When Jesus died, He didn’t just wipe away the actions of sin. He changed who we are and how we thought and felt. He didn’t stick to the surface and do an incomplete job.
When Jesus died, He didn’t just wipe away the actions of sin. He changed who we are and how we thought and felt. He didn’t stick to the surface and do an incomplete job.
There is nothing that happens in this world that He does not see, know, and have power over. In times that are rough, be reminded that the Lord is still in control, and place your joy in that.
Meanwhile, we know the plans that God had for the war, we have a defensive location set, and we have the provisions to last through a siege. Our goal is not to win, to wipe out Satan’s army, but to merely survive until word of God’s victory reaches our ears and those of our enemy.
He provides us salvation because it is who He is. Because His very nature is good. Because His very nature is love. And because we are His, He loves us.
The only one who knows what is good and who knows what happens after we die is the one who created us. We can deliberate about it all we want, but unless we’re getting our information from God, we’ll never know anything good.
When hard times come around and you feel like God is distant and the emotional high you once had as you chased after His heart disappears, the most common question is, “How do I get that fire back to pursue God? How do I get motivated to love Him, to read my Bible, to pray?”
Literally our sole purpose is to be an extension, a visual representation, of God’s love on Earth, and I write about it a lot because we fail to be that far more often than we succeed.
I find it disturbingly ironic that the wealthiest king in the history of kingdoms hated wealth so much that he dedicated more page space to it than any other worldly pursuit of happiness in Ecclesiastes. The richest king ever abhorred his wealth; that should tell you something.
Ephesians 4:26-27 provides a framework for resisting any temptation that comes—don’t give it time to cause you to sin. When Satan comes to tempt you, don’t give him time to chip away slowly at your defenses. Get rid of him quickly so he can do no damage to your walk with Christ.
It’s okay to be real with your emotions and thoughts. It’s okay to admit that sometimes you doubt God. It’s okay to acknowledge how hard it is to love how Christ loves. It’s okay to admit your struggles. And it’s high past time we started making the body of Christ a safe place to be imperfect humans.
The first seven verses of Ecclesiastes chapter five express the need to approach God and your relationship with Him with caution. As with any significant relationship, our relationship with God is one that must be intentional and guarded so that we do not cause any undue issues.
We would hate to leave behind loved ones, but when you’re afraid of the small things like helping out a homeless person or showing love to a friend or even an enemy, keep in mind that to die is to gain all the benefits of being with Jesus. What’s a little fear in the perspective of eternity?
Biblically, I think it’s pretty clear that we need socialization. We need intimate, vulnerable, human connection to survive and thrive on this Earth.
People who will never abandon you are a rock on which you can find strength, even if they aren’t the rock on which your foundation should be built. Wealth can be lost in a moment, but a good companion will stick by you through rich and poor.
1 Corinthians 12:12-13 says, “For as the body is one and has many parts, and all the parts of that body, though many, are one body—so also is Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
Just for a moment, imagine that you don’t know what you know about the Bible. Imagine that God didn’t have everything, like Jesus’s sacrifice for our salvation, planned beforehand. Put yourself in a world where the intended plan was for you to suffer and die for your sins.
Well, God says we are different, special. We were formed out of clay by God’s hand as he breathed life into us while he merely spoke animals into existence from the earth. We were designated as God’s special creation while animals were not given such a position. We were made in the image of God while animals were not.
Too many times we've all held back
The truth from those put in our path
So let us be the voice of love to them.
If you change your mindset about how God works, you’ll find that you’re far more blessed than you think you are. You’ll see God doing so much that you never would have noticed. He’s always working; you just need to be looking in the right place.
If anyone else is like me, you’ll have struggled with God in an attempt to rationalize doing what you want rather than what He wants, or at least trying to figure out every last move He has set up for you. Personally, I hate not knowing what’s going to happen to me on any given day.