answer to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords! God removed His people from slavery after four hundred and thirty years, He did not endorse it. Those who were in slavery in Israel were to be released on the seventh anniversary of their slavery, it was not to be a life-long servitude unless the slave loved the family enough to become a bond-servant and it was the slave’s choice not the masters.

We cannot do away with racism by our own choices. Humanity doesn’t have the moral and ethical capacity to get rid of it or any other bigoted ways of treating people, not on our own strength at least. The love of God through Jesus can open our eyes and our hearts so that we no longer act on our cultural and familial learned behavior toward others, but if it has been taught from an early age it is still there. Only the change wrought by Jesus in your life and mine can cause it to be any different, so the choice is clear…choose Christ as your Savior and follow Him. Serve Him as your Master and Lord because He is the only Master to whom service is due!

What good are the Ten Commandments?


Today, do we still need the Ten Commandments? Are they relevant to our time and our lives today? Many people don’t think so today. According to most of those who don’t want to know about God and don’t want to believe anything that is contained within the Bible, these laws are null and void. According to them, God’s Word was made up by men so it has no authority. They even postulate that it had no authority at the time it was written and it specifically hasn’t any today!

Why is that? Our laws are based upon the laws given by Moses! We have laws against adultery, murder, perjury (lying under oath), stealing, neglecting your parents in their old age (honor your father and mother). Granted, you won’t go to jail for cheating on your wife or your husband, but if you are found out the divorce will cost you something! Dependent on how forgiving your spouse is, it may or may not cost you your life!

The Ten Commandments were given to begin to show people that they need a Savior, because there is no way that we can keep them perfectly. It just can’t be done, because by breaking even one of them, you have become guilty of all of them. If you have ever stolen anything, no matter how small or inconsequential it might have been, you are a thief. If you lied to your Mom or Dad about it, now you are a liar and a thief. Any one of these sins will keep you from having a relationship with God, but the most important decision of your life has nothing to do with these!

The most important time of your life is to realize that you are a sinner, separated from God and then to realize that you need Jesus in your life! That is the purpose of these Commandments! To make you realize your sin, regardless of your faith! If you have heard them or read them, then your heart will let you know when you break them. That is their purpose, to bring you to the point where you know that you need Jesus.

Your decision, the one which will determine your eternity, is whether you will accept God’s grace to you through Jesus or not. That is what decides your final destination, not a loving God. He didn’t create hell for any of us, it was created to punish the angels and Satan who rebelled against God. We have always had a reservation, an invitation to Heaven, all we have to do is accept Jesus as our personal Savior and when we follow Him, we will be where He is, where our reward is, in Heaven. It is your decision and yours alone that determines your eternity, this is why we were given a choice because God wants us to choose to serve Him!

Even the angels have a choice, they are not required by instinct or design to serve God. We are created with a spirit of choice as well. We can choose to live by the rules of the world and do what we want to do, trying to do it all on our own,to see if we can be good enough, righteous enough to earn our way into heaven. Except, we are flawed because of our sinful nature and we can’t be perfect enough, righteous enough to earn our way. Jesus is the only way into Heaven because He paid the price of a perfect sacrifice for all of mankind and all that we have to do is accept it and believe that He did it for us.

Don’t believe the lie that time is on your side, because that is a deception from Satan himself. He is using that to make you believe that you have plenty of time to make your decision. The problem with that is that none of us are guaranteed tomorrow, we don’t know if we will wake up when the alarm goes off tomorrow or if we will open our eyes to gaze at the judgment seat of God!

Truthfully, I am not trying to frighten you, I am not saying that your life might end tonight. But, kids who were just 19 years old have died in their sleep, people get killed in accidents every day, none of them saw this coming, none of them knew that it was about to happen, but it did. What if, for the sake of your eternal soul, I am right. What will happen to you if you have not asked Jesus into your heart? It will not be God’s fault that you will end up in hell, it will be yours! Because you have heard the message and the way out of hell is faith and acceptance of Jesus as your Savior. There is no other way. Religion won’t save you, your own version of righteousness won’t pay your way into Heaven, none of your wealth on Earth will go with you and it won’t help.

The only way into Heaven is by faith in Jesus.

 

What kind of faith do you have?


Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible, and receives the impossible.

This is the definition of honest, child-like faith, something which many people cannot understand, even though they have a kind of faith too. Take the scientists and professors who believe in evolution for example, the amount of faith that they have to believe in a theory which is still just a theory would have to be more than mine!

Richard Dawkins is quoted thus — “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”

There is plenty of evidence for a number of extinct animals and plant life all over the world and I agree with it. There are many different types of animals found in different places and climates, which I don’t and won’t argue with. But…no one has found a transitional fossil of any kind (species) which shows an animal in the process of changing from one type of animal, like one that lives on land or even an amphibian which lives both on land and in water, into another like the theory which says that whales evolved this way.

If scientists claim that evolution takes millions of years, then where are the fossils to prove it? Unless an amphibian stepped into the water one night and the next morning found that it couldn’t get back up on land, how can this be? It seems to me that it would take an enormous amount of faith to believe in evolution happening in that way. So, how can these questions be satisfied? If faith is a cop-out, then scientists are guilty of it too, don’t you think? Jesus said that we only need the faith that a child has, trusting faith, in order to believe and receive the gifts and grace of God. We don’t have to do anything, nor can we do anything to help us get into Heaven. It has already been done, by Jesus Himself. All that we have to do is surrender to Him in faith and believe what the Word of God tells us.

Although, there are many who think that the Book, God’s Word, was made up by the men who wrote it, there are many proofs of its authenticity. Such as the historical account of Israel’s past kings and kingdoms, these have been proven by archaeology and if there is proof of part of the Bible, then the whole of it can’t be dismissed as fiction.

Forty men over the course of fifteen hundred years wrote the books which appear in its pages and yet they are all pointing toward the salvation of the world through the Person of Christ. You couldn’t get forty scientists to agree on enough issues to be able to write a book with sixty-six chapters and coherently point toward one conclusion, whether they were separated by geography or time, let alone over fifteen centuries! The message contained within this Book points clearly to the Savior but it also points to how much God loves each of us. Not specifically for who we are or because of what we may have done, but just because He chooses to.

Isn’t it wonderful that the Creator of this universe loves each of us enough to send His Son, Jesus, to take our punishment for the sin that is in our lives! It is very humbling as well, because He knew me…He knew each of us before we even knew about Him! All of this information is in His Word, the Bible, along with the promises that He made to Israel and most of their promises have been fulfilled. If those promises were fulfilled, don’t you think that those promises to us about salvation, and eternity will be fulfilled too? Give your heart and your life to Jesus because He loved you first.

Our dear friends


Many times in our lives, we come to know some dear friends. Those that you can talk to without worry of being criticized regardless of the topic of conversation. The ones that you can call upon for anything or nothing just because you want or need to talk. Though dear friends like these are few in number usually, their value is far above any amount of money or anything that this world seems to deem worthy. Though some of these friends are humans and I do value them above many other humans, I am referring this time to our pets. Those pets that actually show emotion and feeling toward us not the ones who could care less whether you are there or not as long as they get fed.

Specifically I am talking about dogs (but cats are okay too). I have nothing against cats really, I just never have owned one which lived in the house. I live in a rural community so cats come and go as they please all the time. There is never a day when you don’t see one or two, but they really don’t belong to any one family. Whoever will feed them, they will hang with you for a while and come back to visit occasionally, but staying put in one spot doesn’t seem to be their forte’.

I have owned a few dogs in my life and they were all house dogs like chihuahuas or pekingese and right now I have a dachshund. All of these were wonderful companions and one still is and hopefully will be with our family for a few more years yet. God created dogs to be our companions and over the years, we have bred different breeds or characteristics into and out of them to create dogs which we enjoy having around.

House dogs or toy dogs as their group is known by kennel clubs, are a joy to have especially once they are house-broken. They greet you with enthusiasm in the morning and they wait for you patiently to return home, yet they greet you like a long lost friend when you arrive.

In my opinion, they are like little angels from God Himself because of the friendship that they offer and the comfort that they give as well. They don’t ask much of us except to love them and care for them, like we would a child in our home. The love that they give to us reflects the care and love that we give to them just as we are supposed to reflect the love of God which was given to each of us to the world around us.

God loves us and He loves His creation, which includes our pets. He cares for all of the creatures which He created which is shown in God’s Word. In Matthew Jesus tells His disciples this:

Matthew 10
29 …and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

God cares for all of creation. Us, the birds and animals that we are given charge of to care for, every living creature on this world God put here for a purpose. Each animal fulfills that purpose without question with the exception of man. The animals do it by instinct, we have a choice and many of us choose not to even get to know our Creator let alone learn what His will is for our lives.

It is usually our choices or our pride that drives us away from friends and from God too. It could also be our own problems and our selfishness which drives our friends away but your pet doesn’t care about that. They will stick by your side, just as God does, through the good and the bad so don’t give up on them or on Him. They are representatives of Him too and just as much a part of creation as we are.

Do you see a racial problem in our world today?


I had thought at one point that once we had an African – American President that Martin Luther King‘s dream would be realized. I am sorry to say that it has not happened. It actually seems to have become worse, from both sides. Blame is being thrown between people who don’t even know each other and yet it is always, or seems to be, the other guy’s fault.

Why are we so divided this way, by hate and anger over generations of abuse true enough but the understanding of the depth of hatred and bitterness escapes me. It is like the bitterness in the Middle East that has been going on for centuries, it is so deep until no amount of “peace negotiations” will ever work. It also seems that that is exactly what is happening in America.

We are allowing our racist pasts, on both sides, to cloud our judgment and our sense of morality. Where in the Scriptures does it say that we are to hate each other because of our skin color? It is not there, because I have read them many times and in no way or in any book from the Old Testament or the New is hatred for any reason encouraged!

We, as a nation not just certain groups of people, need to get back to God‘s Word and repent before things get completely out of control. Jesus is coming back and whether it is in ten years or in fifty it will happen. Yes, things are going to get worse economically before He returns but if we cling to Him and to following Him we will be the ones who triumph in the end.

God loves all of humanity, not just certain “races” of people. The Israelites were His chosen people, but with their rejection of Jesus they shunted their status aside. Not permanently, but God sent to us Gentiles the message and the blessings that they would’ve had in order to make them jealous enough to want Him back!

Jesus called the religious leaders in His day hypocrites because of their attitude toward the people that they were supposed to be leading. Hypocrisy is what we have shown to the world because we claim to be a Christian nation and yet we kill innocent children, unborn babies as a normal thing! Why is that happening? What purpose does killing an unborn child serve? We are going to be held accountable for this by God, so we should be considering this.

Many people in America as well as all over the world, don’t want to have much to do with Christians or church or God either. They want their own god, their own way of doing things, but He will hold you accountable, each of us! How can this be fixed in the religious climate that we live in today? Only by Christians doing what they are supposed to do by telling others about Christ and His love for them. Although, this will infuriate some people it will help in the end. Read God’s Word, pray about the problems at home and abroad, pray about your own problems since we all have them, God hears your prayers and will answer them in His own way and time.
The biggest problem that we have as people, not groups of people separated by race or ethnicity or culture, is that we expect everyone to think as we do. Regardless of where they grew up or how they were raised in their culture, people everywhere seem to expect others to know how they live, how their culture sees things or does things. Then we get offended when others don’t understand our unique position or our unique place in the world as a whole!

Why would or could you expect someone who has been living in Indonesia to understand the problems or the culture in Nigeria? Why would anyone expect an American, whose family has lived here for over two hundred years, to understand a Middle-Eastern culture, regardless of the religion involved? We cannot do it personally or individually or even as a country! Perception is the one part of life that everyone has, just as each of us has an opinion about everything, but our perception is clouded by our culture and the norms that we each grew up with.

It is the same with racial divides in our world today. Perception and our cultural norms that we each have, causes and compounds this divide and adds to our racial problems even further because we expect each other to understand how the other feels when it is impossible! If your skin is black or brown and you grew up in sub-Saharan Africa your perception of the world is going to be totally different from someone who looks like you but grew up in Chicago. Conversely, someone who is Caucasian and grew up in Atlanta won’t have anything much in common with a person who grew up in Russia other than their skin color.

The racial divide in our world is not getting any smaller, it is still there and in some places and people it is getting larger and deeper. The only way to come together as humanity and not as racial groups is to accept the One who can cross those divides and change our hearts so that we see each other as Christians and not as we do in our limited human ways. Give Jesus a chance to make a sweeping change in your life, to open your eyes to the humanity that is around you and not the racial differences and cultural differences. Because until we can, there will always be strife, anger, bitterness, hatred and loneliness in our world and Satan will make each of these worse.

He will use his ways and his powers to make all of these so bad that we would think of nothing more than killing each other just to feel better, or even killing ourselves so that the pain and loneliness would go away. The pain and loneliness that we feel are there because of him and because of the divides that we feel toward each other, and if he can make it worse he will. As long as he can use our emotions and our own racial or cultural divisions against us, he will. If it will keep us from giving our lives to Christ, even better.

The only “fix” for these problems is a relationship with Jesus which continues to grow until He comes back, because He will! We are not promised tomorrow, only today and while we have the day we need to be seeking Jesus and His Kingdom, because nothing else really matters because the “stuff” that you have here will not travel in either direction. It will be left or sold or destroyed in some way after your death, it is temporary, just like your life here. Life with Jesus is eternal, life in hell is eternal too but your “stuff” nor your position in life will not matter one bit in the life after this one. Think about it.

What shall we do then?


Should we believe the testimony of man as many seem to do in the world today or should we cling to our salvation through Jesus?

There are many today that are leading people in the wrong direction, some of them supposedly doing this from their pulpit in the church. What will become of them and their followers? If they will pray and humble their hearts toward the God that is spoken of in the bible, then they can and will be saved from their transgressions. Yet, many people today place their faith in the messenger rather than the message. This was a fine thing to do when Jesus was the messenger before He ascended back into Heaven, but today the messengers are just as flawed and sinful and the one bringing the message (yes, I am including myself in this ).

We are all flawed, sinful human beings and none of us who stand on this earth are any better than anyone else, but there are some who think that they are and they are the ones who are leading others astray. They are subtle, like the one that they are serving and not the One that they think they are serving. Many deceivers are present in this world today, but they have learned well. The message that they bring is wrapped in words that are beguiling, some of them from centuries past, some of them from recent times but their meaning is that we can do it ourselves and we don’t need God’s help.

We cannot do it without Him! Can you command a storm or rain on parched ground? Can you tell the sun to come up an hour later today? We are the created and not the Creator, only He can do those things if it pleases Him to do so! It would bring glory to Him and would make us see that He is in control and not us, but there are many today who would scoff at signs like these.

Our God, the only God, is in control even when things seem to be going wrong. We only have to place our faith and our trust in Him because He will bring about good things from what we see as bad. Our times and our time-table don’t line up with His unless we are surrendered to Him and know Him by His Word. When we walk with Him daily, then our wants and our desires will be the same as His, although we will still be attacked by Satan and his demons in very subtle ways.

Some of those will be our own feelings like depression or feelings of not being in control, which we are not, or even emotions which overwhelm us to the point of hopelessness. All of these come from the one being who is trying to derail your faith and your belief in God and His Son. This has always been the goal ever since Eve decided to follow her own desires rather than listening to Adam and God.

Before anyone gets upset or thinks that I am blaming Eve for our problems, I want to make it clear that she had encountered a master of lies, Satan himself. Adam couldn’t have withstood him either and he didn’t so it wasn’t the woman’s fault! They both knew what God had commanded, yet they chose to follow their own desires. God knew that this was coming before they did so it wasn’t a surprise but it still hurt His feelings just the same.

If we really knew Him and the awesome power that is being held back because of His love for us and the grace that has been given to us through Jesus, we would be humbled beyond measure. Considering His power to create or destroy with a word, how could you tell Him that you don’t believe in Him? What pitiful arrogance we have to confront the Creator of everything and then tell Him that we don’t think that He is real so we won’t believe in Him!!

These words and deeds are being done all over the world today. In different ways and different words but the message toward God is the same. We should be on our knees begging Him to forgive us and to take us as His sons, pitiful though we are, and make us as His servants just so we can have a place at His table if nothing else!

The time is coming when mankind will bow to Him. When that time is, no one knows but it is coming and soon. The prophecies of His Word are clear enough for all to understand and we are in what is called the “birth pangs” prior to that time. We will know when that time has come, but for many it will be too late. Read God’s Word, study it carefully, pray over it so that you will understand what you read and then get your heart ready for Him, ask Him into your life because He is the only cure for what is ailing our world and each of our lives.

Jesus comes into Jerusalem


In Matthew 21, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey. The coming King of Israel rides into Jerusalem on a beast of burden and not a war-horse. Is it any wonder that He was rejected?

Yes, it is, since the Pharisees knew the Law and the Prophets! They read the Scriptures in the temple and taught them and yet, they didn’t recognize their Messiah or even the one who came before Him to prepare the way, why? In Zechariah 9:9 it says: “9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.”

The reason for His rejection is that they enjoyed the praise of men and the position that they held. When Jesus came into the temple area, He chased the money-changers and those who sold animals out of the courtyard again. This fulfilled the scripture references from Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 when Jesus quoted them saying that: “It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer:, but you have made it a “den of thieves””

Our Lord, the Lord of all Creation, is a jealous One and rightly so. It is He who created all of the things which we have and which we can see in the world and in the cosmos, so why do people try to worship the creation or the things that have been created rather than the Creator? He is the One deserving our praise! We are nothing without Him and the grace that is given to us in order to live and be where we are every day!

Your life is to serve Him, if it is not then your priorities are out of sync with the life that you have been given. In the world that we live in today, we must be vigilant about our faith and in what or Whom we place that faith! There are many in our nation and in the world who would like nothing better than to sweep any reference to Jesus and God completely out of our lives and out of our government’s documents, founding and otherwise. Take, for instance, the group which is working to take religion and specifically Christianity out of our military, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). They sound like they are working for our freedom, but their purpose is hidden in their name.

Although I am not going to get on a soap-box about them, the One that I want to talk about is Jesus! He is our Savior and our Lord and yet, we forget Him and leave Him out of our lives much of the time. If we did that to our spouses or our friends, we wouldn’t have any would we? It is good that Jesus is patient and loving toward us who haven’t loved Him and may not be treating Him with love even now! Is it possible to know someone intimately and not want to know them better and more deeply? I don’t think so! To me, that would be insulting, but to Jesus your Savior and Redeemer it is just wrong!

He gave us this cosmos to live in and a planet to live on that is perfectly positioned so that it is neither too hot or too cold to sustain life. We complain about the heat and the cold all of the time, but the truth is that our next door planets in the solar system have temperatures which are too cold  or too hot ( like seven hundred plus degrees hot on Venus). He knew what He was doing and who He was doing it for, so why do we complain about the little things in life? We do it because we can, but more importantly because we want to complain!

Israel, as a nation, complained to Moses and to God for forty years in the desert. It isn’t any stretch for me to understand why Moses struck the rock when God had told him to speak to it in order to get water out of it. It was their complaining constantly that had stretched Moses’ patience to the breaking point, then the consequences of his anger caused him not to be able to go into the promised land. It is our lack of patience today that causes us to ignore God’s advice and the sermons that we hear because we have become so accustomed to nearly instant gratification from drive-thru eating places to microwaves which prepare our food in minutes instead of hours. Can we change? Will we change?

No, we won’t change on our own but we can if we will submit ourselves to Jesus and humble our lives to Him. Follow Him daily, get to know Him by reading and praying over His Word. Ask Him to reveal Himself to us through it because, if you are not attending a church regularly, getting to know Him through His Word is the only way that you will! It doesn’t take but a few minutes out of every day, but it needs to be done every day!

Getting to know Him and love Him is like getting to know your spouse, it needs to be practiced every day. Not just once a week or on Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Think about it and then get to know Jesus, because you won’t want to meet Him for the first time at the throne of judgement and if you don’t get to know Him now, that is where you will meet Him for the first and last time!

 

Have you walked away?


I have worked with and talked to many people who have told me that they walked away from a church because of something. Many people won’t tell what the “something” was that cause the problem, but I doubt that it was God Himself. After my divorce years ago, I heard a sermon that was essentially attacking people who were in my place and it hurt. I thought that in church and by those who attend church, we were supposed to be supported and prayed for when we  experienced pain like that which comes in a divorce. I was proven wrong, so I did not go back for a long time.

This is how churches and congregations as well as individuals become broken and torn or pulled apart. There are hurt feelings and anger and later frustration, then the anger becomes deep and turns into something which won’t go away easily and it hinders our relationship with God.

Many people think that they will be able to worship Him just fine from home or at work or wherever they may be on Sunday morning and it is true that you can do this but what usually happens? We get started cooking breakfast and watching the morning show on Sunday morning, then the phone rings and we go to the mall. What happened?  Life, family, television, shopping, fishing, hunting, kids can all get in the way of learning about your Savior.

There are many excuses that get used when people don’t want to come to church or maybe get back into church. If there ever was a part of your life that was involved in church then you have heard the message of Christ‘s sacrifice for your salvation. Have you accepted it into your life and your heart?

If you did accept Him as your Savior and then something or someone at your home church caused you to leave then there needs to be some forgiveness. It is something that we, as humans have a hard time doing but with Jesus in your life it is possible. Following His example we are supposed to be forgiving to those who have wronged us, no matter what the slight is or was.

We can’t do it with our own strength, but through Him we can. Just as Jesus told Peter, we are supposed to forgive seven times seventy or four hundred and ninety times. It is what our Lord commanded us to do, and yet we are not able to do it on our own.

We have to decide to revive our relationship with Jesus, regardless of the hurt we received from a church-member or a pastor in time past. Even if the one who may have hurt your feelings is a family member, your relationship with Jesus is more important than this. If you have left the church or your relationship with Jesus by not attending church you are only hurting yourself.

When we are in a right relationship with Jesus and following Him daily, we should celebrate and worship with other saints at a church. Regardless of the denomination, worship is the key because of the sacrifice of our Lord and because He is worthy of our praise!

The Living Word, our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ and the Messiah came to be the way that we have to get into heaven, all that we need to do is to ask Him into our hearts or re-establish the relationship that has been on hold. If you have put Jesus on hold, He is still waiting. He never hung up, He has never nor will He leave you.