He is the Creator. I am the created. Saved by His grace, affirmed by His unrelenting love.
Society places lines in life that claims we shouldn’t cross. Whether it’s situations or people, I believe that God calls us to cross them so we can prevent insecurities, doubt, and show the love of Christ. Someone may be wishing for their lines to be crossed today.
There is a religiousness without religion, a religiousness with almost any kind of content or note, a way of sociability or belonging rather than a way of reorienting life to God. Civil religion is capable of brining some people to the highest level of society’s expectations, but is incapable of calling those expectations into judgment!
“The father-son analogies in this chapter are deeply moving. The portrayal of the bereaved father yearning for his troubled child calls to mind Jesus’ New Testament parable of the lost son (see Lk 15:11-32). In Hosea 11 God calls out to his rebellious people with all of the pathos of unconditional love. Theologian Kenneth Boa describes that unconditional Father-love:
To know God is to love him, because the more we grasp - not merely in our minds but also in our experience - who he is and what he has done for us, the more our hearts will respond in love and gratitude. ‘We love because he first loved us’ (1Jn 4:19). When we discover that the personal Author of time, space, matter, and energy has, for some incomprehensible reason, chosen to love us to the point of infinite sacrifice, we begin to embrace the unconditional security we longed for all our lives. God’s love for us is spontaneous, free, uncaused, and undeserved; he did not set his love on us because we were loveable, beautiful, or clever, because in our sin we were unlovable, ugly, and foolish. He loved us because he chose to love us. As we expand our vision of our acceptance and security in Christ who loved us and gave himself for us, we begin to realize that God is not the enemy of our joy but the source of our joy. When we respond to this love, we become the people he has called us to be.
But Israel kept forgetting the nature of God’s Father-love. Time after time the people turned away from their Father, leaving their ‘home,’ to hobnob with other nations, to spend prosperity and wealth God had given them on their own pleasures, and to declare their ‘I can do it myself’ independence. They kept forgetting that God’s laws and his discipline, like those of any good father, were for their good, and not to restrict their freedom. So it is with all of us, especially when we are positioned in God’s economy not only as children but as stewards. Dr. Boa continues:
As we grow to know and love God, we learn that we can trust his character, promises, and precepts. Whenever he asks us to avoid something, it is because he knows that it is not in our best interests. And whenever he asks us to do something, it is always because it will lead to a greater good. If we are committed to following hard after God, we must do the things he tells us to do. But the risk of obedience is that it will often make no sense to us at the time. It is countercultural to obey the things the Holy Spirit reveals to us in the Scriptures. Radical obedience sometimes flies in the face of human logic, but in these times our loving Father tests and reveals the quality of our trust and dependence on him.”
We may not look like much on the outside, but in our ordinary weakness, the power and wealth of God are magnificently displayed.
“God really does have a plan for your daily life and His plan is one of joy, peace and victory. God desperately needs you to conquer your emotional issues because you are an important part of His grander plan at this historical juncture. If you continue to wallow in the blahs, in anger and in depression, the world will be missing out on the gift that you have been created to be. You must never think that you are just a number to God and can get away with flaunting your disappointment and fear in a disproportionate demonstration. You are not merely one of the mass of humanity, but you are a valuable resource who is able to bring significant change at this historic moment.
Will you purpose to be the best you possible? Or will you be a warped shadow of humanity who deviates emotionally from the plan of God for his or her life? God needs you! He needs you to be a living demonstration of joy and peace when your world is falling apart. He needs you to be a beautiful masterpiece of righteousness and patience in a culture gone wild. God needs men and women in every generation who will declare, “My life is not about me and my feelings. My life is about serving God and revealing His character to my world!”
Will you be remembered for the song of your heart or the screech of your life? We all will leave a legacy that is determined by our daily emotional choices. The emotional and spiritual legacy with which you choose to endow the following generations is more important than the finances, houses or lands that you leave. As you gaze upon the emotional smorgasbord that your culture, your family heritage and your circumstances offer for the substance of your life, never forget that God gives His best to those who leave the choice with Him!”
Think about the implications of that. One day God will compare how much time and energy we spent on ourselves compared with what we invested in serving others. At that point, all our excuses for self-centeredness will sound hollow: ‘I was too busy’ or ‘I had my own goals’ or ‘I was preoccupied with working, having fun, or preparing for retirement.’ To all excuses God will respond, ‘Sorry, wrong answer I created, saved, and called you and commanded you to live a life of service. What part did you not understand?’
Read Hebrews 12:1-17.
The enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy. He cannot touch our spirits so he tries to communicate through prompting emotional reactions in us, tormenting our very souls.
Our human emotions stand in opposition to our spirits and God’s Spirit in us.
We must crucify our flesh and discipline our emotions. You are not entitled to negative responses.
If you cooperate in God’s disciplining of you, you are positioning yourself and making yourself available to His significant plan for your life at this very time in history.
The devil would not have ensnared man in the open manifest sin of doing what God had forbidden, had man not already begun to live for himself. It was this that made him listen with pleasure to the words, ‘you will be like God,’ which they would much more readily have accomplished by obediently adhering to their supreme and true end than by proudly living to themselves. For created gods are gods not by virtue of what is in themselves, but by participation of the true God. By craving to be more, man becomes less; and by aspiring to be self-sufficing, he fell away from him who truly suffices.
Money, most common of temporal things, involves uncommon and eternal consequences. Even though it may be done quite unconsciously, money molds people - in the process of getting it, of saving it, of using it, of giving it, of accounting for it. Depending upon how it is handled, it proves a blessing or a curse to its possessor; either the person becomes master of the money, or the money becomes master of the person.
“Disappointments do not have the power to dis-appoint you! God has appointed you for goodness and for destiny, therefore disappointments have no power to undo what God has already done. When we become emotionally stressed out and frustrated due to the daily disappointments in life, we are giving each disappointment extremely too much authority in our lives. One of the greatest keys in dealing with disappointments is to keep them in their proper perspective.
To “dis-appoint” means that your destiny has been forever changed; that once you were appointed for destiny and significance but that the disappointing event has forever altered your eternal purpose. “Dis-appointment” would imply that once you were appointed and that some circumstance has stolen your appointment. Daily occurrences or events do not have the authority to dis-appoint you from God’s appointment for you!”
“This passage (Revelation 21:1-27) presents the vision of shalom—wholeness, restoration—as we have not seen since the fall. All things will be made new! Author Eugene H. Peterson says that John’s vision shows us not only what is to come, but what is—though imperfectly—already ours.
Heaven reasserts the beginning. It clarifies the conditions of our basic humanity by putting us in touch with the abundant, creative sources of strength and health, water of life and tree of life. We never graduate from life and what maintains life. Heaven is not an advance over the basic, but a deepening of it. And what is basic, water and fruit, is also abundant. Our lives flow in a river. Our lives ripen into fruit. In such ways [the apostle’s] vision of heaven provides images of the conditions that support and promote vigorous growth in Christ and steady maturation in discipleship. We are already, in Christ, “a new creation” (2Co 5:17) and in our life of faith are presently “[being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit]” (2 Co 3:18). We are therefore, in one sense, “in heaven”—part of and participant in the new creation, the holy city in which God is ruling and having his way.
But says Peterson, we live surrounded by the world’s images; they are not conducive to our perception of glory, but are instead characterized by illusion and fraud. John’s images of heaven are, says Peterson, “a means for discovering the real in the tangle of illusion.”
By means of the vision, we come to know that heaven is not what we passively wait for, but that it is (among other things) the activity that furnishes images by which we achieve clarity regarding conditions propitious to our sound development as creatures in Christ.
Prominent among these conditions as we have seen, are a holiness that is neither cramped or distorted, but spacious; an illumination that goes beyond the minimum of showing what is true by showing it extravagantly beautiful; a nourishment that is the healthy feeding of our lives, not the frivolous adornment of them. The dimensions of the city make our lives ample in holiness (for holiness is amplitude), the light of the city makes our lives beautiful (for the truth is many-splendored), the food of the city makes our lives robust (for life is abundant).
And as always, the faithful will be stewards of their praise and worship of the Lamb of God.
The command requires repetition, again and again. [The apostle] repeated it: Worship God… The work of worship gathers everything in our common lives that has been dispersed by sin and brings it to attention before God… All of this does not take place merely in a single hour of worship. But, faithfully repeated, week after week, year after year, there is an accumulation to wholeness.”
“Did you realize that joy is one of the grand attributes of God Himself? Joy is an integral part of the character of God. There is a deep delight in all that He does and a genuine enthusiasm in everything that He undertakes.
What is it that causes God to be filled with joy? The answer will humble you … you are what fills the God of the universe with joy! God rejoices over you just as a young bridegroom rejoices over his precious bride.
God is so glad to have a relationship with you that He is found singing over you!”
“Once we stop ‘practicing the presence of God’—once we stop talking to Him, and put His Word on the bottom shelf with the dust bunnies—the process of forgetting has begun. It just happens. We all recognize that, but sometimes fail to apply that factual research to our relationship with our Maker, the Lord of hosts, our loving Shepherd.
And how does our Lord react to this lack of attention? He pleads with us, ‘Come back, please. Come here to Me, you who are weary and weak. I will give you rest. I long to shelter you with my love. I will cause you to rise up with wings like the eagle.’ More than anything else, He longs for us to be reconciled’to be with Him. To remember Him. To return His love.”
“But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Mosest and the prophets long ago. We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past,for he was looking ahead and including them in what he would do in this present time. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness, for he himself is fair and just, and he declares sinners to be right in his sight when they believe in Jesus. Can we boast, then, that we have done anything to be accepted by God? No, because our acquittal is not based on obeying the law. It is based on faith.So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law. After all, is God the God of the Jews only? Isn’t he also the God of the Gentiles? Of course he is.There is only one God, and he makes people right with himself only by faith, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.Well then, if we emphasize faith, does this mean that we can forget about the law? Of course not! In fact, only when we have faith do we truly fulfill the law.” - Romans 3:21-31
