God is still working!
Many people, pastors included, think that God stopped working after creating everything…He didn’t stop. He has been working behind the scenes and in every country, nation, government building, and office in the world. It doesn’t matter if it is a country that rejects Him and His message, He is still working in the lives of people everywhere. He is drawing them to Himself and bringing those who will come to Him into His family.
Sometimes we think that God is not in control because of all of the evil and hatred in the world but He is still there and in control. He protects those who know Him and those who will come to know Him. The land of Israel is His and the people there are His too, even if they don’t accept Him as their Savior and King. One day, they will. There are miracles every day that many people don’t notice but if you know God and how He works, you can see them. There are people who are alive today that wouldn’t have been alive if He wasn’t in control. There are places that would be in much worse shape spiritually if He did not have control of Satan and only allowed him to do whatever God told him to do and not do.
Life itself would not be possible if there weren’t specific parts of our world that He keeps in running order. He controls the Sun and the weather and everything around us but there are so many who do not see it. It wasn’t an accident that our planet was placed here. Jupiter and Saturn help keep many hazards from making a run toward us and God placed them there for that purpose. Scientists don’t want to acknowledge it but it is true. Even the moon protects us from many threats that we might never know about.
Jesus came to pay all of the penalties for the sinners of the world, past, present, and future. He did exactly that and then was raised on the third day giving us the opportunity to enjoy eternity with Him if we believe in Him for our salvation. God had this planned a long, long time before any of us were here and He loves us in more depth than we can understand. It seems that many people think that our universe was brought into existence by the “Big Bang” and God may have used something like that to begin but I don’t think it was fourteen billion years ago. The Bible says that God stretched out the heavens and that is why they are finding galaxies that are way out there but they look just like our galaxy.
God’s creation is awesome and all of His attributes are shown in it every day. From the blue whales on Earth to the rings around Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune, He created all of it to cause us to have wonder and awe at all of creation and for us to give praise to Him. Seek Him while there is time to do so because the age of the church, the dispensation of grace, is coming to an end. When it does, the whole world will know it and those who haven’t made Jesus their Lord will have to endure the Tribulation.
Life is hard enough today without any help from anyone. But, God promises to be with us every day. As Christians, we should help others bear the burdens that have been placed on them by life’s circumstances. Not just because it is the right thing to do but because we would want help whenever we become burdened with a load that is too much to bear alone.
The verse that nearly everyone knows, John 3:16, begins with “For God so loved…”. He does love us because we are created in His image. God doesn’t love the sinful ways that we live and show our lack of care and love toward each other. Can we fix this? NO! Not on our own we can’t.
When you feel His touch in your heart that convicts you of the ways that you have hurt His heart by living apart from Him, please don’t turn away. Don’t refuse to listen to that “small voice” that speaks to your soul. It is God telling you that you need to turn your life over to Jesus and allow Him to change your life.
God sent Jesus to live and teach and heal those who came to Him but He also came to die for our sins. He did that and then rose from the grave three days later as He conquered death for us. He made it possible for us to have eternal life with Him one day. Something that we can’t do on our own. We can’t be good enough to not commit sins during our time here. Satan always has the upper hand and can tempt us to do or think about things that we might not do on our own. The problem with our pride is that we think we can master our own selves.
Self-control is something that most of humanity has trouble with every day and has had to deal with this trouble for thousands of years. God knew this long before we were born and He provided a way for us to be reconciled to Him through Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only way to be admitted into God’s Presence. Believing in Him for your salvation and giving your heart to Him is the beginning of your eternity but that isn’t all. You need to study God’s Word and learn His will for your life and how you can possibly please God for the rest of your time here.
Becoming a Christian by your belief in Jesus as your Savior is the first step but it is only the first step on your journey to Heaven. Our life here is pitifully short compared to even one thousand years. Thinking of eternity is something our minds cannot conceive of. I pray that anyone who might read this will seek Jesus as their Savior…soon. Because one day the church will be taken up to be with Him and life on Earth will become more like hell on Earth than it has ever been. Make sure of your eternity before that happens.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” – John 3:16
God loves each of us so much that HE was willing to give His Son as a sacrifice to pay the penalty of all of our sins. They are paid for entirely, all you have to do is believe in Jesus for your salvation and you will be saved. Like the Jewish people in the wilderness who were bitten by venomous snakes for their disobedience and hard hearts, all they had to do to live was to look at the bronze serpent that Moses put on the pole in the camp. Just look at it and you will live. If they didn’t, they would die. Their “looking” at it was with expectancy and they were expecting God to heal them from the snake bites. We have to expect salvation through our belief in Jesus for our salvation.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is just that simple but many people don’t want to believe that it can be that simple. There must be something that they can do or must do in order to gain their salvation! That is the problem today, people expect that they have to help Jesus save their souls but that is not what is required. Those people in the wilderness couldn’t heal themselves. All they could do was believe what Moses told them about looking at the serpent on the pole and they would be healed. Jesus did all the work that was needed to bring salvation to us and it is up to us and our faith to believe in His work of atonement for our sins and we shall be saved.
There is nothing magical about the verse that nearly everyone knows but the belief in Jesus comes to us when God touches our hearts and we realize that we truly need Jesus as our Savior. I pray that everyone who reads this will seek Jesus Christ as their Savior because the time of God’s grace is coming to an end and the world will soon be in turmoil during the Tribulation. Salvation is possible during this time but it will be harder to achieve and live out during this period. God wants as many as will believe to come to salvation and I pray that you will.
There are many “demons” in our world. They don’t look like the movies or even what most of us think they would look like. Some of them are drug addiction or even alcoholism that so many people deal with. Others are the diseases that we have to deal with that cause addiction, to begin with. No one knows how badly it affects people, but Satan knows how to cause people to become addicted.
People don’t really believe that demons or even Satan exist. That is why is it so easy for him to manipulate those who have no spiritual background. I’m not talking about “new age” spiritualism, I’m talking about those who have been to a Bible-teaching church. These are people who attend church but they think they are saved because of the church they attend. Some think that because their family has always been in this church, they are saved. That is not what Jesus said. He said, “He who believes in Me shall have eternal life“.
We don’t become Christians by osmosis, we become Christians when the Holy Spirit convicts our Spirit that we need Jesus as our Savior and we believe in Him for our salvation. It is our choice but it is also a daily walk with Him. Prayer and reading God’s Word DAILY, not just on Sunday, is where you engage Him on a daily basis and learn from Him every day. The Holy Spirit is the one who teaches us about Jesus when we are doing our part by reading the Bible every day.
Many people would say that they don’t have time to read the Bible every day, but God gives us the same amount of time every day. We make time for things that don’t mean anything to our lives but we won’t do the very thing that will help us to live according to His Word. God loves us and He knows what is in your heart. Make sure of your walk with Him and your Salvation because the time of the church and this age of grace is coming to an end. What day that may be no one knows but God Himself but if you compare today’s news with the prophecies you can see that our world is coming to the end of our time.
It could be a few years or maybe a decade but I don’t believe it will be more than that. I pray that everyone who reads this will seek Him for your salvation because not one of us is given more than today to seek Him.
There are many who think that they do. Mark 11:22 is where Jesus told His disciples to “have faith in God and all things are possible”. The kind of faith that He was speaking of is one that is not swayed by feelings or problems. It is the kind of faith that allows you to believe even when things don’t look good or when things are not going the way you want them to. I think of people who go to church and study their Bibles yet they get a diagnosis of cancer. Does your faith give you the strength to stand up to that?
Many people’s faith doesn’t. Why? Because, in my opinion, they don’t think that God cares enough about them or their problems, their faith and belief in Him is not strong enough to stand up to their problems. It is not easy to believe that our Creator loves us this much. Especially when we can’t see Him or the evidence of His love but it is all around us. He gives us the food that we have to live on and the air that we breathe. He gave His Son to pay the price for our sins so that we could be redeemed from the penalty of those sins.
There is an unending supply of evidence that God loves each of us but many of us choose not to see it. We go through our lives every day and we live by the same rules that we have lived by all of our lives, some of them are His rules and some are not. The point is that we choose to pay little attention to the details that He takes care of when we can’t. He takes care of many details that we may never be aware of, like an accident that we avoided because He caused us to be a little later getting on the road. We may blame Him for causing us to be late but if we had been there when we intended, we could’ve been hurt in an accident.
There are likely many things that God does for us in the background that we aren’t aware of now, but we may find out about them when we are in His Presence one day. Then we will know about the little details that He took care of when we didn’t know He was doing it. Your faith in His should be based on all of the things that you can read about in His Word. Not because He did it two thousand years ago but because He can still do it today. Remember, Jesus said that we can do the things that He did and even greater…but it is likely dependent on our faith and our belief in Him.
The Living Message of Christ 