Friday 31 May 2019

So you gave your life to Jesus. Now what?

Humility is imperative for relationship with God! You found it when you went to Him sobbing and apologizing. Keep that humility. Cultivate it and pray for humility.

Pray whenever you can. Teach yourself to pray the parts of the Lord's Prayer as topics like,

Revered Father (Daddy) in Heaven, please cause people to love You above everything else.

Cause obedience to Your will to become the norm on Earth like it is in Heaven.

Provide our day's needs for today - our greatest need is the Bread of Life

We are helpless sinners, incapable of doing right on our own. Forgive us, please. Please cause us to love you so much that we forgive anyone who hurts us, since they can never take the one thing we love above all others from us.

Keep us from temptation, but when we are tempted, give us the grace to flee from the temptation and focus on loving You.

After all, You are in control of everything, You can do anything, and You deserve our highest regard and deepest love.

Forever.



However you pray, pray often. You can't develop a relationship with someone you love if you don't talk to them and spend time with them. Want to fall in love with someone? Spend time with them. The same is true of God.

Your greatest joy will from now on come from God. Don't bother looking elsewhere, He won't let you find satisfaction anywhere but in Him, and you will love Him for it.

Thank you God for shining the light of your face on this humbled soul. Lord, bless our honesty, and give us good advice from Jesus centered hearts.

Saturday 25 May 2019

Seeds to Oaks

Oh Lord if it be Your will,
Shine light of Your countenance,
 On all who are gathered here,
Truly resting in You still.
May all Your words in this place,
 Light up and conquer all fears.
Let seeds become seedlings
And seedlings sprout,
Let sprouts become saplings,
Absorbing light.
And if it be possible,

Let seeds turn to oaks overnight.

Wasted Silence

I'm editing a sermon my wife wrote for me to preach tomorrow (she is a preacher as well), and one of the illustrations she used is a joke she found on a sermon illustrations website. Here it is:

A monk joined a monastery and took a vow of silence. After the first 10 years his superior called him in and asked, "Do you have anything to say?" The monk replied, "Food bad." After another 10 years the monk again had opportunity to voice his thoughts. He said, "Bed hard." Another 10 years went by and again he was called in before his superior. When asked if he had anything to say, he responded, "I quit." "It doesn't surprise me a bit. You've done nothing but complain ever since you got here."

What a missed opportunity! He took such a significant vow, yet clearly accomplished it relying on his own power and not on the joy of the Lord. Anyone with the ability to speak constantly with God and God alone inside their mind, forced by vow to spend all of their communicative effort in concentrated consecration to God alone, would be so filled with unspeakable joy that nothing of complaint could possibly remain in their mind, let alone be the one thing they wanted to say.

I realize this is a joke, but how many of us spend 10 years in church, and our most common thought about it is complaint? How many of us can think of at least 5 complaints we've had today?

It is natural to complain. Things don't go the way we'd like them to go. But they do go the way God ordained that they would go. God is sovereign, and if we truly trust Him, then we will know that things are always going the best way they could possibly go, because the whole universe and everything in it was made for the glory of God, and will glorify Him. If we are born of God as John 1:1-13 indicates, then glorifying God is our sincere desire because we truly love God more than anyone or anything else, including ourselves, our families or the whole Earth and everything in it. The glorification of God is good for us, because to glorify something is to take supreme pleasure in it. When we glorify God we are given supreme pleasure by Holy Spirit.

Therefore if we feel the urge to complain, let us first remember that God is in control, and we can trust Him because he wants to give us infinite joy. By proving that you value God more than your personal comfort by being satisfied in Him even in the midst of horrible circumstances, you glorify God and cause his reputation to be lifted up in the world.

Tuesday 21 May 2019

Firstfruits

The Firstfruits belong to God. That is, the choicest of the choicest - the best of the best. These are the things closest to the ideals of Heaven and therefore deepest in their indebtedness to Him. God created everything - He owns everything. But the firstfruits are especially His.

All current life is the firstfruits of every generation compounded from the primogenitor which was the firstfruits of each of its ancestral stars and particles which were the firstfruits of the matter-antimatter resolution which was the firstfruits of the Big Bang. We are in every way already born as fully devoted to the Lord. To deny God His right to us in everything is a trespass of infinite insult. For God to ignore that insult would be to count His own worth as less than ours. Our sins must be punished to the full and infinite cost of their evil result. But despite this fearful truth, fear not for our sins have been covered by the blood of the Lamb, our once and future and current King of kings, Jesus.

God frees us to fulfil our life's purpose and know God and enjoy knowing Him forever. We know Him as a person through Jesus His Son. We learn of Jesus through the Spirit who draws our attention to the Son, whom we received when we admitted to God we were incapable of reaching Heaven, unable to love God, but that we wanted to do so, and that we believed Jesus is the Son of God and have decided to follow Him as King of our heart. Even that decision was enabled by God - God turned our hearts to Himself, so that even in that one action we have no righteousness of our own.

Saturday 18 May 2019

Forgiveness

Forgiveness. Set your feet on forgiveness. You stand before the omnipresent throne of the almighty Sovereign God. You don't stand by reason of gravity and electromagnetic forces, but by His will. You stand and do not burn because you are forgiven. The sacrifice of the Son of God, the anointed King of kings, Jesus, God with us, has paid the price of your sins and you stand and do not die before the Holy God on the basis of that forgiveness. Bless His name, meaning, give Him a great reputation, starting with your words of praise.

Let His will be done. Jesus obeyed His Father's will even to the point of death on a cross. It's all well and good for a perfect Son living in Heaven to claim He's perfectly obedient, but true obedience is proven in the tight spots - the places where it hurts you the most to obey. We can't do it. We just aren't up to the task. Jesus did it. We identify with Him through His crucifixion. See yourself on the cross, looking down on your oppressors. See the scoffers who are ignoring your innocence and calling you evil and despised. God said that anyone who is hung on a tree is labeled as evil. You are on a tree. Yet you look at your enemies not with satisfaction at their ultimate demise, but instead you forgive them and love them. You don't even want your death - the death of an innocent - to be in any way counted against them. Your desire is to forgive. That is how Jesus felt on the cross. Jesus feels the desire to forgive. Do you accept that forgiveness? Do you feel it for your enemies?

He is our daily bread. We can't learn of forgiveness today and expect to keep it tomorrow if we don't eat our daily bread - our bread of Life - Jesus. Consume His life into your own. First do what is open to all conscious believers everywhere & when: pray. Meditate on Jesus. Pray to Father, Son and Spirit as appropriate. Next: praise. Preach the gospel to yourself daily. Next: study. How can you know what to praise Him about if you don't know who He is and what He's done? By these means you eat your daily bread. For now, only a full stomach has the strength to forgive. If at all possible, never sacrifice spiritual nourishment.

Jesus knows your every thought, word and deed, now and always. He knows the ways you will sin later on. Yet He forgives you completely to the point that He willingly offers His heart held out in His hand for you to take up and release your own heart of stone into His hands. He takes that stone, cuts it open with the sword of the Spirit, circumcising your heart as you ask Him to circumcise it. Your heart attaches to the only life it feels - His. You feel the beat of His love course into your heart through His forgiveness. You accept His forgiveness and your heart sinks into His heart. Suddenly you know life like never before. Suddenly you know what it means to be alive, and you realize how much of your life you've wasted in death.

Forgiveness bridges the gap. At this point, even if you die, nothing will steal your joy. Only starving yourself of the bread of life could sap your strength. But who can keep you from prayer? May God's grace keep you from sinning and fleeing from the presence of God for the sake of lesser pleasures.

Forgiveness places you in the center of God's will. The blemishes on your soul are being purified, but you stand before your God clothed in the righteousness of the Son of God and you are called a son of God.

Look at the faces of everyone around you. God has the same will to forgive each of them and loves each of them the same as He loves you. He wants you to love them the way He loves them. Sense their relationship to Him and rejoice at their closeness while mourning at their distance. Rejoice in the closeness He has given you and desperately seek to deepen that joy in God. Forgiveness will define you.

Wednesday 15 May 2019

Compassion

Jesus loves the little children. All the children of the world. Show us the Father, Jesus. Don't you know me yet? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Jesus loves everyone. God the Father loves everyone. He loves those who hate Him as well as those who glory in Him. To those who hate Him, He mostly leaves them to their own devices, which is as they wish. In His love for them, He lets them drift further away from Him, because He knows that the deeper their pain gets, the louder they will hear His call. He lets the happy stay happy as long as He can. Why remove the joy of those who will spend the rest of eternity in torment? Let them have their fun while they may.

But at least let the pain they cause others bring the suffering ones closer to Him. At least let the one who romances our hearts romance more deeply those who feel the most unjust pain. Those who most uniquely identify with the sufferings of His own Son.

His Son who lived a perfect life, wholeheartedly devoted to His Father in Heaven. Obedient from leaving the ecstasies of Heaven which are glorying in the Triune, He was incarnated through a low class child. He never harmed anyone nor caused His Father grief of any sort. Even in crying out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" He referenced David, for whom He was Lord, and made David's his own words, "Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts."

This most innocent and beautiful love-filled child grew to become a bold, innocent love-filled man who was wrongfully arrested, tried and murdered. His own people - the ones whose king He rightfully was - rejected Him as not the kind of king they wanted. Jesus knows what it is to be betrayed. He knows that pain. One of His 12 best friends betrayed him with a kiss. He knows the pain of wrongful beatings. He knows the pain of public shaming. If you know His pain, then show Him your love, and show your love to those who are also in pain.