What would you give?

In Psalm 84:11-12 it says: 11 For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly. 12 O LORD of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee.

God gives to us everything that we need. He doesn’t give to us our wants and our demand, yet many people seem to think that He owes them their desires just because they are “following” Him. God doesn’t owe us anything at all! He protects us and keeps us in this life because He loves us. We have air to breathe and water to drink and most of us have food to eat, so what is there to complain about?

Jesus said that she gave more than the others.

God never said in any part of His Word that we would be rich or well off because we serve Him in some small capacity, whether it is as a teacher or a mother or a police person or even a preacher. It is only because of some “twisted scripture” or scripture taken out of context which people use to get what they want out of other people that we see so-called “servants of God” who are wealthy. You also hear some people saying, usually during times of hardship, that they would give anything if their loved one would recover. Sometimes, God takes them at their word and heals that person but when the healing is done their “promise” is forgotten or it is reduced to a very tiny portion of what they were thinking at the time.

God gave His Son to atone for all of mankind’s sins. We may not be able to give a sacrificial gift like that but we could give our time or our prayers or volunteer in a nursing home or a hospice. Anything that we do for others is considered more than we think it is worth. Many times we will do things and we may never think of it again. We may not find out about the good that our giving accomplished until we get to Heaven and find someone that reminds us of something that we considered small but it made a big difference in their life at some point.

If you ask someone who doesn’t have a home or food or maybe even shoes what they want most in life, what do you think they would give for an answer? A mansion? The finest clothes that money can buy? Maybe the best and most comfortable shoes? Most of the time, in my opinion, the few that I have heard interviewed on TV, they would like to have a warm meal, a warm bed or a cool place to sleep in the summer, comfortable, simple shoes and maybe the most important thing…someone to talk to and who will truly listen.

Jesus paid the price for our sins and our salvation because we can’t do it on our own. Think of the love that He and the Father have for each of us to make it possible for us to have an eternity to love and be loved by our Creator and our God just because we believe that He did it for us because He loves us. Some may say that they don’t want to live an eternity like that. You don’t know what that eternity will be like. God did not save us to sit around meditating on Him, although we could and it would be wonderful. God’s love for His creation is so deep and unknowable until we will be in awe of Heaven’s beauty for many, many years because of what He has perfected there. Your home, if you are a believer, will be so wonderful even if it is a tent (which I don’t think Jesus would do that to us).

Every prophet or disciple who has been given a glimpse of Heaven could scarcely find the words to describe its beauty. It was so much more than what we can see here until even the most beautiful places on Earth pale in comparison with it! I pray that all who reads this will seek to know Jesus as your Savior and Lord and I pray that I will meet you there one day.

Be kind to one another

Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Ephesians 4:31‭-‬32 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/eph.4.31-32.KJV

Don’t render the same towards anyone

See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men. 1 Thessalonians 5:15 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/1th.5.15.KJV

Be at peace…

Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: Hebrews 12:14 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/heb.12.14.KJV

Be thankful and humble

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. Matthew 6:6 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/mat.6.6.KJV

Don’t make a show of yourself so people can see or hear what you are doing. Know that you are a sinner in need of God and humbly ask Him for your forgiveness, because all of us are sinners saved by His grace.

God is…

Our Creator…the Creator of everything. The Savior of all who will believe. Our God Who sees us as we are and loved us even before we were born. The Father of Jesus the Christ and the Lamb of God Who gave His life as a ransom for ALL of our sins. The One Who named the stars and placed them in their places. He is All knowing and all powerful. The One Who was and is and is to come. He is the One Who defends the helpless and heals those who are blind or deaf or paralyzed. He can soften a heart grown cold from abuse and neglect and make it to hope in the future and see His great love for them. He loves each of us, whether we believe in Him or not, just because He is God. He doesn’t have to have a reason or an excuse to do everything that He does because He is Life, Love, Perfection, Time and everything that is good and holy in the universe.

Since God is all of these things and more and yet He is holy and pure…how could you believe that you or I could stand in His Presence one day and even consider that we are worthy to be allowed into Heaven? We were in His thoughts before the Earth was formed and the moon was hung in its place. He thought of each of us before He hung the stars or our Sun in its place. So how could we be holy and blameless before Him unless we give our lives to learning from His Word and living our daily lives by striving to be more like Jesus? The answer is simple…we can’t! There is nothing that any of us can offer to God or live by on our own that will qualify us to be granted access to Heaven.

Only by believing in Jesus as our Savior can we be in God’s Presence because we loved Jesus more than our own life. I pray that all who read this post will seek to be saved by belief in Jesus as your Savior because the day is coming soon. Don’t be left behind when the church, the Body of Christ, meaning all believers are taken up to be with Him.

Love others as Jesus loves you

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. John 13:34 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/jhn.13.34.KJV

Every life matters!

Life matters regardless of skin color or ethnicity

God created all life on our world and He created the different shades of color found in humanity as well as all of the variety of life and colors found in nature. So…why can’t we look beyond our skin color? It has been over fifty years since Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered by a white supremacist and yet those on both sides of this tragedy still haven’t moved beyond the same anger and frustration fifty years later.

Life does matter and it doesn’t matter if it is a black life or a white life or any other skin tone, in God’s eyes ALL of life matters. So why can’t we realize this and find something in common and work from there? I do realize that there are many things that the white “race” has done in the past and in many ways are still agreeing with even today. Even though today we don’t vocalize it for the most part. Our crime of being racist is shown in how we react to the situation that we may find ourselves in. We may think that we aren’t showing a racist attitude toward anyone but our body language and our eyes show something else entirely, even though we may not even realize that we do these things unconsciously.

Is there a way to end the violence and the hatred in this world which has been sparked into a raging fire? I don’t know that we can find one without Jesus coming back and ruling our world. I don’t really believe that we have the ability to place our emotions and our prejudices aside in order to bring lasting peace into our world and keep it that way. Now, I’m not pointing a finger at any government or any other movement in the world. Black lives do matter but so do the police and fire service men and women. The EMT’s lives matter, who try to help those who are injured or shot in any confrontation. The doctors and nurses lives matter because regardless of color or “race” they do their best to put people back together who have been hurt regardless of the circumstances.

Yes, in the past people have treated other people differently because of their skin color or their station in life even, but that doesn’t give you or me the right to go into the street and burn down small businesses and homes and threaten people with harm for no reason other than the color of their skin! When you are doing that you are no different than the ones who did this to your ancestors many years ago. We are living in the twenty-first century but many people are acting as if they are still in the 19^th century. If things keep going in that direction and someone sets an EMP off one day we will be back in the 19^th century in the area that it affected.

God never intended for us to live like this or act in this way toward each other but we are doing it. Satan is the one who hates us and it has nothing to do with your skin color at all. Satan hates us because we were created in God’s Image. It is Satan’s coaxing and prodding which is pushing this movement to be as violent as it is and he doesn’t care if we kill off a few thousand or more because that is fewer than he will have to deal with later. God loves each of us and all of our unique abilities and our outlook on life. Seek to please God and walk with Him in this world so that you can be victorious against Satan and his influence over a world that seems to be crumbling around us.

We are a part of God’s creation whether we like it or not, whether we believe in Him or not, but that doesn’t change the fact that murder is wrong in every instance and it doesn’t matter if the one murdered is old or young, a cop or one of the crowd. Even suicide is wrong in God’s eyes because you are killing yourself and you are also created in God’s Image. He loves each of us and we should try to reflect some of His love back into the world and make it better than it was before…not worse.

Jesus went through this for you

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. Isaiah 53:5 KJV https://bible.com/bible/1/isa.53.5.KJV

How much are we alike?

In many, many ways actually. God created mankind in His Image. All of us, regardless of our location on Earth, have two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth and of course the appendages that go along with arms and legs too. Granted there are many who have lost the use of or the presence of an arm or leg or both in war, but for the most part we come from His template. Even our blood is the same color.

So why do we focus on the color of our skin or even the color of our eyes much of the time? It has been said that “the eyes are the window to your soul” and for the most part it is true. You can look at someone’s eyes and see lots of different things. You can’t know their heart for sure in this manner or even their personality but you can get a “gut feeling” of the type of person that they are. Sometimes it is wrong but occasionally it is spot on.

We do not all look alike. Some of us are dark skinned and some are light on melanin which helps each of us depending on our location on Earth with respect to the Sun. So…why have we become so polarized in our relationships because of our skin color?

The reason seems to have started a few centuries ago and it was wrong then too. Explorers from Europe and England considered the “dark-skinned” inhabitants of Africa and Middle Asia (India) to be “less than human”. The same was thought of as the Aborigines of Australia and the South Pacific Islands. But why did they think this way? It could be that they thought of Chimpanzee and their skin color and equated them with the “darkies” as they labeled them that way.

This was a very European way of looking at other people from other cultures and areas of the world but it wasn’t the correct way at all. Jesus was a Jewish man born in what is Israel, He was dark skinned and not like any of the “white” Jesus paintings that artists painted of Him. There are many misrepresentations of Him and Adam and Eve and many other Biblical figures in museums around the world but thankfully the Word of God in the Bible is true.

Will racism ever be fixed? Not by reading books about it nor by any amount of violence or destruction of property but it will be taken care of when Jesus returns to rule over Earth for a thousand years. Consider this and seek to know Him before the end of the church age comes.