Jesus died and rose again for you – The Living Message of Christ

Jesus came to this Earth with all of the problems and chaos caused by a fallen people who truly had lost their sense of direction and their knowledge of the One True God. He came because He loved ALL of us, not just one little tribe of people and He knew that when He came that He would have to suffer and die for ALL of the people who didn’t know Him. Most people in the world at the time He came had no idea Who He was and didn’t care, just as many still do today. Yet…He loved them anyway just as He loves all of us today. That is the love which calls to each of us today.

God seeks out those of us who truly need Him but even in our broken state of being, He can mend us and make us better so that we can show others that His ways are so much higher and more than able to heal and direct our path toward His higher calling. The calling of being His disciple and His friend in this life and into eternity. It doesn’t take a lot of convincing to show people how He has changed us, just tell them about your life and how it was before Jesus came into it and gave you a new purpose and hope!

Are we perfect and sinless after becoming Christians, of course not! We are still human beings after all and we are still subject to every temptation of Satan and all of the other lures that are in this world. Wealth, power, greed, sex, drugs, alcohol….our world and the things in it draws our humanity toward all of these things even after our hearts are changed which is why we have to read the Bible daily. Washing our minds and our thoughts with His Living Water, the Word of God, is the only way to stay true to our calling and know His mind and thoughts.

The Christian life doesn’t give you a clean slate to go out and dirty it up again. If you are doing that, then your heart hasn’t been changed at all. When Jesus and the Holy Spirit come into your life, there is a change which will let you know that what you are doing is wrong. While it is true that you can ignore the message enough to go back and get into the pig stall and lie with the other pigs…why would you want to? We are not pigs, and contrary to what some people may think, we should live above our old lifestyle where Jesus would walk and live. Think about what He went through before the cross. The shaming and the threats on His life and even those in the town where He grew up wanted to kill Him because He told them that He fulfilled the prophecy of the Messiah from the prophet Isaiah. They didn’t believe Him and wanted to kill Him because they had watched Him grow up in Joseph’s carpenter shop. They knew the little Boy but they didn’t KNOW Him!

Like knowing someone from childhood and then they grow up and move away or join the military and essentially become a different person from the child you knew. Of course, Jesus matured into His life’s role as Savior and Messiah by His Father’s teaching and not Joseph’s teaching. The part of His life which everyone in Nazareth saw was His Earthly life, His physical life here. It was His Spiritual life and learning from the Spirit and from His Father that had brought Him to be a different Person from the one that everyone in His hometown thought they knew.

God has many jobs and roles which He wants each of us to do and fulfill in our Christian life, but we need to submit to His teaching and His Spirit and His Word so that we can learn what we need to know in order to be the person which God knows that each of us can be. If we will only follow Him in our daily walk and learn from Him, we can do this!

Strange title, I know, but sometimes it seems to be a mantra in my life. I am not complaining about it, but many times it seems that I mention something that I want to do and then something else interrupts my thoughts or my accomplishment of that which I wanted to do. Some might call this old age, some might call it being lazy, I just think that I have too much on my mind at times and the stuff which isn’t important at the time gets shoved aside.

2014-07-16-procrastinator Whichever way you look at it, I could be accused of being a procrastinator and I suppose I should own it. Getting back to the point, what did I not do: I didn’t make some ham chowder. Why? I don’t know, I am not sure exactly what caused that bit to become shunted to the side in favor of something else. Some might also call this a form of adult ADD.

Whatever you want to call it, this little problem of mine doesn’t bother God in the least. He doesn’t have a problem with too much on His plate or on His mind. Thank goodness, because with all of those prayers being sent up to Him every hour or every minute of every day, humanly speaking there isn’t a person who could accomplish a fraction of what God does every second of every day that we don’t even know about! He is the Ultimate Multitasker of the Universe!

God knows which of us can handle multitasking and which of us can’t. Life is doing multiple tasks on a daily basis, just not necessarily on a deadline! Preferably, not a deadline which may get you fired from a job! The only real deadline that I am currently dealing with is the one which has to do with my sermon each Sunday. God usually gives me the words to speak or the topic to speak on, which for this year it has been mostly involving the book of Romans.

Paul was a very good evangelist and a multitasking individual because he was raised as a Pharisee. He knew the Law and the Prophets by memory and didn’t need to carry a scroll with him as we do our Bibles. My point in bringing up problems with our memory is that we can’t remember all of the things that we need to all of the time. Nor can we accomplish all of those tasks in a timely fashion daily, but God gives each of us the ability and the mind to accomplish our tasks which He gives to us at the right time.

As the Bible says, “you will be given the words to say at the proper time” and the Holy Spirit will give you those words which you need to speak. I rely on this every Sunday and for every writing which I post here. I am not eloquent enough to spout as much as I have over these last six years between Sunday and all of the little sermons that I put up here. God gives me the words, I just put them down. The grace of God and through His Love is the only reason that I have been able to do this.

God loves each of us in a unique fashion that only He knows. We will feel it when we get to Heaven, but until then we have to live with the grace and love brought to us through His Spirit. It isn’t a downgrade exactly, but our humanity prevents us from experiencing His Love in any profound ways in this body. Seek Him out in your life so He can prove that His love is more than you can bear. I have felt it and it is something that I can’t describe to anyone, you just have to experience it yourself.