Category: God’s Love for us

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.

Do you serve or do you want to be served?


In the society that we live in, we expect to be served regardless of where we go. In the mall or a store, at a restaurant or a fast food place we all have a microwave mentality today which means that we expect everything to be given to us NOW!

It is something which has been brewing in our culture ever since the first fast food joint showed up, but I am not blaming it on them. It is just a fact that since food became easy and cheap to get, the ability to cook at home has been mostly lost. Look around in a supermarket today and you will see many boxes of quick meals which can be made in less than thirty minutes.

Of course, you could just buy a packaged dinner, zap it in the microwave oven and in less than ten minutes be eating a “meal”. Except that it has been so processed and packaged it very likely has little, if any, real nutritional value,  but it is quick and it tastes good.

We tend to go about our religious experience the same way. We want instant satisfaction from the preacher who can’t say anything bad so he won’t hurt our feelings to our religious experience with our Saviour. So, what can we do to change these things? Since it has been ingrained in our culture for so long, we may not be able to clear out the things which have been learned soon enough.

Some people may wonder what I mean by “soon enough”, well it means that we need to repent of our disregard for God and His laws. It also means that we need to sit down long enough to read some passages from the Scriptures and to pray over them so that He can show us what is meant by them. Don’t close your mind to the possibility that He exists, because if you are being closed to the option that He is real then you are missing the point.

What point is that? The very reason and purpose for life itself, to give glory to God for being here! I know that there are many people who don’t or won’t believe in Him, but think of it this way: what if you are wrong about His existence? What if there really is a place of punishment after you die?

Not believing in things during this life won’t cause them to not be there when you die and find out that there really is life after death. At which point it will be too late to change your mind, it will be what it is and you can only take what you have ordained for yourself.

Your life and mine are important to God or He wouldn’t have wasted nearly four thousand years trying to get people to listen. Since the time of Moses, there have been many prophets that were sent into the nation of Israel trying to bring them back to God. Many were killed, most were just ignored or stoned until they left but the point of this is that God is interested in us! He would not have done the things which He has done if He was not. He doesn’t sit up in Heaven waiting for things to get better, He knows the end from the beginning because of where He is and Who He is.

We are all privileged because, not only does He care for each person but He has cared from the beginning. It doesn’t matter if you are from Israel or Turkey or China, God knows you and He knows when you will accept Him as Savior or if you won’t. Like looking down on a parade from the top of a building, He can see your life and mine from the first breath that we take until the last. Whether we choose to allow Him into that life is our choice, no other religion or faith allows you this.

Many people are going to disagree with me on this, at least on principle, but the point is that we have a choice…life or death. Which will it be? Many people, and don’t comment saying how I know it is “many”, there are thousands or millions who don’t agree with anything a Christian says just because they are Christians!

Many don’t agree because they don’t want to be responsible for their lives. They don’t want to be held accountable for their actions and if you have children you have seen this from an early age. Even before you think that a child can lie, they will do it in order to get out of trouble or to stay out of trouble. It is ingrained in our DNA, we are sinners from birth. One lie is still a lie, even if the one who is lying is only two or three years old.

I began this with references to food because of the way that our culture has become so dependent on things like food being available as soon as possible. We have also transferred that dependence over to almost everything in our lives, from our jobs to our religion and everything in between. Instant gratification, instant answers like we get from the Internet, we want everything now and we are not content with waiting.

God has waited and is waiting for you to make your decision, either for Him or against Him so which will it be? If you are joining God’s family, then welcome home! If you have decided to wait, then I want to ask you a question: When are you going to die? It is a simple question but it is not one that we can answer. You may die tonight or tomorrow or this afternoon, I may not be alive tomorrow either so when will you make that decision? When you are standing in front of God and He shows you the things that you have done and said in your life, how many times have you heard the good news of Jesus and the facts of salvation and either ignored them or just blew it off? What will you tell Him? At this point, it will be too late. You have already made your choice.

The UN-pardonable sin is not some heinous crime, it is turning away from God’s gift of grace and not accepting it as it is. That is the only sin which will get you thrown into hell, the others which you have committed convict you of a life without Jesus. 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.

Can you live without Jesus?


Unfortunately, the answer is yes, anyone can live here on earth without Jesus in their lives or in their heart, but can it truly be living? Can you really be alive without Him? I once thought so and I thought that I was enjoying myself at the time, but I was only fooling my self.

We were not meant to live without a relationship with Jesus or God Himself! Originally, mankind was created to have a daily encounter with God in all aspects of his life here on earth. We are supposed to have that close relationship with Him every day, many times during the day. I know, there are many people who will say that only preachers and others who serve in places of worship and as worship leaders are supposed to have that kind of relationship with Jesus.

But, that is not how it was in the beginning. In Eden, God told Adam that he was to have dominion over all of the animals and the birds and He also spoke with him every evening. Isn’t it strange that the Creator would want to walk and talk with His creation? God didn’t think so at the time.

Until he sinned, Adam was pure and righteous and could come before God about anything and ask anything of Him. The earth yielded its bounty to him willingly with no effort on Adam’s part before he made his mistake and thought that he knew better than God. When he chose to go against the command that God had given him, he stepped out of his comfortable life and into the one that he and generations to come would have to endure.

God knew that this would happen and He had made provisions for it, so it wasn’t a surprise to Him but it made mankind’s life much harder. Which was supposed to cause us to seek Him, to want Him to be in our lives. Of course, Satan had his plans for mankind as well and it didn’t include getting to know God.

I could recount the whole creation/pre-flood saga but the point is that since Satan was cast to earth after his rebellion he is provisionally the ruler of this world. This is the reason for the bad things which happen everywhere, although God is in control of how far Satan can go with his plans and won’t allow him to really cause as much trouble as he would like to.

In reality, religion itself is the creation of Satan. He devised all of the gods which people have been worshiping for thousands of years. He or some of his fallen angels very likely appeared to man at some point in their angelic forms or their demonic forms and that is where many of the pagan gods and myths came from.

He has always been able to stir up our emotions because he knows where to tweak our unconscious minds and hit our most vulnerable parts, the parts of us that we may not even know about having. Even after we come to Christ, Satan still hits us in those areas and will cause us to stumble and fall if we don’t lean on and depend on Jesus every day for our strength.

Our life is in Jesus and the life that we have here is better when we are His. Our troubles don’t go away when we become Christians, but they are far easier for us to deal with when we have His strength in us to help us with those troubles.

If not God then what?


There are many today that are trying to prove that God doesn’t exist and that nothing was before the Big Bang which started everything. But, let me pose a question here: What or Who started or initiated the Big Bang?

It didn’t just explode on its own even if it did contain all of the matter in the universe. What existed before the Big Bang? The singularity from which it proceeded from maybe? Just a huge lump of matter which was condensed to a point and yet contained everything? The Creator existed before the so-called Big Bang and He was the One who started it.

There is no way to prove my “theory” any more than astronomers or cosmologists can prove their theory of its going “boom” on its own so I won’t get into that discussion. Although, God was and is the Creator of all according to His Word and the discussion that He had with Job, so according to my faith that settles the issue.

Why does it seem that one of three people seem to want to ignore the facts around them especially that the order of everything is too perfect for it to have happened by chance? Perfection is the way that He planned everything, because that is His way.

Chance and accidental happenings on which evolution depends in the early part of earth’s history could not produce the variety of life or the abilities that the animals on earth possess. In the short amount of time that life has been present, even if it may have been over four billion years, life could not have changed from single-celled animals into all of the various forms of life that is present on earth.

God brought all of this into existence by His power and His voice, as the Bible says “by His Word”. So, why is everyone denying His existence? I know, not everyone is denying God’s existence but according to the news and the people in the news it seems that way.

Getting back to Creation, God created mankind and all of the animals as adults, they didn’t start life as babies so why does everyone seem to think that the universe is billions of years old? God created it with the appearance of age because only mature galaxies and solar systems work the way they are supposed to when they are created. The theories about clouds of gas condensing into planets and stars is great but how long do you really think that would take?

Our God, the Creator of everything, is awesome! He can stretch out the cosmos in all directions and place stars and galaxies in any place that He wishes to without exceeding the speed of light. There is no possibility that it created itself nor did it just go “boom” and then billions of years later solar systems and planets and animals and people just happened to appear. If God was not the initiator of it all and in every aspect of it, then we would not be here.

Give God the credit for it because that is Who did it all. Can we make it without Him? No and why would you want to try? What if He gave up on you and stopped giving you the sun to power the weather and photosynthesis in our plants which give us oxygen to breathe? Can you create these things?

I don’t think so. God loves us enough that He gives us every good thing that is needed for life plus He sent His Son to take the punishment for our sinful lives. Not just yours or mine but everyone on the planet from the beginning to the end of the age. If you decide to ask Him into your heart, please don’t think that you can take Him off like a glove and go do what you want to do when you want to do it. It will come back to bite you if you do. You very likely didn’t really ask Him into your heart to begin with if you leave Him in the church or don’t even go to church after asking Him into your life.

I mean, how would your spouse feel (if they stayed with you) if you left them at the church after the ceremony. Then claimed them the next Sunday or when you came back to church. That relationship will not last very long. How do you think Jesus feels if you ask Him into your life and then you leave Him out of your life all during the week until you come back to church? Think about it and let me know what you think too.

 

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!

 

What do you see here?


A picture is worth 1000 words. This safe has been through a lot. Image credit: “safe” – © 2007 Paul Keller – made available under Attribution 2.0 Generic

It has been through a tremendous fire with a lot of heat which is what did all of the damage to it. The fire was particularly hot but the safe was not breached, it seems that it was capable of still being locked even though the outside was scorched and then discarded. I see an analogy of our country and the state of religion in it.

Christians, whether black or white, have taken the heat from people who follow Islam and from people who don’t follow any religion at all. We have not been broken, we have not stopped being Christians but there are some who are discarding their belief in Jesus or their religion. Why is this happening?

Is it because of the state of our country and its economy? Is it because of the state of relations between the so-called “races” of people in our country? Now, before anyone gets all bent out of shape, the reason that I have races in quotes is because God did not make us this way! God created mankind! We are all the same race, whether your skin is white or black, yellow or brown or any shade between those. Our main difference is cultural. There are cultural differences between most everyone on earth regardless of where you may live.

We are brought up by our parents and grand-parents into a culture, regardless of where you live. You may be brought up in a community in Chicago or Detroit or New York, but your culture will be in line with those that you are around.

Christian’s, regardless of race, should follow Jesus’ example. He didn’t pay attention to the cultural norms of his people, He spoke to women and to Samaritans which other Jews actively avoided. He healed lepers, he touched them which no one in His culture would do. We are to be His hands, His eyes, His feet in our time because others need to know Him. How will they know about Him if we don’t take Him with us through our actions or our words?

How can we possibly fulfill the commission that Jesus gave us to take the gospel to every nation and tribe if we don’t do it? If our cultural differences keep us apart and separate us into “us” and “them”, how can we show each other the love of Christ?

At the beginning of this post there is a picture of a burned safe which had been discarded. It did what it was supposed to do because it protected the contents to the best of its ability from the fire. That is what Christians are supposed to be doing too…protecting others from the fire of hell by telling them about the love and forgiveness of God.

Then, telling them about what Jesus did for each of us regardless of our skin color or our race or our culture. He did it for all of us and if you need to know what “it” is I am going to tell you: He took the punishment and the torture of being apart from God as well as the punishment of the cross for our sins!

God loves each of us, and it doesn’t matter which culture we claim or what skin color we have but in order for us to be considered a child of God and forgiven, we have to accept Jesus’ sacrifice and believe that it was for us because it was! The way that the world has everyone thinking is about groups of people and we need to look at each other as individuals. Each of us is unique and different but we are all the same in God’s eyes!

The contents of that safe may have burned up, but it did its job as well as it could. It may not have been designed to take as much heat as it looks like it was exposed to, but we are. Our character is molded by our culture and that character is what we should be showing the world. If your character and your ability is modeled after Christ, then they will see Him and that is the best that we can do as individuals because we were created to be mankind and have a relationship with each other and with God.

Your life and mine is but a whisper


If we look at the time of our existence, the time that we have to make a difference, it truly is but a whisper. Like smoke or your breath in winter, there but a moment and then gone. I know that many look at this and say: “What about those who live to be 8 or 9 decades old or more?”

Is that a really long time in comparison to one thousand years or more? It is not and we were created by God with an immortal soul, one that will never die. So, when you compare our lifetime with an eternity that doesn’t have an ending, it doesn’t matter if we lived for five hundred years it is still like a puff of smoke.

What will you do with the little time that you have? Will you use it selfishly, doing what you want, playing around like a child most of your life and then wondering why you feel so empty? Many people try to fill that empty space with all sorts of fun things like drinking alcohol or using drugs to make them “feel better” but what do those things do for you? Make you feel worse in the end. I know because I have been there. I did those things, even though at the time I supposedly knew Jesus. I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I didn’t like the way that I felt afterward because I usually felt worse than I had before. Our life and what we do with it is supposed to mean something, we are here to do the work that God has placed us here for. But the only way that we will ever learn that purpose is to submit our life and our hearts to Jesus. I know, submission is not something which we like to do. But, consider this: Jesus came from Heaven to be clothed in humanity in order to be the perfect sacrifice that would pay the penalty for everyone’s sin (from the beginning to the end of the age).

He did this for each one of us and He would’ve done it even if there was only one person to be saved! That kind of love is the kind that we don’t understand and cannot understand with our limited perspective.

God loves each of us enough that He sent a part of Himself to take the punishment for us because there was no other way to do it. He knew this from the beginning, but He allowed us to try our way first and He still allows us the choice, even though it grieves His heart when we don’t choose to ask Jesus into our lives.

Our purpose which we were created for is to glorify God and His mercy and to tell others about Him. The talent that each of us has in our chosen profession, whatever that may be, is secondary to this. The short time that we have to accomplish our life and our purpose is the only time that we will have prior to eternity. Life doesn’t end when your body dies, because your soul lives on.

God is in control of all things and works toward the completion of His purpose whether we can see it or not. The so-called “ruler” of this world, Satan, thinks that he can win but a created being cannot overpower the Creator! Satan hates us because God intended to give us dominion over the earth and all of creation which God placed here. He also hates us because of the favor that God bestowed on us even though we are made of clay. The favor that we received is our soul, the breath of God which made us the way we are and what we are to be!

Nothing can separate us from God’s love except us. We can choose to walk away from it, not believe in it or deny Him altogether…but He still loves us! It is our pride that causes most of our problems today because it is the principle sin! It was pride that was used against us when Satan tempted Eve and Adam and we have been falling into it ever since. Comments are welcome, but advertisements will be deleted.

Being a religious person doesn’t make any difference?


I saw this on the news today and I wonder just what people think will make a difference in our society? Religion itself has gotten a bad reputation in the past few years because of the problems which have cropped up in churches in many places. But you know you can be religious about many different things. You can be religious about the way you cook your food or how you put your clothes on a certain way or even about going to the golf course or fishing. People can make a religious experience out of most anything, but what about your faith?

Do you have faith in the sun coming up in the morning? You really don’t have to, because you know it will. What about the moon rising later in the day or after the sun goes down? Faith doesn’t really come into play there either because you know that these things will happen.

Religion and faith together can be an explosive combination, especially when you are so caught up in emotional issues and a religion which stirs these to a point where many people get uncontrollably caught up in what their teachers teach them. I am trying to be as politically correct as possible here so I really won’t offend anyone. The point is that our individual faith, regardless of which “religion” it happens to be in, is our own.

But, what will you do with that religion or lack of faith when you are confronted after your death by God Himself who is the final judge of our lives? What can you say to Him about your religion which will make a difference? If you never accepted Jesus and the sacrifice which He made to reconcile us to God, there isn’t much that you can say. God knows your heart and every word which has come from your mouth. If you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, then He will be beside you as your life is judged, if not you will stand alone.

What then? Would you want to be standing in front of the Creator of the universe with nothing except your deeds and your personal “righteousness” which is as Isaiah 64: 6 says:

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;
and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”

Unless we have put on the righteousness of Christ, God sees us as we are and we cannot enter into Heaven in that way. What many people today do is to create their own version of “God”, one that is acceptable to them and doesn’t judge them for their personal faults but this is doing nothing except delaying the inevitable. We will all be judged by God, the One True God, whether we are clothed in the righteousness of Jesus or not. If we did things in this life while belonging to Him, we will be rewarded if not then those things will be judged on their merit if any, except without Christ those merits will mean nothing.

How can our lives really mean anything or have any meaning at all without Christ? To each of us, our lives do mean something, but when you look at eternity once your life here ends, without Jesus eternity is not something that anyone would want to experience.

I know that there are many who think that life ends completely when we die, but we were created as eternal beings and part of us does live on. Without Jesus, it will not be an enjoyable eternity but with Him we will not be without anything good . You can choose whether to believe and accept Him as your Savior or not, many don’t wish to believe in Him at all. Satan knows that He is and believes that He is but he won’t worship Him and that is his downfall, don’t let it be yours.