Tag: Salvation

This is the day


A verse in the Bible begins this way, “This is the day…”, but it is not the only verse that has those words as its beginning. One verse says: “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Psalm 118: 24

Another says: “This is the day of your salvation”, (2 Corinthians 6:2) , maybe not in those exact words but the idea is there nonetheless. The Bible is full of verses which have “this day” or “today” contained within them and the meaning of them in relation to your salvation is that you shouldn’t put it off at all, not even one more day! God loves each of us, which is why He came to Earth in the person of His Son so that He could pay the price for our sins, not just yours or mine but for the entire world! Your sins have been paid for, you just have to accept it, believe it, and allow Him to change you into the person that He wants you to be.

There is nothing that you can do to add to the work that He performed on the cross for you, it has been done and it is finished. All that you have to do is accept it in faith and ask Him to forgive you for your sins, then seek Him out in His Word so that you can come to know Him better and more completely. It is not required of you to do this, but in gratitude you want to because of the grace and the love that has been shown toward you and the whole world. I did.

Oh, when I was younger I didn’t understand the Bible and I didn’t take the time to ask Him to help me understand it. But, later on I realized that I needed that wisdom, His wisdom for life, for living, for being a better husband and father, for being a better representative of His grace and mercy toward us, toward me.

I lived in a broken home for a long time and I blamed my life on God. I blamed Him for my parent’s divorce, and for the fact that I grew up without a father at home. I was a rebellious teenager all during my teens. I drank alcohol, I smoked pot, I ran around with a bad crowd. It would’ve been worse had I lived in a larger city, instead of the small town where I was. But, the worst of it was that I thought I had accepted Christ at the age of 13. I had gone forward and I did all of the things that you are supposed to do, like come before the church and get baptized. I went to Sunday school and church all during my school years from the seventh grade on, but when Friday night came around and I had my drivers license I went to town to get drunk. I didn’t go to watch the game, I didn’t care about the game.

I had some wrecks in my Mom’s car before I graduated, because of my drinking. But, I still thought I was saved. It wasn’t until twenty years went by that I realized that I had been playing a game doing all the outward things which looked like I was a Christian, but inside I hadn’t changed at all. Essentially, I had put on a coat that said “Christian” on it, and when I go ready to do something that I knew didn’t fit in that coat, I took it off and did what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until I became a father that I realized that I needed to change my life so that I could, at least, be a real role model for my child. That is when I became a Christian. I had been going through the motions for a long time, and it still took some study and some real, honest prayer between me and God before I truly felt Him touch my heart and my life and make me realize that I truly needed Him. That, I couldn’t be a Christian without Him and without giving up my “life” so that I could put His on.

Birthday wishes and kind words


Birthday wishes are like snowflakes, they are beautiful as they come and they make you appreciate the life that you have. We appreciate them when we see them or hear them fall on your ears. Wishing someone a happy birthday is a wonderful way to appreciate this person’s friendship. Appreciation of someone’s friendship is a wonderful way of showing kindness toward people who are or have been part of your life. Whether they are in your life now or not, even if you only see them infrequently, kindness and appreciation are qualities which you get from being Christ-like.

Yes, you can be kind and appreciative even if you are not a Christian but you will be even more so if you are one. Your character or the character of Jesus will come through into your daily living, your being, and it will show through everything that you do. There won’t be much of this distrustful, mean-spirited, person left in you. Now, I am not saying that everyone who is not a Christian is this way, I have met a few Christians who act this way in their life and their business practices. I suppose thinking that if they are kind and caring toward their competition that they will be run over in their business and be taken advantage of by people, so they think that they have to be “tough-minded and hard”.

Do you think that Jesus was this way while He was a carpenter before He began His ministry? I doubt it. I think that He was just as easy-going and kind toward those who didn’t want to pay Him for His work as He was to those who paid Him a little extra for the work that was done. Being a kind person, whether in business or in your everyday life, is easy but as Jesus said “be shrewd as vipers” when working or talking around people who might take advantage of you. In today’s world people will try to take advantage of you when you are kind to them or seem to be naive, so conduct yourself in the way that Jesus would.

Seek His wisdom, found in Proverbs mostly, to conducting your life and your business and then do it everyday. Some people may not see the love and compassion of Jesus until they see it or hear it in something that you do or say. Just a kind word, a “thank you” for something that is expected but say it anyway, open the door for someone who is carrying a package, just being helpful can go a long way toward bringing someone to the knowledge of Jesus.

Good news for ALL people!


Our God and our Savior loves you all and you have an appointed time with Him! It is not a judgement time, if you just come to believe in Who He is and what He did for you!! This is a simple message but a powerful one, so powerful in fact that after the dream that I had of Him this morning (it is 3:12 a.m.) I had to get up and write this to tell all of you the good news!!!

God truly is NOT dead, He is alive and Jesus is coming soon to claim His Bride for His own. But that news alone is not the GOOD NEWS, it is that if you truly believe in your heart and confess Him before men then you will be saved, that’s it! We are not required to do anything or perform any “tasks” for Him, just believe as a little child that Jesus did what God’s Word, the Bible, says that He did. When you can come to that belief in faith like a child, then you will be changed into a child of God.

I am not saying that you will fly up to Heaven the moment that you are saved, but your soul, your spirit will be counted as a citizen of God’s Kingdom and from that moment on you are not the same! He loves you and wants to bring you into knowledge of Him, a loving knowledge of Himself, like that of a toddler to your Father! That is the kind of relationship that God wants to have with you from the moment that you believe and on into eternity!

Isn’t this AWESOME, the Creator of the universe wants to know you personally, every day. Not just at Christmas services and Easter, but every day. He cares for you like nobody on Earth can, just because He is God! You don’t have to do anything to receive this blessing, except answer the call in your heart, in your soul that you may have felt before, but you didn’t know what it was or even why you felt it. Yes, the emptiness that you have felt is telling you that something is missing, and that something is Jesus! Nothing will fix the feeling, nothing else will work in that spot in your heart. It is a place that only one Person, only one relationship will be the right one and that is the relationship with Jesus that needs to begin today!

Don’t put it off until tomorrow! Now is the appointed time to be saved and to come to know Him for Who He is, He is your Lord and Savior and He has always been waiting for you to come to Him. He doesn’t force you into a relationship, forced servitude is not a loving relationship. You have to be willing to come, you need to learn of Him and about Him, because only in Him and through Him can you be saved from the fate that awaits Satan and his demons.

Why would a loving God do that to you or anyone else? Because, if you have rejected His offer of grace and mercy through the belief in Jesus and His sacrifice, then you are no better and no different from Satan, who wanted to place his throne above God’s throne! You are rebelling against God when you choose to be separated from Him, but it is your choice, God is not the One who condemns you to hell, you are. By rejecting His grace and your salvation through Jesus, you are rejecting God Himself and all that He is offering to you, and by doing that you are no better than any demon or principality or even Satan himself. The “lie” that many people have believed is that they will always have the time to come to know Jesus. But, we are not guaranteed tomorrow. We have been given the grace and the ability to come to Him today and only by accepting that grace, by asking Him to come into your heart and change you into the person that God knows you can be will you be able to stand before Him with all of your sins covered in the righteousness of Jesus.

That’s it…that is all that is required or necessary. Just belief in Jesus and in His sacrifice and asking Him to change you into the person that you should be. Give your life to Him because He is coming…sooner than you think!

Veterans and the faith that they have


I have heard of so-called “fox-hole conversions” and there is likely some truth to them, I mean, come on…wouldn’t you want God on your side in a war!?! Many of the veterans who fought in WWII, Korea, and in Vietnam may not have had much faith in God when they were drafted or when they were in their first battle or fire-fight, but I would bet that before they came home there was at least a bit of faith the size of a mustard seed in them.

I served for a short while during 1980, but I never was deployed as they say so I am not considered a veteran. Then, I had to get out of the military due to a medical emergency discharge, so even the VA denies that I am a veteran because I had yet to serve six full months in the service.

Now, I am not complaining, I enjoyed my time in the service and would’ve gladly went back until I became a father. I had a more important job to do at home then and didn’t want to put my family through that. In fact, I was in the process of getting back in about a month before September 11, ’01, when I clearly heard the voice of God while I was at work. He told me that I needed to cancel my joining up with the Army at that time. No reason given just that I shouldn’t go. Then the confirmation of a reason became clear when those airplanes flew into the towers and changed everything. I am not a coward as some people may think. I was a firefighter for five years and I have gone into burning buildings plenty of times, so that wasn’t it.

I just needed to follow God’s lead in this. Also, just a few days later, my father died and my son turned two so I had other things going on at the time. I do praise and honor Vets because of their bravery and for their service. I have the utmost respect for all of our service men and women. God watches over them each and every day, whether the FFRF wants Him to or not.

The point of this is that God has appointed each of to a time to die and then face His judgement. Whether you have given your heart and life to Jesus or not will be the issue, not your sins unless you have left Jesus out of your life. If His blood is not covering your sins, then they will all be brought to light, every word and deed. Yes, our servicemen and women need God in their lives and watching over their service wherever it may be. Seek Him while you have the time to do so, because time is growing short. Read the last book of the Bible and see if it sounds like the news, that should tell you that we are getting closer to His return every day. For your eternal salvation, please consider asking Jesus into your heart!

Help, we need, our Father can give it


There is a picture that I found on Facebook that needs to be here and here it is:

What about this picture is beautiful? Everything. The sun for the day, the warmth from the sun which God placed there just for us, the woman who isGivemePeace praying, these are all beautiful creations and all are part of the world that God created. We are the ones who make bad decisions, the ones who follow the wrong people or the wrong ideology, even the wrong teaching from a pastor who is deluded into thinking that he has the best way of saving people or whatever.

Thinking more of yourself than you ought to will only cause a greater fall one day. Considering your own thoughts and words to mean more than God’s Word will truly condemn you. Yes, there are preachers who do this today, but hopefully their followers are not very vocal.

God loves each one of us, every day, whether we love ourselves or our circumstances or not. Give thanks to God in all circumstances, regardless of the pain or the sorrow because this life is temporary and so are the problems contained in it. He loves you and will provide the strength and the comfort to bring you through whatever you find yourself in. What can we do that will make a difference in other people’s lives? For one, live your life as close to Jesus as you can if you are a Christian, then others will see Him through your life. If you don’t believe in God or Jesus, then you need to be seeking Him. He cares about you and loves you as His child, as His creation, all that He is waiting for is for you to come to Him.

 

Expectations, what are they today?


Many people seem to have fantastic expectations of their children and their lives today. In many ways, we seem to try to live our lives or some part of our lives through our kids and their accomplishments, don’t we? You see it portrayed in movies and on television and on the Internet and social media, our lives and our children’s lives are open to all of the world in one sense or another. Depending upon the security that you have in place, and unless you are knowledgeable about such things, many of us don’t have much security at all.

I don’t know how many emails that I have received about a poll which was taken at random, that showed that thousands of people still use “password” for their password or “0123456” even. These are ridiculously easy for a child to crack, let alone someone who really is a true hacker! The security that I am speaking of is in reference to the “stuff” that you store in the cloud or on Facebook’s servers. How easy would it be for someone to crack your password and get into your family photos and other things which should be kept private?

We have expectations of security and life, along with what we expect or want from our children. To put it a bit more politically correct, “what we want our children to become is just to make us look and feel better”; maybe not so politically correct, but a sight more succinct maybe? We expect or hope that our children will do better with their lives and their careers than we have been able to do, but do we give them the esteem and the knowledge of applying themselves toward that goal or do we just coddle and spoil them until they graduate into the real world and hope that they get it right?

Many times it seems that is exactly what we are doing to the next generation. We “baby” them and give them stuff that they didn’t have to earn until they graduate from high school or college and then we expect them to hit the ground running toward a goal which they have no idea how to accomplish at all! We never tried to get them to earn their way in life or through school or with chores to do at home! They played games and watched TV and movies on DVD, when they weren’t whining about all of the two pages of homework that they had to do. Yes, some kids actually have far more than two pages but so did we when we were growing up!

In the public school system, there is now something called “common core” which is the biggest joke of all on our kids. No one can be left behind while taking this curriculum because not even the teacher understands it, so how can our kids know or learn it? We are expected to raise our children to be good people with character, but how can they have character when many of us don’t even have it? Do you know any of the Ten Commandments? Do you know where they are found? This country was founded on principles which came from the Word of God and all of the Ivy League schools were founded, at first, to be seminary schools which trained preachers and missionaries.

What happened to our country? What happened to the values and the beliefs of those who run this nation and those of us who live in it? We have allowed science and political correctness to invade our churches and our homes. Many people are mourning the loss of values and purpose in our country, but it is our fault that it has slipped away. We allowed it to happen because we as Christians did not speak up and try to keep our country as a Christian nation. Now, we are paying the price although the true price hasn’t been set yet.

Who was your builder?


Psalm 127:1 says this: “Except the Lord build the house, the labor in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

Your body was put together by God for a purpose in this life. It did not happen by chance, nor did it happen without His knowledge. God is our Creator regardless of what the critics say about our world or the universe itself. One day, this will be evident to all but until then I must go on telling people about Christ and His offer of salvation and about our Lord’s will for all to come to repentance in Him. There are many today who reject this teaching, many more who are deceived into thinking that the road or path that they are on will carry them into His presence when they die.

Life has a way, and by life I mean that God has a way of working things out so that His purposes are fulfilled. We are not in control, He is, and we had better realize that before it is too late. There are many people who think that just because they have been to church a few times in their lives that they are “OK with the Man upstairs.” What a load of baloney! First and foremost, calling Him that is insulting to God! Second, going to church once or twice a year or for special occasions is a good thing, but being in church even for a lifetime doesn’t get you into Heaven! Being a preacher won’t even get you in the gates of Heaven if you have not accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior!

You can memorize the Bible from beginning to end, but unless you believe in what it says and in Jesus as your Savior, being able to quote the Bible from memory won’t help you either! Until God’s Spirit calls you and touches your heart, drawing you to Jesus in faith, you won’t turn to Jesus and you can’t just decide to do so unless He has called you!

I have even heard some so-called “pastors” saying that they were going to ride their congregations until they could find a bigger one. Sounds to me like they weren’t called to be pastors, they chose to act as a pastor in order to get money from the church and the prestige of being a “pastor” when they really aren’t one at all! These are the “pastors” which give Christianity a bad reputation and they are actually leading people in the wrong direction too. God will deal with them in due time.

When we are called to be a Christian, each of us knows it because you can feel it in your heart and your soul. The person which God speaks to is the soul living within you and when He calls, your real self knows it. It is not a wrong number and it can’t be faked. You can choose to ignore Him for a time, but eventually you will listen and obey His call. How do I know this? Because I tried to ignore Him for a while. I could feel the call on my life, my heart or soul could tell Who was calling, but I didn’t want to answer yet. He kept calling until one day, I did answer and my life hasn’t been the same since…it has been so much more, well more!

When we have finally come to our spiritual senses and come to Him in repentance then He can use our talents that He gave you for His purposes and for the good of the Body of Christ. Think about it, seek Him out and He will come into your life and change it into the life that you were meant to have!

Love the people, not the lifestyle


Regardless of what you call it, a sin is a sin in God’s eyes.

It can be a lifestyle or a life-choice or it could be a religion or a belief. It can even be a church or a temple or a synagogue but the truth is that regardless of the place that you worship or the religion, belief, or lifestyle that you practice…when God is NOT the object or the center of your life, then you are worshipping an idol. We can make anything into an idol, from our spouse to our car or even a job and it’s paycheck. We can also worship our grandchildren or children or someone else who is dead and gone. We can worship or rely on money or position in a company or life in general, but what about the Creator of Life itself and all of the things which we see, feel, hear, taste and touch on a daily basis?

It seems that we are more concerned with our senses and our surroundings than we are about the One who created it all. It is okay to look down your nose at someone it seems but to put down their religion or their belief is uncalled for, especially if you are talking about Christians.

Oh, I am sorry, I got that one backwards! You can’t put down anyone or their beliefs UNLESS they are Christians!

That is how the media and the world look at those of us who believe in Jesus these days. We are bigots, and we are intolerable, and we are totally against whatever it is that you like to do with your life?!? REALLY!?

Honestly, I don’t care what you do or who or what you may worship or even if you choose NOT to believe or worship anything or anyone! My writing…my witness here is simply because my Redeemer told me and the other disciples to “tell all of the world about the gospel”, that’s it!

Jesus died for us, all of us, so that our sins could be forgiven. God doesn’t like sins of any kind, whether it is the lie being told about taking a pen from work or being a homosexual or even being a mass murderer. To God, a sin is the same regardless of how you rank it on a scale.

Just as you wouldn’t let me come to live in your house, if you didn’t know me, God won’t let you into Heaven if He doesn’t know you! It doesn’t matter what you have or haven’t done in your life, God has always pursued a relationship with each of us. He did it with Adam and He is still seeking that relationship now with each of us, but it is your choice whether you will seek Him out and continue in that relationship.

I am not going to tell you that being a homosexual will keep you out of Heaven, but it is the sin of practicing homosexuality and the rejection of Jesus that will do that. Repent of the sin, ask Jesus to come into your life and change you into the person that God knows you can be! Rejection of God’s grace toward us is the unpardonable sin, there is no specific sin other than that which will keep you from being forgiven!

Turn your eyes and your life toward Jesus…spiritual eyes can see Him and the forgiveness that He offers. You can read and understand His Word too, if you will ask Him to reveal its meaning in your life, because it has a different meaning to each person. What one person gets from the Psalms may be totally different from what another person may get. This is true for each book in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Seek God and His Kingdom through His Word and ask Him to show you what you need to know and do from His Word. Then join Him every morning or evening by learning more of Him.

Grace under fire or not, we have it.


God’s grace is given to us by Him through Jesus. We can’t earn it, our lives don’t require it, but it is given to us because of His love for us. Why would God love the people who are actually responsible for His Son’s death on the cross? Because He chose to reconcile us to Himself by Jesus’ death on the cross long before anyone uttered a prophecy about Him. When God told Eve that one day a redeemer would come through the seed of the woman, He was speaking of Jesus then.  The actual wording of the text in Scripture was: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel” (Gen. 3:15).

But, from that point on, the “seed” which God had spoken of was expected and looked for until His arrival. Jesus was born through the grace and mercy of God by a woman, but with the essence of God inside Him and not mankind. That is why He was able to be the “sinless Lamb of God” to be brought to the cross and give His life for all of us so that we could experience His grace and love through Jesus. The grace that humanity has enjoyed these past two thousand years is particularly and specifically for those who will come to Jesus and ask Him into their lives and into their hearts.

It is God’s grace!

By definition it is many things: skills that are needed for behaving in a polite way in social situations; disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency; a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine grace.

Truly in the sense of this writing, it is the unmerited favor of God toward each human being on Earth. We do not have to earn it, it is given by God to us through His Son, Jesus. Whether we want it or not is irrelevant, we already have it, it is the acceptance of it that we seem to have trouble with. Grace is God’s love shown toward us in that “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. (Romans 5:8)

The grace that we and the world enjoys now was given to all that day when Christ died for us, all of us. The part that many don’t understand is that it is available, freely, if they will accept it and give their lives to Jesus.

It seems that some think that they will have to give up much of their enjoyment of life and truly, they won’t. The difference that will be made in their lives by accepting Jesus, will change their joy and the things that they enjoy to be like the things which Jesus Himself would do. Granted, your “old friends” may not like the new you, but if the change was/is genuine then they will see a better person than they knew before. One that is more caring, more compassionate, more trust-worthy, more like Jesus Himself!

Would that REALLY be such a bad thing?

Grace is given to each of us by the compassion of God toward us because He cares for us, each one of us. Jesus told His disciples that God knows when even a sparrow falls to the ground. If God cares for His creation enough that He knows when a small bird dies, don’t you think that He notices you and your life EVERY moment of every day!? We are above the birds in His scheme of things, but God notices all and sees all of it from time past until the day time will end.

Your life and every breath that you take is important to God. Don’t you think that you should make Him important in your life too?

Think about it because time is growing shorter by the year and we are not promised tomorrow or next year to live it, so make sure that your eternity is secure in Jesus.

Understanding the Bible, is it possible?


The reason some of us don’t understand the Bible any more than we do is because we have not been living up to the light God has already given us! If you want to understand the part of the Bible you don’t understand, begin to obey the parts that you do understand and then you’ll understand what you didn’t understand. Understand?

I know, its kind of cryptic to put it that way, but it is only by reading a letter that we can understand what the author meant about the story. It is also the only way that we will ever know the end of the story or its beginning. Your lives and mine are products of our educational system, a system which was broken many years ago and has never been fixed. Broken because we chose to take out the wisdom which our forefathers knew were necessary for us and for our country.

God’s Word, the Bible, was the main educational book used at the beginning of our country. When people began printing the Bible in English so that the common man could read it and understand it, it took away the control from the “church” and gave it back to God and the people who were reading it. This was deemed heresy by the Catholic church and the church of England! Many believers were killed for their beliefs because the teaching found in the Bible were slightly different from the “church” at the time.

The Bible should be part of our educational system now, but it isn’t because of politics and because a small minority doesn’t want it there. They are afraid of the Truth that it contains because it exposes their own sins and the failures that school systems have heaped upon our children for decades. People who like the darkness don’t like it when a bright light is shined into that darkness, because it hurts and it exposes the lies and the inconsistent stories which have been used to make us and our children go along with the “status quo”.

God’s Word is His letter to us…His way of speaking to us and it has been that way for more than four thousand years. Jewish scholars have accurately copied the scrolls which have been passed down to them for generations and this is our “Old Testament”. The followers of Jesus have copied the letters, epistles, which the disciples wrote to the churches so that we would have the “New Testament”. When one part of the Bible validates the other, there is no doubt about where it came from or Who had a part in its writing. The Spirit of God inspired the writers from both “Testaments” so that the New would validate the Old and verify it as authentic and it does this perfectly.

How can you know for sure that it is the valid and truthful Word? First, the Holy Spirit inspired the writers to write down what they wrote. Second, the prophecies in the Old Testament are proven and validated in the New. Third, and this is the most important reason, because it is the Word of God! He doesn’t lie, He cannot lie! So the inspiration that was given to the prophets and disciples through the Holy Spirit has to be the Truth!

Many people today think that you can take parts of it as the truth, and others are just metaphors for something else and can mean whatever you interpret them to mean. The Word is Truth and the laws and the wisdom contained in it is the Truth, like it or not. You cannot pick and choose! Either you believe it as the Truth or you don’t, but that doesn’t change its Truth. The love of God for us and the Truth of His Word is shown throughout the Bible and in our everyday lives. Seek Him out, read His Word and learn of Him and His wisdom because it is life to you now and in eternity, if you ask Jesus into your life and your heart.