A love note from God

Romans 8: 31-39

God loves us so completely and totally without reservation until He sent His Son, One of the Trinity, to pay for ALL of mankind’s sins. Not just those which had been done by Israel or those from centuries in the past, but for ALL of mankind until the end of the age of man. Love is the factor which brought God to Earth in the form of a man, Jesus the Christ.

We receive His grace every day with our life as we wake in the morning when we are bound to Earth by the gravity which God placed into creation or when we breathe the air given to us by God and recycled by the plants and trees and chlorophyll-laden plankton in the ocean. God provides for us in so many ways until we have come to take all of them for granted as if we have a right to them.

We do actually, as long as we are in love with Him too. But when we burn the forests down or pollute the oceans and streams which He gave to us to manage but not destroy, God doesn’t look kindly on us as part of His creation, which was made in His Image, while it destroys other parts of creation.

God tells us in His Word, the Bible, that He loves us. He does this so many times until it should register with you and me without it being pointed out by a preacher or someone who has taken the time to chronicle the number of times it shows up in the Bible. The numbers are not exactly staggering but they do show that God wants us to know that He LOVES us!

It depends upon which version/translation that you use to track the number, but if you use the King James Version there are 310 times in which it appears. Some translations use the word in ways other than what love should be used for but the fact is that God expressed His love for all of us through His grace and mercy and all of the blessings which we have in our lives.

Yes, we do take most of them for granted today and most of the world doesn’t notice any of them as being given to us by God at all. The air we breathe, the water we have to drink, the food which we have are all part of our inventiveness and our own work. Much of the world doesn’t attribute any of our accomplishments to God at all! It has all been done by the ingenuity of our minds and our talents.

Who gave us our talents and our intellect and ingenuity? God did. Yet, we treat our talents and our intellect as ours, as if we had a part in bringing it to bear in our lives. God gave each of us unique talents and abilities which only we, as individuals, have in our possession. While a degree or a talent for music may be shared in the general population, each person has some unique talent or ability which no other person in the world has.

So why do we seem to think that “natural selection” made such a difference in the world? Because of the scientists and legislators who have pushed God and any mention of Creation out of their curriculum. That is the reason most colleges graduate people who have no concept of God because He isn’t allowed in the classroom! So why would God bless our country so much when we have pushed Him out of schools and out of our government or public life? There is really only one reason which explains why He has not taken His blessings away from America.

He blesses the land which has blessed Israel and our country has done that. While it is true that a few others have blessed the land and the people that God holds dear in His heart, America has done it for the longest amount of time.

God is still active in Creation, whether we recognize His hand in it or not. The world is His and everything in it is His to do with as He pleases. So, forget the political processes and the parties, the Ruler of the universe is truly in charge of each facet of life here and we should be following Him as closely as possible every day.

The futility of man’s understanding

For those of you who have been to college, have you ever noticed just how much you find out that you don’t know? Even with degrees in the clinical sciences and chemistry, I find that the world around us still fascinates me by showing me things that never made it into those lecture halls or the books I studied. We are ignorant in comparison to the knowledge of the cosmos or any branch of study that you wish to pursue. When I was a teenager I read every astronomy book and magazine I could get my hands on.

I never owned a real telescope during my life of searching the meaning in the stars. I had one of those cheap dollar store type “telescopes” which you couldn’t get to focus on anything, so when I went to college I took astronomy as an elective. I didn’t know I was going to get a chance to look through some 12-inch and 14-inch telescopes and boy did that make me go “Wow!”

Yet, even with the Hubble telescope today and all of the information on the Internet, we still don’t know much about how we became who we are. We cannot pinpoint anything which leads us to a point where we can say that our knowledge bank is full. The point is that we are living in a futile existence. We only have a small amount of time in this life where we can pursue knowledge and truly learn things about the world around us. Yes, we live seventy or eighty years, but how many years of that span are truly productive and learning years?

We still cannot understand the workings of painkillers or how our genes code for eye color or personality. We cannot tell anyone how to speak to whales or dolphins and our best computers cannot make sense of the multitude of frequencies contained in the squeaks and clicks of the voice of a dolphin. We know how cells divide to make more of themselves but we don’t know when a “clump of cells” becomes a human being. (Hint: it happens even before the heart begins its first thump).

God has placed within us the knowledge of the infinite and our need for HIm in our lives but we run around for years trying to fill that place with lots of other things besides Him. God knows us from the moment we are in the womb because He placed us there. He gives us the knowledge for our life and the ability to learn more if we need to, but for our understanding of everything that we learn…it takes patience and seeking His knowledge first.

Why do I say that we need to know Him first? Because He is the Creator of it all. Who better to teach you about cells and biology and astronomy and chemistry than the One who made all of the life around you? He placed the stars in their courses. He placed the whales and the other life in the sea in their specific places. He created mankind to be an eternal being and at least part of us does live into eternity.

All of the knowledge that we can learn is but a small drop compared to His knowledge of everything. Even if you had five Ph.D.’s in many different disciplines, your knowledge would only be a small fraction of God’s. This is why the scientists in the years prior to the 19th century learned about their studies in order to prove His awesome glory!

Seek Him out during your few decades here on Earth so that you can spend eternity with Him doing things that you never thought possible.

God says

Are you lost?

In this age of cell phones with GPS capabilities, very few people can get lost on the road to almost anywhere. But, the road to Heaven is a road which is your life and a GPS doesn’t work on it. Oh, you can find exactly where you are at any time but what about your spiritual walk and your ultimate destination? Those two are part of the same interconnected lifestyle. It isn’t just going to church on the occasional Sunday or any particular holiday like Christmas and Easter.

Holidays and an occasional visit to church don’t equal a lifetime of relationship with your Savior. A relationship with Jesus is more closely related to a relationship with your spouse because it is a daily walk, a daily reading and studying of God’s Word, continually washing your mind with the water of Life which springs from it. A real Christian life begins on the day that you accept Jesus as your Savior, regardless of your physical age.

Some people seem to think that once they have accepted Him as their Savior, there isn’t anything more they should do so they go back to living their life. Their spirit tells them that they are doing it wrong, but if you ignore your spirit long enough eventually you won’t heart it at all. While this is possible and you are grieving the Spirit when you do it, I don’t believe that a person who does this was actually saved, to begin with, if they continually move back toward their old way of life.

When you are convicted of your sins and ask Jesus into your life, usually there is a complete change in your heart and your mind to move toward becoming more like Jesus. If you are studying the Word and meditating on His Wisdom and working toward becoming more like Christ, I don’t think you will turn back to your old way of living. Jesus paid a price for your soul, and for your salvation, so don’t treat your new life in Christ lightly.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4). Jesus is with us in all of our troubles and our fears especially after we have asked Him into our heart and our lives so why would you do things and go places that you wouldn’t be comfortable taking Jesus if He were with you in the flesh? He is there in Spirit in everything that you are doing, so consider that before you decide to go somewhere or do something that you wouldn’t take your own mother with you!

Jesus never leaves our side so if you did accept Him as your Savior, why would you consider doing a sinful act or going somewhere that you wouldn’t take Him? He loves you more deeply than you can imagine or even comprehend right now and even though your daily life may not be running over with blessings, He is still there. “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

We are coming close to the “end of the age” and you can see it because of the prophecies in the Bible. Make sure of your salvation in Christ while there is time, because tomorrow may be too late. Every trial and problem in your life has passed through God’s hands and is approved for you to endure but you will endure it better with His strength and His Presence in your life.