What are you doing for Him? Have you ever wondered about your life as a Christian? We usually ask God for our provisions, our needs, and our problems. Do you see the pattern here? We are called by God, prompted by His Holy Spirit to give our hearts and our lives to Him as our sacrifice to Him because of His grace toward us through Jesus’ sacrifice. We are supposed to give because He gave His only Son’s life for you and me.
Yet we have the audacity to claim Jesus as our Savior and then pray for our selfish desires and our problems without a thought for His requirement of us being His servants and His disciples. And we expect Him to answer our prayers right now! Not next week! How arrogant we are. Can you see what I’m trying to illustrate here?
Your life, as a Christian, should be centered on doing the work that we have been called to do by Jesus. What is that exactly? First and foremost it is being a witness to those around you at home or at work or even in public. Remember, Jesus told His disciples to go and tell others about Him and what HE did for them. That same command is extended to each of us today because people need to know about their Savior. If you and I don’t tell them, how will they know?
When I was lost, the only reason I went to church was that I had no choice. My mom went to church on Sunday and I had to go with her. I had been in church for as long as I can remember but when I became a teenager is when I began to rebel against my “expectations”. I’m not going into all of the details of my early life but I was a part of a “broken home” as they called them in the 70s. It isn’t uncommon today but back then it was. I didn’t get into drugs much but alcohol and a little “weed” were my friends or so I thought.
When you accept Jesus as your Savior, you are supposed to move away from your old self and follow Him into your new life. I thought I did this for a long time but I kept drinking and smoking for a long time. I was doing things that a born-again person isn’t supposed to do. It wasn’t until I became a father twenty-two years ago that I really began to reach out and seek God for my salvation. I had been baptized a couple of times but all that did was get me wet but I was still lost.
It has taken twenty years of study and seeking God to bring me to a point where I feel comfortable telling others about my Savior. I even served as a “lay-preacher” for almost ten years and there was a lot of growing in Christ that happened during that time as well. What is my point? It is this: If you truly belong to Him, you should be telling others about Him.
Don’t back up or think they will be offended. Some of them may be but they still need to hear it because you might be the only person who will tell them. God can use your talent to touch those around you and sometimes you are the only person that can get His message to at least one person in particular. It may be someone in your family or someone you work with but they may not listen to anyone else but you and your story. Plant the seed of your story in Christ so that they may decide to turn to Him as well. You may never know if they gave their heart to Jesus until you see them in Heaven but you may be surprised by how many you did influence that you never even spoke to.
If you are saved by His grace and you truly and completely believe this then He does live in your heart. Believe this and don’t listen to those who say that Christianity is foolish. It is foolish to those who don’t want to believe, but God loves them anyway.
God loves each of us completely. Now, what does that mean? It means that God loves every fiber of your being right down to your DNA. He put it together and placed all of your gifts and abilities in those strands of your building block molecules. So, when you are called to become an adopted child of His through your acceptance of Jesus as your Savior, you are supposed to give your complete life and love back to Him.
How can I give my life and my love to Him? The first act of love from yourself to Him is to accept Jesus as your Savior and learn about Him and His commandments in the Bible so we can be the best person that we can be. With the Holy Spirit’s help, we can live our lives daily trying to live according to those Ten Commandments. I can’t live my life according to and following those commandments without His Spirit living in my heart and neither can you! God desires our obedience more than anything.
Jesus, the Son of God, came to live here as a human being so He would know our weaknesses and our temptations. He also knows our fears and our feelings of rejection and He came to walk where we walk and be connected with us. While it is true that God knows these things too, Jesus needed to do this as part of the Trinity so that He could truly relate to and understand us with our physical limitations and our sorrows and our joys too.
A better way of understanding this would be the relationship between a dog that you have in your household. They are part of the family. You take care of their needs and love them as much as you can but you can’t relate to them on their level unless you were able to become one of them. Live your life as a dog even with their short life spans. Enjoy all of the things that they enjoy and feel and smell all of the things that they feel. This is a very simplistic way of looking at our relationship with God and Jesus but I know that all of the dog owners out there can relate to this.
God loves us far more deeply than we can imagine. Just as most owners of Dachshunds can relate to this relationship. Any dog, regardless of breed, that you take into your home and care for will become a part of your family. Usually so deeply loved until their death will affect you more than you ever thought possible. That pain is the kind of pain that I believe God feels when we reject His love and His offer of forgiveness through believing in Jesus for your salvation. It may be even worse than that. My point is this: He loved each of us enough to send Jesus to die on the cross so many years ago just to pay the debt for our sins that we cannot pay.
Sometimes, in life, we feel that we have done so much that He wouldn’t accept us. But…when you read God’s Word you find people that He has used in His plan who were murderers, killers, adulterous, liars, harlots, even some who were not Jewish and a few who were people that God condemns completely, yet they were all used in the family line leading to Jesus. I know that was a very long sentence but to give you the backstory of all of them is just too much.
Why did I include all of the different people in the paragraph above? Because, when you begin to think about Jesus or even if you are thinking that He can’t use me or even why would He want me? God used a donkey to speak to Balim when it was needed. He knows you down to your molecules because He created you in every way by knitting your DNA together and giving you your talent and your personality. Why am I telling you this? Because there are so many people who think that God doesn’t exist or that He doesn’t care about us or more personally…me or you!
Jesus came to take your place on the cross. It was your sin and my sins that He came to pay the price for and it was those sins that nailed Him to the cross. So in the most intimate way, God loves you. He knows each of us more deeply than we know ourselves and He wants a relationship with us. He wanted this relationship in the beginning with Adam and Eve and for a while, He had it with them until Eve started talking with a snake.
It only takes a second for you to realize that you need Jesus in your life. Sometimes, that second that you say, “Jesus help me!” is all that you will have. If you know that you need Him in your life, I pray that you will make that decision soon before it is too late.
Have you noticed how much people want to get rid of any mention of God or Jesus and especially their laws? The Ten Commandments were never “suggestions”, they are commandments and we should obey them.
The first four commandments tell us how to obey and worship God. The other six tell us how we are to behave toward each other. That is why Jesus said that “we should love the Lord with all of our hearts, all of our souls and with all of our strength and all of our minds and the next commandment is that we should love our neighbor as ourselves”. Jesus didn’t dilute them, He just made ten into two but the two that He told the Pharisees about ARE the essence of the TEN.
Why can’t the church live by these commandments today? It seems that much of our problems in America could be fixed if these were taught in our homes and in our churches too. Life would be so much better if this was what we taught in schools to the children, but there are too many people worried about lawsuits and the separation of church and state. Teaching these is not an endorsement of any specific “religion or church”, it is teaching our young people the way they are supposed to act when they become adults!
In my walk through life, as I’m sure there is in everyone’s journey, I have discovered that every part of your past has had a part in shaping you for today. Are there things that I would’ve liked to avoid? Of course, but as I have been a student of the Bible for the past eleven years, every wobble and misstep has a purpose. God used so many things in people’s lives to bring about something good and glorious for each of their lives and Himself as well. He did it in the book of Genesis and He did it all the way through the Bible, right down to the book of Revelation.
Some of you might remind me that most of the book of Revelation hasn’t happened yet. Hang on, it’s coming. Every detail and every curse that is foretold in it will come to pass and I don’t believe we will have to wait very long to see it. Most of you who have denied the truth of God’s Word will see its Truth come to light when the church is taken away from the Earth. There will be many “explanations” for why people vanished but the only one that will be based on fact is the one found in the Bible. God’s facts, not mankind’s ideas or fabrications.
Each part of your life and mine has been a part that shaped each of us into the person that is here today. You read on social media about “what would you tell your younger self if you could”, even knowing what I know today there isn’t anything that I could tell my younger self that would make any real difference. Because if anything was changed in my past life, I wouldn’t be the same person that I am now. If I had stayed in the Air Force my future would be entirely different from what it is. My family would have been different, and my outlook on the world would be altered from what it is now if that one change had taken place.
God knows the person that we are and when He has a plan for your life in the future, He will make sure that you are that person at the appointed time.
You might ask “Does that mean that I’m not in control of my destiny?”. Well…the answer is more of a yes and no when it comes to your destiny. If God has a plan for your life but you choose not to listen to His voice and go off doing your own thing then the answer is yes, you are in control of your own destiny. But if you have given your heart to Jesus and then decide to go your own way for a while, then God will bring you back in line one way or another. When I say “given your heart to Jesus”, I mean truly repenting and turning away from your old life and following Him, at least for a while. Totally refusing to listen spiritually to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and going your own way is rebelling the way that Satan did. That is where freedom of choice comes into play.
God gave the angels and humanity the freedom to choose because He never wanted us, all of us, to be obedient because we didn’t have a choice. He wanted us to love Him and choose to obey Him because we loved Him because He loved each of us first, even before we decided to love and follow Him.
The Living Message of Christ 