We are blessed by God!

Do you know this?

“And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:19

“Worship the Lord your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you,…” Exodus 23:25

We have many promises in the Word of God, and yet many people seem to ignore them or reject them. The reason usually is that they don’t believe God’s Word or they don’t want to believe in Him period. We are blessed by God because He loves us and cares for us, if He did not our world would be much worse than it is today! Truly, our world is in bad shape as it is but if God had abandoned us entirely it would be in much worse shape spiritually and morally than it is now.

We are made in the image of God and we should act like it. I don’t mean to think of ourselves as gods, because we aren’t and we can’t be, but we should act like His children. Yes, many of us are rebellious children and have been since the beginning, but shouldn’t we try to come near to Him? To get to know Him as He knows us and loves us? God does meet our needs, not our wants, and He will heal us if it is in His will to do so. Why doesn’t He heal all diseases and hurts? He is God and He does what He wants for our good and His glory!

If healing a person will bring the entire family to a saving knowledge of Him, then He will do it. If changing a person’s life from one of following Islam to being a Christian will enable more to come to Him, He will do that too. Even if that person has never read the Bible or heard a sermon! God changed Saul from a Pharisee who was intent on wiping out these followers of the way into Paul the apostle who wrote most of the New Testament from his jail cell in Rome!

God can do anything that He wishes or is pleased to do with each of us, if we will let Him and then follow His leading. He will not drag you into a pulpit to preach, but He will give you the desire to be a teacher and a preacher. He asks us to follow Him but He doesn’t force us, because when you are forced to do something then your heart isn’t in it. That is what God wants…your heart, just as when you fell in love with your spouse. You couldn’t force someone to love you and God doesn’t do that because love can’t be forced!

We are also blessed by Him in our lives because we have His Word as a guide or even a moral compass. The Word of God is absolute Truth so therefore we should learn from it and use the wisdom contained in it to pattern our lives and our societies after. We look at Christian values and morals today as antiquated and out of date, but morality and character can only be learned from One that is absolutely true! God’s Word is that standard that we should be learning from and teaching to our children and grandchildren!

Looking at morality and truth as “quaint” and “old-fashioned” is just a nice way of saying that it is outdated and it isn’t. There are truths in the natural world which cannot be undone, such as the law of gravity. If you drop a glass it will fall and possibly break! If you drop a pen it will hit the ground just as well as the glass did. The laws of God need to be taught to our kids because our society today and for many years has been eroding, not because our education is lacking but because we don’t have a moral standard that is taught to our children.

American society and many of the other countries societies are unraveling at an alarming rate because of the lack of standards that people have to compare to. God’s standards haven’t changed, we have! We have walked away from Him and now it seems that we are running as fast as possible toward a culture that will be more like the days of Noah, and it may already be there!

Religion and the practice of it cannot save you from an eternity in hell. Christianity and living daily for Jesus, giving your heart and life to God as a daily, living sacrifice can do more for society and for you than anything that you can do with your own idea of morality or what is right for you. Because today, moral relativism is taught in colleges so that people are graduating with the idea that “what is right and true for me may not be right or true for you”. With those kind of ideas in their heads, how can any law that is on the books be followed?

What do you need from God?

There are many things which we need and He provides them all, even when we don’t ask for them. We need air to breathe and our health which enables us to get up every morning. Water and food are the next things on our list of needs and God has provided those for us through our ability to pay for them. Clothes and shelter are another couple of things which I would describe as needs, since we don’t want to walk around without clothes in the winter especially! Shelter is nice because we can stay warm and dry when it is cold and wet outside. These are the basic needs which everyone has that God has provided for us, even when we haven’t asked for them.

What about our life itself, didn’t God provide us with that too? God has provided for us to be alive every day that we live and He has provided a way for us to have eternal life too. In truth, we all will have an eternity since we have an immortal soul. The difference is our place of residence. Jesus said that “I am going to the Father to prepare a place for you, so that where I am you may be also.”. The dwelling place is in Heaven, which is beyond our comprehension to understand the beauty and majesty of yet.

Since God loves each of us enough to do this, why won’t many of us accept it on faith and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice for us so that we can have it one day? Looking at the Bible, God’s Word, from our stand-point, we see a book of rules and regulations and a book of historical stories which may or may not be true. Many people today see it as just that, a book written by a bunch of old men which has no real truth to it and is a work of fiction. Really?

One day soon, our world will be shaken with the Truth coming back like He said that He would. Then many who don’t want to believe will have their world turned up-side down because of their un-belief. Why do I say this? Because a book with over forty authors which spanned over two thousand years of history could not possibly point to the birth of a Messiah from beginning to end, if it was an imaginative fable written by people who made these stories up!

After His resurrection, His disciples went all over the world that they could reach and were all killed for the message that they brought except one who died of old age. During the last two thousand years there have been many thousands of people persecuted and killed in horrific ways for their belief in Jesus and this Book, the Word of God! I doubt that they would’ve died the way that many did if this had been a fantasy or a lie.

What do we really need from God? Forgiveness, which we already have through Jesus, if we will believe and accept it. Our world and many of our churches need forgiveness for perverting the gospel into something which is twisted out of Scripture and doesn’t look like any of the Wisdom contained within the Bible. Yet, today many so-called “preachers” and “evangelists” are teaching a form of godliness which is not represented in the Word of God. This was prophesied by Jesus when John wrote the book of Revelation.

It is a book of the Bible which many are afraid of and they don’t want to read it but it is relevant to our time.

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.

God’s children

Who were the first children of God? Many people think that Jesus was the first, but He wasn’t. Adam was the first human son of God and Eve was His daughter. Have you ever considered that? When God told the creation story to Moses, we aren’t told how long they existed in the Garden. The best part about it is that God came down and walked with them in the cool of the evening. We aren’t told what they were discussing, but I am sure that they had plenty of questions just as we do when we are young. We all ask “why is this the way it is?”, and I am sure that Adam and Eve did the same.

What can we learn from their story, their lives? One very important lesson is to experience God’s presence every day, not just on Sunday morning! God wants us to talk to Him about what is going on in our lives. He loves you because He is LOVE, perfect and holy. It doesn’t matter about your faults or failures, God knows about those but He loves you anyway. So, will you give Him some time in your schedule every day? You know, we don’t really grow up until we graduate from this life to our eternal home, right now we are just practicing.

Can you see the beauty of the creation around you? The strength of a horse or a cow and how wonderfully they are made. The strength of an oak tree and how it bends and sways with the wind, yet it remains strong as long as its roots are planted in God’s earth. That is where we draw our strength from, only when we are planted in the Word of God and cling to Him every day do we draw strength from Him and His wisdom. Our wisdom is foolish and futile because it is finite, God’s is infinite. He knows what you said last night and what you said or even thought this morning. Going fishing instead of going to church is not a worship experience. You are in the world that He made, but you are not worshipping Him. Hunting instead of coming to church is the same, you see the majesty of His handiwork all around you in the trees and the animals but unless you are there to worship God you are just hunting.

We all tend to hunt for things and stuff that satisfy for a while, but will that trophy or that ribbon be with you when you appear before God? No, everything that you have now, will be left when you stand before Him. None of your things will accompany you unless maybe your family is there, because showing them the way to Jesus will allow them to be there too. The fruit of your salvation, those who you have shown Jesus to, will follow you to paradise with Jesus. That is the only reward that will be worth having in Heaven. Those that have heard about Jesus from you or from someone who you might have told about Him, that is the fruit which will follow you or arrive before you into Heaven.

Think about how wonderfully you are made. We all have something about us that maybe we don’t like, but God put it there for a reason. It doesn’t matter what it is, God put it there to make you unique and special because you are. Each person on this Earth is unique, no two are alike exactly, not even twins. They may be similar but as any mother of twins can tell you, they are different too. Personality and differences in temperament are evident regardless of how much they look like each other.

Think about this today and ask God to show you what is special about you. It might surprise you.

A conscience, do you have one?

Many, if not most people, do have a conscience but with all of the evil, hateful things going on in the world it sure doesn’t seem like it. You would think that it would prompt more people to think about what they are doing before they do it, but when you read a news story or watch the news, it seems that thinking about what was wrong with their intentions was the least of their thoughts.

What is a conscience? Is it God telling you what you should and should not do? Your conscience is, according to the definition of Webster’s: an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior. To answer the second question: yes, it could be the Spirit of God telling you or guiding you toward and right decision rather than a wrong one. It also has something to do with your character and how you were brought up as a child. Were you taught right from wrong? Did your parents or grandparents take you to church?

The lessons learned, and the words that were heard in church came from God’s Word, the Living Word. This is where most of our collective conscience comes from since God’s Word is able to make an impact on your life, even if you are not expecting it to make an impact. It resonates with your heart and soul because it is supposed to. God’s Word never comes back to Him void, it always accomplishes what He intended for it to do. If you heard it in a sermon or on the television, if God intended for your heart and soul to respond to it, you will.

God loves you and wants what is best for you, regardless of the time or place or the circumstances that you may find yourself in. Our lives are truly important to Him, for some that is hard to understand. I mean, how or why in the world would the Creator of the universe be interested in me or you as an individual? What could we possibly do for Him? Well, what about when He called Moses? God came to a bush in the desert to call him, for something great, couldn’t He do the same thing (maybe less dramatic) for some of us?

Your conscience comes from a part of you that knows right from wrong, the truth about life comes from the One Who created it so you recognize truth, His Truth. Give Jesus and the Word of God a chance to make a difference in your life so that you can make a difference in someone else’s life. Of course, it won’t be you making the difference it will be Jesus. He will show through your life and into someone else’s life so that they might want what you have.

Think about it, then ask Him to come into your life and be your Savior. When He does, your life and the lives of those around you will never be the same.