Who is in control?

It’s not the United Nations. It is not the President or Congress.

The One Who is in control of all things is God Himself! He allows things and He causes things to happen on the Earth and in the universe around us. Nothing happens by fate or coincidence and nothing happens without God’s knowledge of it!

When Jesus showed up to be baptized, what happened? John the Baptist declared that He was the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world. Yet, the teachers of the Law didn’t accept Him as such. They accused Him and mocked Him at every turn in His ministry. Yet, one of their members after His resurrection told them that if this belief and this movement was of God there was no way to stop it. Regardless of how many times His disciples were put in jail or flogged or told not to preach in His Name, His church was built on one immovable rock and it wasn’t Peter…it was faith!

God is in control and He is the One Who wants to bring salvation to you and to those all over the world. But many in the world don’t want to accept Jesus as their Savior, they have their own ideas about finding the pathway to Heaven or their afterlife. God loves each of us and yet He knows who will accept His Son and who, ultimately, will not accept Him.

Does He want everyone to be saved and come to Jesus as born-again believers? Yes, He does but God knows human hearts and He knows how people are with their beliefs and their fears and their pride. So, have you ever considered your life and the meaning of it, the purpose of it? Have you looked at God’s Word and read it and realized that your life can have much more meaning if you are a part of His plan for your life?

Life is much more than we truly think it is and it can be much more if you are a part of His Kingdom and live your life according to His Word. Many people think that we have to live by His rules but if your heart has been changed by His Spirit, it isn’t quite the same. When your heart is changed and He is living with you then you won’t want to be in the places where you were before. You won’t do the things which you did before you met Jesus and asked Him to come into your life.

The Holy Spirit makes a change in your heart and that change makes a difference in your life and the way that you live it. You live by God’s rules after this not because you have to or because He makes you do it but because you want to do it as a way of showing others that He has made a change in your life. Because Jesus cannot come into your life without a change taking place. You are a new creation! Your old, sinful ways and your old life have been replaced with His Spirit changing you from the inside out.

Don’t turn away from His call in your life or in your heart! God is calling you for a purpose and He knows that you are the only person who can take His message to the places where you go or to the people that you meet.

The Lord hears our prayers!

I love the Lord , because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
Psalms 116:1 KJV
https://bible.com/bible/1/psa.116.1.KJV

A change of heart…

In our Christian lives, we have to have a change of heart or we are not saved at all! When the Holy Spirit comes to you during a service or in your daily work by something which you have heard or read, He touches you and brings to you a message from God. He is telling you that you need Jesus!

“What if I don’t want Jesus?”

Well, that’s your choice but do you have a guarantee that you have X number of days or weeks or years ahead of you? Not one of us has such a guarantee! I may die before finishing this and you may die before you finish reading it if I do finish it! God knows your expiration date, thankfully we don’t!

God in His wisdom and His knowledge of our sinful ways touches us by a word or a thought or sometimes a sermon. Then it is our job, our choice to respond to that touch with, “Yes, Lord, I do need you to mold me and make me after Your will for my life”. Giving your heart to Jesus is not a one time deal nor is it just a “purchase” that you put away and forget about.

It is a beginning, THE beginning of a life-long journey with Jesus until He calls you home! Many of us do allow Him into our hearts and then get frustrated and angry when we can’t understand the Bible enough and we walk away from it and from Him. His disciples spent three years with Him and they didn’t understand most of His wisdom and His teachings until after He was resurrected!

He had to open their minds to the Truth of Who He was while they were learning from Him and to the Truth of Who He is today! If you think that understanding the New Testament is hard, His disciples didn’t have it at all! All that they had was the Old Testament in the scrolls of the Temple. What all of them had learned as children as the Books of Moses and the Prophets and the Writings. Many of us can’t understand much of what is in the Old Testament even though most of it points toward Jesus and His coming.

The only way that you can understand His teachings is to ask Him to show you what they mean during your study time and your prayer time with Him…daily as you walk with Him! As I said this is not like going to the store and picking up a book just one time, this is a daily journey through the Bible every day, learning and praying about what you read and thinking on it while you go about your day.

God has given us His Word and Wisdom for our life and examples of how we should live our life with Him on a daily basis. Your life and mine are a marathon and a journey with God as our Guide and our Teacher through His Word. Isn’t it wonderful that the Creator of all things is willing to teach us about Himself and how we can be His servants! He made this whole cosmos in order for our brains and our comprehension to go “Wow, what an awesome God we serve!”

Give your life to Him so that you can spend eternity gazing into His handiwork and His face and knowing that He loved you before He made any of it! Isn’t that wonderful?

Jesus is the Bread of Life!

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.
John 6:35 KJV
https://bible.com/bible/1/jhn.6.35.KJV

One blessing at a time

Is this how you approach God or do you really want the flow to pour into your life? Many of us say that we want His blessings to flow into our lives but then we put conditions on the flow. We begin telling God exactly what we want and how we want it and when we want it, but have you ever noticed that God doesn’t answer prayers like that? God knows what you need and when you need it. Notice the difference in those two sentences.

In one sentence we are telling God what WE want and when and how we want it, but God knows what we need and He knows when to bless us with it and how much of a blessing to give because He knows exactly how we will use it and for what!

We multitask in our daily lives and we want Him to do His work in our lives the same way. For example, do you notice that many of us are trying to do many things every day and even though we think we are “multitasking” we actually get very little done? Unless…we concentrate on one thing at a time. Such as wash the towels, get them started in the washer, then move on to the dishes and hopefully finish them by the time the towels are done, then get the towels in the dryer, etc. Each task which we begin as just one task and them move on to the next gets done.

But when you are trying to call someone and get put on hold while you are washing the dishes and needing to wash the towels and the clothes, then very little will get done until at least one of those tasks is complete. Many of us try to do too much in our lives when God has told us exactly how to live and how to complete your tasks in this life easily. Focus on the Kingdom of God and His righteousness every day, learning from His Word and His Wisdom, then those other “things” will fall in place behind the most important One of all, Jesus.

Even when we know this, we tend to impose our ideas or our thoughts about how God is supposed to work in our lives. Don’t we? When we pray about a problem or about something which we want Him to do or accomplish in our lives, we impose our ideas and our wants on God and in the prayer that we are praying. God does not work on your specific ways of thinking because our ideas tend to limit God’s power and His miracle. God does answer prayer in His way and on His time and with His blessing for you even though His answer may not line up with your ideas about how He was supposed to do it!

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you”. Matthew 6:33

GodGaveusEverything Begin each day by reading His Word, maybe a chapter or so, then pray about what you have read and ask Him to help you incorporate His Wisdom into your day. Then your day will follow Him instead of the other way around. Always begin a decision or a day with Jesus, no matter what the day may bring and when God comes first in your day and in your life then your other priorities will be in their proper order.

How much more, little one?

Have you ever wondered how little we seem to be in the universe which God created? I know that our world is a normal sized planet but when you back out into the galaxy and into the cosmos as a whole, our entire solar system gets lost in a sea of motes. The stars which comprise our own galaxy take up the sky and cover our small corner of this arm of the galaxy until we are lost among the dust and the gas. So why are we, on this little ball of dust and mud, so important to God?

We are important to Him because He created us to be His. We aren’t puppets or toys to Him, we are people and we are special because we are created in His Image. No other being in the universe can claim that place. But, we hold that special place because He is God not out of any accomplishment or any righteousness of our own. All of us are bought with a price and that price was the blood of Jesus our Savior and Redeemer.

How much should we suffer or be in bondage to sin? We shouldn’t be in bondage to it at all because we have been bought with Jesus’ blood and our sin debt is paid, but if you haven’t given your life and your heart to Him then you are still a slave to sin! It doesn’t matter how long you have belonged to a church or denomination or if you are a deacon or serving in the Gideons, no amount of work which we do without Jesus as our Savior will help us or save us in any way!

How much should we live in this world of temptation and heartaches and put up with all of the things which happen every day? How much more, O Lord should we be here?

These feelings have been echoed throughout the ages since Jesus went to His Father. Is it selfish to wonder about these things? I don’t think so. The church is ready to leave as well, but the timing is God’s timing and not ours. It could happen in a few minutes or in a couple of years but only God knows that day and hour.

Jesus told His disciples not to worry about the timing of His return recorded in Matthew 24: 36-41: 36 No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,e but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. 39 And they were oblivious until the flood came and swept them all away. So will be the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field: one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding at the mill: one will be taken and the other left.

That day will take the whole world by surprise, even those who are looking for His return. But, He will return for those who are expecting Him and looking for Him because they have faith that He will return. onebreathaway

I will sing of your love, O Lord!

But I will sing of thy power; yea, I will sing aloud of thy mercy in the morning: for thou hast been my defence and refuge in the day of my trouble.
Psalms 59:16 KJV
https://bible.com/bible/1/psa.59.16.KJV

Faith, what is it?

Have you ever wondered what faith really is? Faith according to the Bible is defined by this: Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

In Ephesians our faith is part of the equation which brings us to salvation through our Savior: Ephesians 2:8 “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

Also, without faith it is impossible to please God in anything that we do: Hebrews 11:6 “And without faith, it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

When God calls you or me to Himself through the conviction that we need Him, He gives us the faith which we need to believe in Jesus for our salvation. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have the faith which is necessary to bring us to that knowledge. It is a gift of God to us so that we can effectively believe in the promises which He has made to us in Scripture. That is what Biblical faith is.

We have faith in gravity or in our heart to keep beating and to keep us alive, yet we don’t usually acknowledge it. We have faith that the sun will rise in the morning, not gifted to us by God but because it has always come up each morning. That is faith in things which are seen. Faith in things which are not seen but are hoped for with a conviction that we will have them one day is the faith which is spoken of in the Bible.

This kind of faith cannot be proven or shown to anyone who doesn’t believe in God or Jesus or the Bible because it takes faith to believe in those things. If you don’t have it, you can’t get it except by belief in Jesus and His atonement for your sins and you won’t believe that unless God gives you the faith to do so!

I know, it is a spiral which goes from faith to faith to faith but if you have it, you’ve got it and if you don’t then unless you are seeking Him, you won’t get it then either.

Romans 10:17 “So faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.” Reading God’s Word and seeking Him in it will bring you into a closer walk with Him so enjoy His Presence in your life by cultivating a friendship with God. He is always present with you so treat Him as a treasured friend and talk to Him, walk with Him, seek His advice and act on His advice that is given to you.

By faith in Him and through Him we can conquer any problem in our lives, so make sure that you seek Him and His Son’s friendship while you can. Life only lasts for a little while, so make sure that you are friends with the Author of Life!

We are free in Christ

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
Galatians 5:1 KJV
https://bible.com/bible/1/gal.5.1.KJV