How much time do you have? How much time does our world have?
The only One who knows this answer is God. I have been on this Earth, in this body for 21, 900 days. That sounds like a lot of time but it’s not. Six decades is only enough time to live through marriage and raising a child and seeing them grow up and become adults and maybe even a grandparent. It is enough time to make it through high school, college, and a career and come to a point where you are considering retirement if that is an option.
Our days are numbered and God knows exactly how many days you and I have left. He has known this all along but we don’t need to know it. The time that we are living in is at the end of the age of grace. If you don’t know Jesus as your Savior, I suggest you begin seeking Him to be your Savior soon. The church will be taken away and when that happens it will be even more difficult and dangerous to become a Christian.
God’s Son has already paid the price for your salvation, all you have to do is seek Him out and claim it to become a Christian and an adopted heir of salvation.
Who has the most influence in your life? Is it your friend? Is it your parents? Is it your wife or your mother? For most of us, the answer is our wife or our mother, or both. We learn many things from our mothers while we are growing up. Whether we are home-schooled or not. We see how they handle situations. We hear their opinions and their advice, whether they intended for us to hear it or not. Some of us learn from our fathers and our grandfathers some important lessons. Sometimes they are good lessons and sometimes they are lessons that we would rather forget about, but they are learned nonetheless.
Occasionally, the lessons that we learn are from life itself. Schoolmates and friends teach us things. Some of which we shouldn’t have learned but in some ways, these “life lessons” help to make us who we become later in life. Then there are those lessons that we learn by trial and error. These lessons also teach us and make us into the people that we will ultimately become.
I’ve often wondered if God has a hand in all of these “teachable moments” and in the last decade I’ve come to realize that He does indeed have a hand in guiding us through them whether we know Him as our Savior…yet, or not. Especially when He has a plan and a purpose for your life that you may not know about yet. I mean, He does place kings and Presidents in their places because He is working through them to bring about His will for our planet and the people on it. So, why wouldn’t He have a hand in each of our lives even when we haven’t come to the place where He is our Savior and Lord?
Sometimes we go through some dark times in our life so He can show us the way out of the darkness. I went through a time of depression while I was a pastor of a small church. Brought on because I wasn’t sure that my message was making any difference. But God brought me through it and gave me a message to put out there so others could find it and hopefully find Him as well.
Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened, ask and it shall be given“. Don’t go through life without Him. When you feel that you need His help and you don’t know where to find Him, pray. Seeking Him through prayer will allow you to find Him and then ask Him for your salvation and your strength will be given to you as well. Will your life become easy and wonderful from that point on? No, because when you belong to Jesus, Satan will try to ruin your witness in front of your family and friends. So keep seeking Him every day and you can overcome those hard times that Satan is throwing your way.
Psalm 31: 14-16 says: “But, I trusted in the thee, O Lord, I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me. Make thy face to shine upon thy servant; save me for thy mercies’ sake”.
Why should you trust in the Lord? Because being a truly changed Christian requires it. Trust is also another word for faith or “having faith in”. God is our Creator and our Redeemer and the faith that we should have in Him for our salvation is necessary for that salvation to be real. If it is not there, then your salvation may not be real either. Going a bit further, trusting in Him is the only way to know God and His Son as your Savior.
So, why do people in our world today seem to believe in things that have no eternal meaning? It seems that people will believe in many things today that have no basis in fact at all and cannot be proven scientifically but they will argue with you feverishly over their “beliefs” even when they cannot prove any of them. Jesus came to the Earth to bear the sins of the world and to pay the penalty for all of humanity. Whether you believe in Him or not or even if you have accepted Him as your Savior or rejected His offer, He still came and paid the price for your soul. That is how much God values your soul.
Even if only one other person accepts Jesus as their Savior, God knows who you are and He values you enough to pay your way into heaven by believing in Jesus for your salvation. When you feel broken and hurt and depressed, God is there waiting for you to turn to Him. He can heal your heart and the problems that are weighing on your life. He can give your life a meaning that it has never had before, regardless of your background or any of your sins in your life…He loves you!
When you are younger, growing up is not easy. Oh, we enjoy recess period at school and we enjoy our summer breaks but there are many things that we don’t enjoy. Homework, tests, pop-tests, falling and skinning your knees…all of these things are hard and hurtful at times but they help us to learn. So…are you grown up? Some of us are and some of us are keeping back some part of our life to keep from being grown up into maturity.
Have you given your life to Jesus and asked Him to come into your heart to be your Savior? Have you surrendered your life to Him fully? A fully surrendered life is given as a definite, deliberate, voluntary transfer of undivided possession, control, and use of your entire being to the Lord Jesus Christ to whom we rightfully belong. He paid for your salvation and mine through His death, burial, and resurrection and since He is our Creator, He is entitled to our whole being. But, we must voluntarily give it to Him.
This is something that we have a very hard time doing. We are individuals and we enjoy being free to do as we please. But when you give your life and your heart to Jesus, you have to give Him the whole of yourself, not just a part of you. This is what I’m talking about when I mentioned being “grown-up”. Maturing as a Christian is not an easy task because we want to have control over many parts of our lives. We need to seek His counsel in every part of our lives not just our spiritual lives. He wants to be involved in all areas of your life. Why? Because He loves us!
The problem comes because we live our lives daily for many years without thinking about Jesus. We go to grammar school and sometimes junior high without considering Him or even His ways. Sometimes we may even live through college and into our “adult” life without Him fully in our life. I don’t understand how people can live like this but it seems that many do. Living a life that is surrendered to Jesus is a conscious, deliberate decision and it is one that we must do every day. It isn’t easy but it can be done with the help of the Holy Spirit. Doing this or trying to do this on your own will not work.
The little planet that God created for us to live on is the focus of His attention in the universe. Why? Because the people that He chose to bring the Messiah into the world through are here. God created the universe and our little planet too. He created the stars and galaxies and all of the life that is on our little planet and He did it to make life interesting. When sin was brought into our world it corrupted all of creation, not just mankind. That is why there are so many problems and things that are not right in the world. One day in the future, the corruption that sin caused will be taken away. What a wonderful day that will be.
Seek Jesus and learn to be His disciple every day. Grow up in your faith and in your walk with Him so you can be more useful to Him and His Kingdom. It will take time but it will be worth it.
God grants each of us a “measure of faith”. When we are called to become a child of God, adopted into His family, He gives us the faith to believe in His Son for our salvation. Without faith, we cannot believe! Even the smallest amount of faith will enable you to do more than you can without it.
Faith is something that Christians have that many people don’t understand. Some of us who have been Christians for a few years don’t understand it. We know we have it or we wouldn’t have given our hearts to Jesus. We know God gave it to us because without it you can’t please God or come to know Jesus as your Savior. The Bible says that “faith is the evidence of things hoped for and the certainty of things not seen“. With faith in God’s Word and in Jesus, we know that His Word is Truth and that no power on Earth can keep God’s promises from coming to pass.
Jesus is coming back. There will be a day of judgment on those who have rejected Him. There will be a 1,000-year reign of Jesus on Earth as our King! God always keeps His promises. It really doesn’t take faith to believe this, but it helps. We are near the end of the “Church age” and the very next event will be the “rapture” (taking away) of the Church, the Bride of Christ. When that happens, the whole world will know that God’s Word was telling the truth. At least, those who have ever been in church or heard a sermon about this will know. Everyone else will be blaming it on aliens or swamp gas or who knows what else.
I pray that everyone who reads this will be part of the Bride of Christ because the world is going to become more like hell on Earth after we are gone. Seek Him out and read the Bible. Learn about Him and ask Him to be your Savior. It won’t be impossible to become a Christian after the church is gone but it will be very dangerous to be one.
When I was a lot younger than I am now, listening to adults give me advice was the last thing on my list of to-dos. I imagine it was the same with most of you who read this blog. When you were a teenager adults didn’t know anything. As you get older you realize that they did know more than you did at the time but you didn’t want to listen to them or their advice.
Lots of times we are the same way in the church. When we are there we may hear what the sermon is about but we don’t listen to it very well. How do I know this? Because I did it myself. If you asked me on Monday what the sermon was about on Sunday morning, I couldn’t tell you. Actually, I could tell you this time. It was about the vision that Ezekiel had of the angels who marked those in the city who were concerned about the sins of Israel and those who were not. Those who were not even included some who served in the Temple and it was those who were killed.
God cares about everything that we do but He is very interested in the things that we care about that align with His. When you love those things and people that God loves and hate those things that He hates, then you are more like Jesus which is what God desires for us as His followers. Life is promised to those who follow Jesus’ ways and do the things that Jesus told His disciples to do.
When I see the news today and hear the things that are going on today, the only conclusion can be that we are living at the end of the last days. I pray that you will seek to know Jesus if you don’t know Him as your Savior yet.
We need to be ourselves because Jesus called us to be His. He chose you. Not someone that you will become with more education or study. Although the studying and the learning will come with following Him, He called you as you are to be…well, you. Each of us has a specific trait that He needs and that the body of Christ, the church, needs. There is something that you can do or say that nobody else can. You can reach someone with His message that the pastor can’t reach. You can tell the story of how Jesus has touched your life and that will make a difference to someone.
Christ touches our lives when we believe in Him for our salvation but He also lives through our lives to take His message to others. His Spirit lives in you if you have believed in Him for your salvation and it is this life that others will be able to see. Taking His message of love and forgiveness to the world doesn’t mean that you have to go overseas to be a missionary. You can take His message to your family or to those you work around or work with every day.
When I said that you don’t need to have degrees to prove that you are serving God that is what I meant. All of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen but they had been to school at their synagogue. They had learned and even memorized a good bit of the Old Testament by the time they were teenagers. The Bible is the best book to teach us about God and about life too. God’s wisdom is contained in His Word so the more you know about His Word, the better you know Him. That is why I read through the Bible at least once every year from Genesis to Revelation. Then…I go back to the beginning and start over.
I used to wonder why people would do that but I found out that God’s Word doesn’t really repeat itself. You do read the same words every time but the message that your heart and your Spirit get from it is different every time. God’s Word is what we should read to learn what His will is for your life but it also is alive and it reads your Spirit while you read it. So your Spirit will receive the wisdom from the same words that you need right now. Just because you have read Psalm 23 many times, the words and the wisdom change when God sees that you need a different message.
God gives us all of the wisdom that we can handle and it is contained in His Word. His love for us is beyond anything that we can imagine or conceive in this life. On the day when we stand before Him, we will know the depth of His love and feel it too. If you don’t know Him as your Savior yet, I suggest getting to know Him soon.
The Living Message of Christ 