Category: God’s Love for us

Some deny it, others await it….


Many in the so-called “liberal”media deny that Christians are right. I don’t mean that we are on the right or the left, but that we believe the Truth of God’s Word! Watching the news, seeing all of the prophecies coming true before our eyes, if you can’t see it then you need to get into God’s Word! Pray about what you are reading so that He will open your eyes spiritually and allow you to see what is there!

Why am I asking many of you who DON’T  believe in Jesus or God to at least try praying for Him to show you the Truth in His Word? Because if you don’t find it out, if you won’t go to a church or read God’s Word, then when you stand before the One that you don’t believe in…uh-oh won’t cut it! Your life will be shown to you in vivid detail down to the words and thoughts that you had. The time for learning the Truth is now, not at the end of your life! Yes, you could be saved on your death-bed, but you may not get that chance.

Ican'tmakeitChristians don’t say these things to scare you exactly, but what if you had a wreck on the way home from the bar or from a meeting. What if you had a heart attack on the way home or in your bed tonight and didn’t live long enough to ask Jesus into your heart and life? We are trying to get as many people to open their eyes to the reason that Jesus and the Bible are REAL! This is not a “fake religion” like so many of them are!

Being religious can get you a ticket straight to hell, being saved by Jesus will cover your sins and allow you to get into Heaven. If you are able to do some things for Christ while you are here, you may have some rewards in Heaven, but the reward that I am looking for is eternity with Him! God in the person on His Son came down and became as we are so that He could provide a way for us to be saved from an eternity away from Him! He planned this long before any of us were born, even before our world or the universe was made by Him!

God loves you! It doesn’t matter what you have done, when you did it or how, all He wants is a repentant heart and your realization that you have sinned and you want Him to come in and fix the broken pieces and make you whole in Christ! Believe me, since He made the universe and mankind in six days, I think He can handle anything that you ask Him for, don’t you?

Love others as He loved us


The video above was shared with me on Facebook. It is sobering and it steps on “church people’s” toes and it should! Because if we can’t show Jesus to someone else, then how do we know if we actually have Him in our hearts? How can we be sure if we are true to our calling and our Savior if we can’t at least be like Him? He didn’t pre-judge people. He had dinner with those who were considered sinners, prostitutes and tax-collectors. He LOVED them! This is what we are supposed to do, as Christians, we are supposed to reflect Him to others and be as much like Him as we can in our lives, not just at church! He loved us while we were yet sinners, before all of us were born and yet He loved us anyway.

We have to be more like Him every day because if we aren’t then we may not have Him in our spirit, our spiritual heart, to begin with! Consider this, think about it, read your Bible, see what and who Jesus really preached and taught every day. It wasn’t just His disciples, it was everyday people…sinners just like you and me. The only difference between them and Jesus was that He was perfect and holy, we are not but we are still supposed to reflect Him to the world. If we can’t do that every day then are you a Christian? Really?

God Loves You!


Is it that hard to understand that He would do such a thing? He created the universe, including this little ball of dust that we live on. I know, it is only that small when you compare it to the size of the REST of the universe, but stick with me on this. God made all of this so that you can see how great He is and how much He really loves you and me and everyone else on this planet! Now, many of you might say that God is just showing off, that is what humans would do in His place. He ain’t human!

But, He is God! He can do whatever He wishes to do in your life and mine. It doesn’t matter how bad it looks to you or even how bad it feels, let Him know in prayer. He already knows, but He wants to hear from you! He is like a parent that knows there is a problem but until the child comes to them with it they are not going to interfere. We don’t go around fixing things in our own children’s lives when we see something happening that we know isn’t going to end well. They would never learn anything like that, so why do we expect God to swoop in here and fix every problem that we have?

I’ll admit, it would be nice but we would be a world full of lazy people if He fixed every problem that we had the second that it showed up! Nobody would do anything, we would just wait for God to fix it. But, what if He stopped fixing it one day, then what would we do? We wouldn’t know how to do anything because we had always depended on Him for everything. Depending on God is good, don’t get me wrong, but if He fixed all of our problems we wouldn’t know anything at all. There wouldn’t be cars or planes or cell phones or electricity or any of the thousands of things that we use all of the time because He had been fixing for us all of the moments that we went WAHH!!

God does love us but He allows us to go through life learning about life instead of doing it for us, healing our hurts and aches. We wouldn’t even have aspirin if He fixed everything!

Even in eternity, we aren’t go to have everything our way, we are going to be working with and for Him, not sitting around looking at stuff! God cares for us and wants to spend time with us, but sitting around in Heaven looking at each other will last about ten minutes! Get up and get going! Do something for God, ask Him what you can do and let Him show you and don’t be afraid of it

Pray, America, Pray!


Our country needs REVIVAL to break out and break down the walls of hate and bitterness in our nation! We can’t wait for Washington, DC. to fix this, because they don’t know how! God does!!

Life is hard enough without having to worry about being shot going to get gas in your car, or being carjacked at the grocery store, our nation needs God back in people’s minds and hearts! Like it was the first few days after Katrina and 9/11! People turned to the One Who could help and did help. Sometimes His help came a little slow, but it came. God doesn’t give up on us until we give up on Him!!!!

Movies can inspire us, heroes inspire us, sometimes even politicians inspire us, but God is the One with the REAL answers! Inspiration lasts only for a little while, on your knees prayer to the Creator and Finisher of your faith is what gets the job done, no matter what that job is! Whether it is fixing your marriage or your finances or a child with a deadly injury or disease, God is bigger than all of them and He can FIX them all, when we come to Him with our problems and leave them in His hands and get out of His way so that He can work!

Don’t try to do His job for Him after you have prayed to Him! If you couldn’t fix it before the prayer, what makes you think you can after you have prayed? Let Him do His work on whatever the problem is, keep praying and believing that He will and He will! Too often we are the ones that short-circuit our prayers, because we pray and hand it over to God and then tomorrow morning we take it back and try to fix it ourselves. How could your car get fixed like that? It wouldn’t.

Pray and keep praying and leave the problem in His hands, then pray some more! Remember this acronym: Pray Until Something Happens (PUSH)!

Do you know Jesus?


Do you know Jesus, the Son of God? Have you come to Him and asked for His forgiveness, because you know that you need it?

What if…what if it were Jesus saying those words to all of you? How would you feel then? Convicted? Ashamed? Indignant? Humbled? UN-worthy?

I write this to show you how far God has brought me from where I was, so that maybe some of you might see that God can use the most unusual things…oops, I mean people, to accomplish His will and His purpose in your life and in mine, to use you to have a positive effect on someone else and their life.

God can do great things, with a thought or by His Word and by just His Breath He gave life to a model made of clay and it became a living, human being with a soul! Then he took a bone, and made a woman who most men would DIE to have on their arms, imagine that!

The point I am beginning with is this, God can do great and wonderful things with very little or a lot. He can also do great and wonderful things with nothing at all! Because He is God! What can you do with nothing? Not very much I would guess, because I can’t either.

Yes, a man and a woman can come together and a child will be born, IF God wants you to have that child. You can’t force it to happen, you have no control over what color their eyes will be or their personality, but God does. He brought you and your wife together because He knew that you complement each other. Not in the sense of, “You sure are beautiful tonight, honey!”, but because your souls and your personalities fit perfectly.

Now, you can ignore that little voice in your mind that tells you that you are marrying the wrong one, but I guarantee you that you will regret it if you do. God loves you and He loves your children, even before you finally find the right woman to have those children with.

Thirty some years ago, I was a very confused and angry young man. I did okay in school, but I was a loner and I didn’t make friends too easily. I kept to myself and kept my mouth shut, for the most part. But, one day I got introduced to whiskey, not Budweiser, but the real alcohol! The kind that didn’t take much to gets you to feeling more oats than you have. The kind that, in today’s climate, would get you killed before lunch break was over.

For some odd reason, I liked the way that alcohol made me feel. Almost like I could do anything, say anything and live to tell about it tomorrow. Many of us feel that way in our teen years, whether we have whiskey giving us more mouth than we should have or not. Since there was an old man selling to whoever had the money to buy, I usually went to a football game on most Friday nights. That was my cover story at least. I would go and buy a pint or a half-pint of whiskey and before the night was through, I would’ve finished most of it. For a sixteen year old kid who did weigh much over one hundred pounds, to put it simply, I would be crawling home drunk. I had a wreck a few weeks after this began that put me in the hospital for about a week.

When I got out, I swore that I wouldn’t do that again. Well, that didn’t last long, although I didn’t have another wreck. I got drunk or tight as we called it, almost every day at lunch time. Sometimes, I would smoke pot, most of the time I just drank whatever I could get my hands on. I was well on my way to being an alcoholic. My teenage years weren’t impressive at all and since I didn’t live in town, I wasn’t popular at school either.

This is all old news, my past, for some it’s your past as well. But, you know, God can use anyone in anyplace at any time…but only if we are following Christ! Saying so doesn’t work, talk doesn’t work, IF you are going to live into forever you must have Jesus in your heart FOR REAL! This is not and it will not be a well liked sermon, but you know what? The sermons which Jesus spoke in front of the Pharisees and the other religious leaders were not popular, but they were full of the TRUTH!

The truth is that a ball of clay that can be made into a man by our Creator is what we are. The Light of Creation He brought into being with His Word, everything in the first chapter of Genesis was brought into being by the Word of God, but Adam was brought to life by the hands of God! He had a special plan for us, before mankind (and that includes women too), was even molded out of clay or fashioned from a bone like the first woman.

We are special to Him and have been ever since Creation began. His plan has been in place since before Adam took his first steps. God knows you and me and has known us since before Earth was ever formed into the world that we live on. Love like that cannot be ignored, should not be ignored because God does love each of us that much. It is a love that we can’t understand at all.

It doesn’t matter how little that you know about God. It doesn’t matter if you have ever read the Bible all the way through. It doesn’t matter what color your skin is. God loves you! This is the message that Jesus was trying to get across to the children of Israel. They believe that they are special because they are descended from Abraham and in God’s eyes they are BUT that alone won’t get them into Heaven. No amount of good deeds or amount of money or even the time that you have spent in church or on missions will tally up your side of the page so that you can squeeze in the door!

Just having a membership in a church makes no difference whether you get into Heaven, sitting in church for forty or fifty years doesn’t do you any good except it makes you responsible for all of the Truth that you have heard in that time. Did you accept Jesus as your Savior? That is the only “ticket” that will allow you to stand in the presence of God, having Him as your Savior is the only covering which will allow God to see you as Holy enough to come to Him as His child!

It doesn’t matter what you have done in the past, the only way that you can be of any use to God now or in the future is to truly give your heart to Jesus and let Him come in and make a true and lasting change in your life. That change has to be all the way to the core, not just a surface change that lasts until the revival is over. It has to be REAL, the change has to take over your life, your family, your business, your friendships, your finances, EVERYTHING!!!

Why does it have to be that much of a change? Because YOU ARE A NEW CREATURE! You are different, you are not the same person that you were yesterday, your wife is not the same, your children are not the same. The change has to be COMPLETE and totally committed. If you haven’t made this change, this deeply, this far-reaching, then you need to DO IT! Because, unless it has been a heart change, deep inside, the kind that it will offend you if you hear someone take God’s name in vain to be used as a curse word, if it isn’t that deep then it isn’t real and genuine!

Will you make that deep of a commitment to Jesus? We are entering a time in history that has been foretold in God’s Word and if you haven’t made this kind of commitment, you NEED to do it TODAY! If not today or tonight, then please make it soon. We are not guaranteed tomorrow, and if you are going to make a difference then you need to make this change! If that voice or some part of your soul is feeling a call from God to be that person, the one that will stand in the gap, the one who will lead their family and their business and their friends to Him, to Jesus. If you are being touched by Him and by His Spirit please answer His call on your life. Today.

What do you depend on?


We all have different ways of making it through our days. Some of us start off the morning with a cup of tea or coffee and the paper. Some people get online with a cup of coffee and try to catch up with what is happening. But, who do you go to and depend upon when things go terribly wrong? I don’t mean when you spill the milk or break a nail, I mean when you get a diagnosis which makes you sit down. When someone in your family comes home with a letter that says you are being sued for something, or maybe they are the one that gets the diagnosis which is like a hammer to your head and your heart, what do you do then?

Many people turn to their best friends or even to their church, if they go to one. So, what or Who do you depend on for assurance or hope or healing? Many people look to their doctor if they get one of those diagnoses, some look to him as well if there is a wreck or accident. The Person that you and I and everyone else should be looking to and praying to FIRST, before going to the doctor or anyone else is God! He is bigger and able to handle all of your problems, to give you strength to get through them all and if it is His will to do so, He will heal you of whatever the diagnosis may be. He may do it through the doctor’s skills or it may happen by His power and your faith before your next doctor visit.

Bad days are going to happen. Accidents and diseases are going to crop up in your life and mine, we are human and that is just the way our fallen world is. Good people and bad get these circumstances added to their lives all the time, it doesn’t matter how good you are or how bad you may be. The reality you have to remember is that God loves you and will not forsake you in any of your problems, you must have faith in him and ask Him for wisdom.

You don’t have to accept a “bad day”, God can make a day which seems bad turn into a good day. Love, especially between two people as husband and wife, can make a shack into a home. Expressing your love for your children is something that many people seem to have forgotten how to do these days. Wake up people, they need to know that they are loved by you just as much as you need to know that God loves you!

If you truly want a successful life and a happy home, even if it is in a two room shack with cracks wide enough to throw a cat through, love works much better to bring this about than alcohol or drugs or anger! Where love is anger cannot stay, when you truly love your children and your wife there is no fire too hot that could keep you from rescuing them! God is the answer that everyone is looking for, they just don’t know it yet. Many people say that they can worship God in a fishing boat or a deer stand just as well as they can in church. NO YOU CANNOT! You are looking for a trophy bass or antlers that will strain the wall to hold them up, you don’t go out there thinking of worshiping God!

I used to think that too and I would pray and talk to God while I was out there. That’s probably why I don’t have any trophies on my walls. I would thank Him for His beautiful creation and the sunrise that many don’t get to see. I would praise Him for the beautiful birds and the chipmunks as they scurry around trying to find all the acorns they have hidden for the winter. Yes, praising God and thanking Him for these things is good, but worshiping Him with other believers is more gratifying and humbling than any deer or turkey. Yes, they are God’s creation and He takes care of them just as He does each one of us, but they don’t worship Him. Their instinct tells them that He will feed them so they don’t know Him like we can.

Your Spirit is lifted up and refreshed every time you hear God’s Word preached. Your soul shouts for joy and it is heard in Heaven especially when you find that the diagnosis that you thought you had is just some cells that are causing trouble and making you feel bad. Satan and his followers know how to make you feel this way and will convince you that you are going to die. They can make it so convincing that you will die, if you allow them to take it that far.

We have power through Jesus’ name to renounce the feelings of deathly diagnoses, and depression that makes you want to crawl under a rock, but it does you and me no good at all if we don’t claim the Word of God and tell Satan to back off because I am a child of God! God’s Word and the promises in it are more powerful than any drug or any situation that you have or that you will ever encounter. Don’t forsake the Word or prayer and call on His name because He can heal you of all the afflictions that Satan has placed on you and in your life.

Does it seem that time is going way too fast these days?


All parents know this and children learn it sooner or later. It just seems that the weeks, especially in the summer, just melt into each other and its hard to tell one week from another. How can we slow things down a bit before our children are gone and the house is empty more than it is full? Fill your time with the talents and the gifts which God has given you. It doesn’t matter what gifts or talents they may be, just get up and outside if you have to and use them. Do some volunteer work for people in the nursing homes or help someone in your community. Little things that we may take for granted and big chores for other people.

Time going by to fast happens when you are busy and sometimes when you aren’t busy enough. It doesn’t matter if you are a parent or grandparent, although our time flies by too fast for us to keep up with it most of the time. Even when you are doing something constructive for someone or maybe even enjoying a hobby or two, time just goes by too fast. That is why Jesus said to take up your cross (life), and to follow Him. Say the things that He would when they are needed to be said.

It just seems that there aren’t enough hours in the day, but the hours haven’t changed. There are still twenty-four of them, eight or so we are supposed to rest or sleep and the rest are for work, whatever kind of work you may do. Jesus said that those who love the darkness love it because it hides what they are doing. We see and hear about the sins which happen every day in and around America and the world and very little of it is good news. As a matter of fact, good news hasn’t been reported on much since a certain newsman died about five years ago. I used to love to listen to him when I could catch his show on the radio and when I was growing up, he even had a small segment on TV.

Those were the last days when we could comfortably go to sleep at night and not have to lock our doors. It seems that it has been a very long time since we could live that way, but it has only been forty years or so.

I have been watching some of the crusades which Billy Graham did years ago, the one tonight was from Dallas, Texas in 1971. I was about nine or ten at the time, but the problems that he was speaking about sounded very familiar. At that particular time, abortion still wasn’t legal in America but drugs and alcohol were and he spoke about the dangers and the consequences of them both. I imagine that Mr. Graham hangs his head if he even listens to the news at all today. If I were him…I wouldn’t watch it at all. I would just pray for America and her soul and all of the souls in America, because prayer can do powerful things, including changing the minds and hearts of people in a country that is on a very wide and slippery slope.

Jesus told those that He preached to that the way to Heaven is by a narrow way and there are few who really find it. This road isn’t as easy or as straight as the broad road, but it leads to Heaven. The rewards that you get on Earth won’t travel the road with you, only those things done for the Kingdom of Christ will make that trip. God loves us all and He has made a way for us to get to Heaven through Jesus, it is only our choices which will condemn us to an eternity of punishment away from Him.

Time does slip away from us every second of every minute, but after your death here you won’t be able to count the minutes or hours. Time doesn’t have a meaning in that life, it is eternal. Your choice will determine where you spend eternity so choose wisely and follow Jesus.

Birthdays and time


I know that many of you have noticed that the more birthdays you have “celebrated”, the less time it seems to take between them. Even my son, who turns sixteen today, has noticed it and he doesn’t have that many under his belt so to speak. Your perception of time changes when you get older. Days and weeks seem to run together, then the months and years, until pretty soon you are wondering “What happened?” It is true that time goes much slower for those who are incarcerated or who are in living conditions that are far from ideal, but in truth time moves at the same pace that it always has it is our perception of it that has changed.

Life is filled with experiences which cause us to take note of them and make our days either go by quickly or pass by more slowly. If you happen to have a fast paced job, then the day goes by so fast until you have to bring home work to get it finished before you go back, then again if you work at a store where people come in spurts, the days drags by between the customers. Then there is the waiting for the return of Jesus. We know that He is coming back because of the statement made by the angel, “He will return in like manner”, when He was taken up to be at the right hand of God. It has been nearly two millennia since that day. Many people say that He isn’t coming back, some think that it will be hundreds of years in the future if at all, some think that it could be tomorrow or today.

We don’t know and the Bible doesn’t tell us. Jesus gave us some signs to watch for and most of them are happening every day around us, particularly in the Middle East. He also said for us to keep watching and don’t lose faith in Him and in the words spoken in God’s Word. He will return and if you notice the prophecies that have been fulfilled, it very likely will happen in our lifetime. When it will happen, nobody knows for sure. I have noticed that some are saying that it will happen when the last lunar eclipse happens at the end of September, I don’t believe that but anything and anytime is possible.

God knows when our days are coming to an end and He knows, for each of us, how many days we actually have from the day we are born. Thankfully we don’t have access to that information or many people would have bucket lists and the world would be even crazier than it is already! Time is something which we all count during each day that we live. We count it by the minute and the seconds and the days and weeks. The most amazing thing is that we won’t have to count any of it after we arrive in eternity, because time for each of us will cease to exist if you are blessed with the love and the atonement granted by Jesus in your life.

Eternity will be very different if you have not accepted Jesus as your Savior. Time will be miserable and pain-filled and never-ending. I know the argument that “My God wouldn’t allow that to happen!”. God didn’t sentence you to hell, you did. Each one of us has had a chance to accept Jesus as Lord, yet if you don’t by the end of your life it is YOU who has condemned yourself to an eternity without God in hell! We have all seen the handiwork of God in nature and in our bodies, we have heard a sermon or a prayer about God and His grace which is given freely to us even when we don’t deserve it. Even the American Indians prayed to the Great Spirit that they believed created everything and they were right, they just called Him by a different name. That doesn’t mean that Allah or Buddha or any of the “man-made” religions are right because their gods were created by their minds or were just men and nothing more.

God is real and He is in control of time and the number of birthdays that each of us has. Seek Him out in your life while you can, give your heart to Him and ask Him to come into your life and give you the strength to work for Him during the time you have left. Even if it is only a few days or weeks, your example during this time can have a great impact on someone you love or even someone you don’t know.

Love…do we know where it comes from?


Today, the word itself is used so much until the meaning of it is diluted to the point of the word not having a real meaning at all. Can we get back to a point where words mean something and actually are felt when they are said? Is it possible to make life itself mean something again or have we drifted so far away from our intent and our passion that life itself just doesn’t mean anything anymore? How did we get this way and why? We have drifted so far away from God until our beliefs and our character is more in line with Satan today, whether we worship him or not. Of course that is fine with him because if he can get us to turn away from God and His love and teachings, then we who follow him during this life will follow him into eternity. By then it will be too late to change your mind and he will be laughing at you when  you claim to have been a deacon in church or you taught Sunday school for twenty years or so. Those things don’t matter if you have never taken Jesus into your heart and made Him the Lord of your daily living!

Love comes from God because He is love and He showed His love for us by giving His Son as a sacrifice to die on the cross so that we can come to know God through Jesus by faith in Him! Today, the word is just that…a word. “Love” to many people doesn’t mean anything at all. It is just a four letter word like hate or some other words in our daily language. But, when you put it into action and really love someone through Christ, it doesn’t matter what they have done or who they may be, you can see them the way that God sees them. They may be filthy and covered with sin or maybe they did give their lives to Christ at one time and have fallen into a ditch full of sinful desires and things, but they are still His.

In this world, we aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, regardless of our age and yet God loves us and wants us to come to know Him, if we will only turn to Him in faith and ask Him to come into our lives. You don’t have to go across the ocean to witness to others although it is needed and if He calls you to do it then you should. But, God can use you right where you are. When I started this blog six years ago, there weren’t many Christian blogs out there on the Internet, now there are hundreds and I pray that if only one person turns their life over to Christ, that is enough.

Thank you for reading and I pray that you will turn to the Bible and read from Psalm 16 and others.

We are real!


baby development You hear so many times in the news and the media that abortion is a woman’s right to choose whether she is going to have a baby or not. Great, then DON’T have UN-protected sex! If you must have sex outside of being married, then make sure that you don’t get pregnant! That way you won’t have to exercise your right to kill that child which came from your own mistake.

That child is not a collection of cells and body parts, it is a life, a baby and a human being and it deserves to live just as much as any other child does. I know a woman has the right to do as she wishes with her body, but if you are going to enjoy sex and don’t want to have a child then get “fixed” just like a dog or a cat so that won’t ever happen! You won’t have to worry about it, ever!

God created mankind male and female so that we could be “fruitful and multiply”, not so that we could pick and choose which child is the one that I want to keep and just throw the rest away! When He sends a child into the world, regardless of who may be the lucky parents, He has a reason and a purpose for that child to fulfill. If you take the life of that child because you don’t want to have it for one reason or another, you have taken a human life. One that had meaning and purpose which God had plans for and you took it away. If you never come to a saving knowledge of Christ, the question will be why did you kill my child?

HowmanymoremustdieSo, look at this picture and tell me who is the most dangerous person or regime on the planet? War has taken only about two and three-quarters of a million lives combined in the past 239 years since America became a country. Abortion has taken over fifty-five million lives in the past forty-two years! Lives that never had a chance to learn to walk and talk or go to school or go to a prom and college. Which sin is the reason for all of this death? Selfishness for the most part, convenience would be another part of the equation.

It is a very sad comment on our culture when we are so selfish that we can’t allow another person to live, even if we gave them up to adoption. That would be preferable since there are many people who can’t even have children and would gladly take a child in and love it and take care of it if you don’t have the time or money to do so.

Another sad thing about this is that you will be held responsible for the lives that have been taken, especially if you have done this more than once.

Yes, God loves each of us and there will be many people in Heaven who never had a chance at a life here on earth. They never took their first breath here, never even had a chance to poop in a diaper or drink some milk from their mother.

I know that this sounds like a rant about abortion and it is to an extent, but God loves all of us even if you may have done this. Please consider that if you do give your life to Christ in this life then you will very likely meet your child in the next one.

Just a thought from a preacher.