Category: Happiness is a choice

Changing times…


The world and everything in it is changing. The problems which we have to deal with, the good and the bad things which happen every day rarely give any of us a break in our lives. How can we handle so much change from day-to-day? With prayer and seeking God it is possible but there are many people in the world who either refuse to do that or they just don’t believe in God in the first place. Have you ever noticed the stars or the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope? Our universe is not an accident! The stars and their galaxies were placed by God in their orbits and in their places so that we could wonder at His power and majesty.

This world that we live on was put here specifically for our benefit with just the right amount of oxygen and nitrogen to sustain life. This didn’t happen by accident either. The placement of the outer planets and the comets were planned and placed for God’s majesty and for our wonderment. Why? Because we cannot explain these things away with mathematics and calculus. Philosophy and mankind’s intellect can’t explain these collections of stars and gases nor can it explain our own chemical make-up. No amount of education can explain the chemical signals which produce emotions like love or hate or rage and we never will!

They are out of our grasp but one day we will know as we are known by Him. How do I know that? Because it is in His Word! God said so and the world and everything except us was formed by His Word. He specifically came to the garden and formed man from the ground, with His Hands not by His Word, that is why we are fearfully and wonderfully made!!

One of the most worrisome beliefs that I hear about and read about today is that there are many (only 2 to 5% of the population) who either don’t believe in God, are not associated with any religion or who just choose not to associate with an organized religion. That is fine and you are entitled to your opinion, but don’t expect me or any other believer to stop believing in Jesus and the Bible just because you don’t! As I have stated many times before, disbelief or not believing in something or Someone doesn’t get rid of them!

Yes, our culture has changed drastically in many ways over the past fifty or sixty years, but God is still real and so is Satan. Two opposing sides trying to either save mankind or drag as many into hell as possible, the choice is ours. We are not automatically damned to hell, unless that is our choice, and we don’t get a free pass into heaven either. Many do believe that if a child dies before they are old enough to make a rational and conscious choice then they do get to make that choice in the presence of God. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know because it isn’t revealed in the Bible.

Change is coming soon, though I am not sure of the severity or magnitude of that change but it is coming.

So much need and so little time…


In our country there is a vacuum that is forming in towns and cities, communities and homes and it seems to be going unnoticed by most people, but God knows that it is there. We have pushed Him away from our churches and our homes and our jobs, especially from our own government so the vacuum that has been created is of our own making. We have caused this, we as a culture and people have done this collectively. Why did it happen? What is the purpose of it?

In reality and in truth, we have been fulfilling Scriptural prophecy that God inspired the writers of the books in the Bible to write down. Many people seem to be wondering the same thing that I have for many years: Why is America or at least a reference to it completely absent from the Bible, particularly the prophecies concerning the end times? It is simple really, it is because we are not a powerful nation anymore. We have lost our foundation and our purpose for being. How did that happen? Over the past century, our government and many politicians in the states have gradually taken freedom from us. Just a little bit here and there, nothing that would be missed for a while. But, after fifty years or so the missing pieces begin to add up.

Like taking a rock from a pile of rocks. At one point, after the pile has settled, the rocks are all suspended and touching each other supporting the ones above on the ones below. If you remove a small one from the bottom, it may not make much difference, but if you take enough small ones from the bottom the result can be hundreds coming crashing down. Another illustration would be a large amount of snow packed on the side of a mountain. As long as you don’t disturb much of the packed snow, there isn’t a danger. But, if you disturb enough of it then the whole side of the mountain may come crashing down as an avalanche.

The only difference in taking freedoms away is that the catastrophe won’t necessarily kill you, although many people may die in the aftermath, but the economy of the country will fail eventually. Bit by bit, a little knowledge is taken away, a bit of history is changed so that the next generation doesn’t really know the truth, money is printed to keep the supply up and the interest rates are dropped to prop up the economy. The net result is that sooner or later, the stocks and bonds that were sold to keep everything going are worthless, the money that our economy depends on is not worth enough to keep the value up when the banks come looking for payments on loans. Our creditors in other countries will look at our devalued status and demand payment on the bonds. Sooner or later this house of cards will collapse under its own weight.

Why is this traced back to our character and our heritage of being a country which feared God and used His Word as a template for our laws? Because, without God at the center of our nation and its governance, the wheel will fly apart and our country will be no more. The movement, if you want to call it that, which began at the beginning of the twentieth century is called “progressivism”. By the time that this is published, we will have lost about half of the freedoms that our great grandparents took for granted and it will get worse before it gets better.

Our country and all of the people in it NEED a true revival of Biblical proportions. Similar to the Great Awakening of a couple of centuries past, but even more fervent in scope. We are seeing our country brought down by a few people, those who believe that an altered view of the Bible is needed or those who believe that God and His Word needs to be booted out of the country and all of its institutions and offices all together. Our people, those in the United States but also every person who reads this blog, need to get into God’s Word and pray for a real revival in their hearts and in the heart of the nation itself. Please, take this to heart and look for God in His Word because He is there waiting for you to come and open  your heart to Him.

Cracks and pieces missing


Have you ever noticed, maybe in a museum or in a cupboard, that with time some pottery or china will have little cracks or pieces missing? Is your life today feeling a little cracked with pieces missing or gone? Did you know that God can fix that? Yes, He may have allowed the cracks to happen, but it is because He is trying to get your Spirit and your faith to expand so you can do more and endure more. Life is in itself a work in progress, just as pottery and other artistic endeavors are also. We as humans live and breathe as a work in progress from the day that we are born until we die. Life is never the exact same from day-to-day, yet we look at it as if it is.

We see our lives as a continual struggle of sleep, waking hours, eating and then sleep again. Simplistic though it is, it is true isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what type of job you have or where you work, which falls under the waking hours, the rest of the day usually falls in the time of eating food or sleeping with a little TV thrown in to dull the day down before going to sleep.

My representation of life in those four areas is simple, but if you think about it then it is the truth. Getting back to our title about cracks and missing pieces, where do they come from? Some come from our own existence, some of the cracks are there because God put them there so you would depend upon Him more, the missing pieces are those parts of yourself that seem to get lost. Some of them are lost when a loved one dies or when some tragedy occurs in your life or in a close friend’s life. They are not totally lost, it just feels that way. That part of you may have fractured into many thousands of pieces and it feels like it is gone, but God can put the pieces back together again.

Sometimes we can feel the cracks and fractures in our life, but think of it in this way: God may be using this trouble and the problems which we feel through it to cause a change in us. The judgement that came against Israel in times past was specifically for the cause of bringing them back to God…to relying on God every day! Captivity in Babylon, slavery in Egypt, slavery through other people in the Old Testament like the Assyrians, each of these was designed and used by God to get God’s people to turn BACK to God! Trouble in this life is there for a reason, specifically to refine us into better and more dedicated people in God’s service.

God loves us deeply, far more deeply than we can understand with our limited minds. In reference to the cracks and chastisement that we may go through, think of it like a weight lifter beginning to lift weights. At first you are very sore, so sore in fact that you can barely lift the bar without weight on it. Then, as those muscle fibers grow and repair the damage of lifting weights, they become stronger and you have to add more weight. You tear and work the muscle tissue so that it will grow and become stronger, that is what these trying times in your life are and God uses them to make you and your faith stronger!

Life everywhere is hard and trying to an extent, depending upon where you live. Seek God and His Wisdom from the Bible, not just one or two verses from it but the whole Bible. He can guide you and give you wisdom and strength to make it through the most tough and trying times in your life. He helped to get Job through his trying times, He helped the Jews get through their slavery and back into their homeland, He helped those who were scattered all over the world to come back to their homeland after WWII. God will help you too IF you will seek Him out and follow Him daily! Time grows short, don’t wait.

So little time….


Why do I say this you may ask? Simply because when you compare our lives with eternity, which is ahead for all of us, your life and mine seem so tiny in comparison. I have seen scientists compare our life-span to the age of the Earth, which is supposed to be ~4.3 billion years or so, and your life and mine shows up as a speck of dust. Eternity doesn’t have an end, so our life would be microscopic compared to it. Yet, we go through our lives preparing to live a long life into retirement and many of us never think much about what comes after our life here.

What would we do if we could get a real glimpse of our eternity? The eternity that each of us will have to face eventually could be very different from the one we think we will have. Some of us will be graced with an eternity in Heaven with many of our loved ones and friends. Some of us, who have been stubborn in this life and unwilling to believe in God or Jesus and certainly not willing to give our heart to Jesus and to following Him through our lives. We want to live our lives on our own terms with no rules except our own! The independent spirit of humanity takes someone to hell every second of every day, even if they feel that they have lived a good life! Many of them would say that “I haven’t killed anyone or robbed anyone!”, really? Have you held a grudge of hatred toward anyone, ever? Have you ever taken a pen or a notebook from work? According to Jesus, the hate that we harbor in our hearts toward someone is the same as murder and as far as God is concerned, stealing and robbing are the same whether it is a pen or a pad or a bank.

Yes, we are all sinners at some point in our lives. The sins may not be BIG sins to us, but in God’s eyes and in His judgement a sin is a sin, size doesn’t matter! In front of Him a “little white lie” is just as big as a lie told to a lawyer or a teacher or your spouse. Many people today don’t even consider a lie to be a sin, but it is. We hear them every day, we see the results of them in the courts and in politics and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. But…God knows who said what to whom about the things of this world and there will be a payday someday for all of these SINS!

In many ways, people seem to look at our life here and think that they have all of the time in the world to decide to come to God and get their life straight. How do you know? When someone has a wreck in a car, did they know about it ahead of time? Not likely. What about when a stroke or heart attack takes someone’s life? Did they know that was coming on that particular day? No, not at all. I have heard of some people who have come into the kitchen for breakfast and fell over dead right there. We are not given a set date and time for these events. When you have heard a message in a church or from an evangelist on television, did you feel a tug on your heart or a voice telling you that you should give your life to Jesus? If you ignore those Spiritual callings to you, then you are walking on a very thin patch of ice above a very real torment in hell!

You can mock me or ignore me or my message, but when you kneel before God and He asks you why didn’t you answer the call of the Holy Spirit when He called, what excuse could you give? None really, because of the miracles that we see every day, the wondrous natural beauty that is around us and inside of us because our Father created us and everything to let us see Him so that we don’t have an excuse for not believing in Him. Don’t put it off.

We love and feel loved but….


Humans are selfish beings, you know it and I do too, and when we feel loved by someone we want it to go on forever but there is only one love that can and will do that very thing and it is the love of God toward you! He has loved each one of us for a very long time. He loved us so much that He allowed His Son, Jesus, to die on a cross and take on your sins and mine and everyone’s since the beginning until the last person dies, just for the purpose of giving us grace and forgiveness and a way to become His children!

Isn’t that WONDERFUL!!

He isn’t fickle like we are with our love because if we can’t feel another person loving us then we will find a way to end the relationship and find someone who will love us. God is patient and loving, so deeply and so much until we cannot understand His love. We cannot believe HOW could He love someone who has never gone to church, never read His Word, never prayed to Him, and all of the other sinful things or thoughts that we have had or done in our life. We feel as if we are not worthy of His love. It hurts to think that someone can love us in spite of those faults and sins that we know that we have.

God’s love is so deep and warm that it can wrap you like a blanket that has just come out of a dryer when you are cold and lonely and you really NEED that kind of love and forgiveness. To quote a character in a popular film: “I like warm hugs!”; God likes to give them away! He doesn’t care what you have said or if you are in a gang or part of a squad of soldiers who have killed people for no reason except they don’t believe they way you do. Yes, He can forgive you for those things. He can forgive the doctor and nurses who work in an abortion clinic who murder children every day for money, and they think that they are doing the world a good service. Except, it isn’t. Choice is the god that people use to make them feel better about it, but what does choice do for you? Yes, you can wake up tomorrow and go about your life without worrying about a child to care for and feed but that child was sent to you by God for a reason. You killed him or her before the reason for their life could become real! But God can forgive you too.

We do sometimes find love and feel loved by another person and it is a blessing when that happens, especially when it produces a child to care for and help to see the world that God made for us to live in and to wonder about. Every day should be an experience of childlike wonder at the sky or a butterfly or a puppy but the most wonderful experience is watching a child find things to wonder at and about. To discount that as an inconvenience is selfish in the extreme.

Give God a chance in your life so that you will have a chance to experience His. I heard these words in a movie recently and they are so important, especially today: “We all have two dates on our tombstone a birth date and the day that we die but the important and amazing stuff happens where the dash is that is between those dates.”  

That is where your life can mean something, so live it like it really does mean something. God put us all here for His purpose and the only way to find that purpose is through reading His Word and praying that He will show it to you!

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

A living Message


Jesus was and is considered the Living Word of God, so our message about Him and salvation through Him should be different for each person. Truly, it is different for all those who seek Him because nobody gets the same message from the Bible. We all get a different meaning and purpose from the words which we read in it and since there are many on the web who are writing about Jesus, all of our messages are different too…at least in some respects.

First and foremost, God loves all of us whether we think so or not. It grieves the Spirit of God when a person dies who has not found Jesus to be their Savior and Lord. Some may not see it this way, but it is true and it says so in the Bible. One of the first instances of this is found here:  Judges 10:16 “And they put away the strange gods from among them, and served the Lord: and His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel.”

God loves us far deeper and more intimately than we can understand, so it shouldn’t be unusual for Him to grieve when we go astray or refuse to become an adopted child of His through Jesus. We don’t have to do it and we aren’t forced to do it but your life and mine are so terribly short compared to eternity and yet it is only during our lifetime that we can make this choice of asking Jesus into our lives. God loves each of us even to the point of the parable which Jesus used about the sheep that went astray out of a flock of one hundred. We have all gone astray at some point and some of us haven’t become the sheep that God wants us to be, meaning that He wants us all to come to know Him and His love for us.

We can’t do that walking around in the world looking for something or someone who we feel the need for but don’t know who or what it is that we are searching for. God sees us all wandering around but He won’t intrude on or in our lives until we ask Him to come in and help us with our lives. Just as love for another person can’t be forced or “made to happen”, your love for God can’t be a forced love it has to be one that you initiate. Once you make the step of asking Him into your life, to forgive you of the sins that you feel can’t be forgiven, then He will work in your heart and your mind to help you to conform…help you to become more like Jesus. This is our ultimate goal, to become more like Jesus. Like it or not, that really is your purpose in life because life is the training ground for so much more.

What are we training for? I don’t really know and I probably won’t find out until I get to Heaven. The point is that we are to strive toward the goal of being as much like Jesus as we can, with the Holy Spirit’s help, while we are here. Don’t judge people or look down on them because they have less than you do or more than you do because stuff is not what’s important in this life, people are. We are called to be mirror images of Jesus and for a while our reflection of Him will be a bit blurred but it takes a bit of polishing to work out those rough spots. Getting through the polishing phase is the toughest part that you will find yourself in during this life, because you will feel like God has left you to fend for yourself when He is actually using those trying times to get your faith and dependence upon Him to work together.

As long as we keep our eyes, spiritually on Jesus, then we won’t falter when the going gets a bit rough. We may have to endure some hard times with our children at home or with a disease or a family member but as long as we keep God in the center of our lives and depend upon His strength to get through today and the next day then we will come through just fine. This is what I am having to deal with today. A teenage son that, unfortunately, is just like me at his age and I have forgotten what he is going through. I have to give this struggle to God and let Him work it out because all that I can do on my own is make it worse. Lord, give me the wisdom to keep my mouth shut until he is ready to really talk to me about what he feels.

See, I may have some good advice but I have to take it too.

Freedom of choice


It is what God gave to all of us who have it, angels and mankind, and we must use it for the right reasons. Not to choose to be evil or sinful or a killer, but to make a choice to be a follower of Christ! It is by God’s grace that we have our being in this world and to reject His gift of life and the atonement of His Son’s death on the cross is the truly unforgivable sin.

Why many people choose to do this and think that they can live their lives without Him in a world full of sin and death and corruption is something that I will never understand. Yes, I was a sinner once and I still consider myself a sinner saved by His grace. I remember going out and partying and getting drunk as a teenager, I also remember that the results of that behavior usually weren’t very enjoyable the next day either.

Even after I thought that I had become a Christian, I still fell in with the wrong crowd and went down the wrong path for a long time. It wasn’t until I became a father that I realized that if I wanted my son to grow up to know Jesus, then I was going to have to be a true follower of Jesus so that he could see me doing it. I began to seek Him out in the Bible and learn of Him more and when I did that I finally “got it” and realized that the voice which had been there all along, was His.

I had ignored it for a long time, but I remembered it being there telling me things weren’t right. I had just thought that it was my own conscience or my own thoughts, I didn’t recognize it as the Spirit speaking to me until I got to know Him better. We have the freedom to choose, even after we become Christians, but we should choose to follow Christ every day. That is the part about “pick up your cross and follow me” that Jesus was talking about.

Good advice


good adviceThis little bit of advice showed up on my Facebook page today and I wanted to share it. Not only with you but with the world. It is true that many people follow their hearts in times of stress and trouble, if they have the courage to do so. Although, many of us don’t have the courage to do it and we end up with regrets later in life. We all have regrets of course, but some more than others.

Why didn’t I stay in school? Why didn’t I go to college? Why didn’t I stay in the military and retire from it? There are many others besides these, but the point is we make decisions sometimes based on incomplete knowledge and fear. We are afraid of where it might take us or what we may have to do if we follow one path over another. It is a fear that we have all of our lives and it seems to cause all sorts of problems and heartache, at least for those of us who take the safe or easy path rather than the one that our heart is telling us is the right one.

Advice is only good when it gives you something which will make your life better. A job or a promotion is only good when it helps you more than hurting your health and your family life. We all see things clearer when we look back on our lives and realize that if we had followed our hearts, we might actually be in a worse condition now and not the one that we thought the decision would bring. The only time that following your heart will truly bring you to a place of happiness and peace is when you follow that longing for Him. Your heart before Christ is missing something or rather Someone and it feels empty and hollow. Many of us have tried different ways to fill that space with something, but it never satisfied our longing until we found Jesus.

He is the missing piece of your life and your heart, so as long as you are following Him then your life means more because you can give Him away to others and yet…He is still with you! God loves us all, He may not be pleased with our lifestyle or with the things that we have done but that doesn’t mean that His love for you and me is any less. God doesn’t change and His love for you…for all of us is no less today than it was before the creation of the world. The very best advice that I can give anyone is to seek Him in His Word and in prayer. To learn more about Him, read the Bible because that is His Wisdom and His instructions for how we should be living according to it.

Many people have said that the Old Testament is irrelevant today because Christ made a new covenant with us in His blood. That is true because He fulfilled all of the prophecies about Himself when He came and lived and died and then rose again. Even though the New Testament reveals the Old and fulfils much of what is spoken of in it, you need to read both to get a complete picture.

Advice like life is what you take from it and use, if you don’t then it is useless. Wisdom from God’s Word is the same, if you aren’t willing to use it and learn from it, then it will be like an empty container of water to a thirsty man.

God doesn’t like sin, but He loves you


In your life and mine there have been times where we fall, whether we are Christians or not. When you haven’t given your life to Jesus, it doesn’t make much of a ripple in your life when you sin. You don’t really notice it much, unless you have been to church and listened to a sermon or two, but your Father in Heaven does. When you are still lost, your sins are..well, expected. Because you don’t have the power of the Holy Spirit to help you to resist the temptation. The sins which we commit in our lives before Christ are those which are designed to draw you away from God and keep you away from Him if possible. An example of these is found in this passage from the Bible:

sinswhich God hates You see, God hates the sins BUT He loves the sinner. Which is why Jesus spent so much time with tax collectors and publicans and others which the priests deemed as undesirable. It is also why Jesus said that “it is the sick who need a physician”, He was speaking of those who were lost and in need of salvation. The song which is sung in churches, “There is room at the Cross for You”, is one that is meant for all of us who are in need of salvation. There are no steps to reach the cross, the ground is level at the foot of it and all are equal there. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how much resources you may or may not have, God loves all of humanity because we are His creation. Salvation is offered to everyone, but only if you will reach out and take it and repent of your sins.

If you were offered one billion dollars but there were some requirements before you could have it, would you gladly do them? For instance, if you were a pornographic movie producer and you have made some money at it but you are also into drugs and alcohol and all sorts of occult practices and you were offered the one billion dollars with the catch of going into rehabilitation for all of your sins, repenting of those sins and becoming a true Christian person…would you? Some might, but for many in our world today even the allure of that amount of money would not be enough to draw them away from their lifestyle. Some would try to fake it, but that would fail too because the change which comes when you truly give your life to Christ is a visible one and something which can’t be faked.God

He cares about your life, your impact in someone else’s life and you in particular because you are a part of His Creation. You are not a number or some nameless person to God! If He knows when a sparrow dies and falls to the ground, don’t you think He knows about your pain and suffering too? There is no power in the universe which can come between you and God except yourself. You are the deciding vote whether you will give your life to Jesus and truly become a child of God or if you will just stay lost and on the side of Satan. There truly is no grey area in the spiritual realm, you are either a Christian who is working for God and eternity or you are lounging around in Satan’s camp hoping that your side wins. If you have ever read God’s Word you will know that Satan has lost every time he went against God and he will lose again in the end.

15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:15