VIDEO It’s Not What You Think!

As I have stepped on Faith for the first time of my life. I said to myself “once I do what God told me to, I would be set.” I thought “God spoke, I obeyed, and then everything would be easy”. Well once again my Friends, I was wrong. 

The verse below this week changed my thoughts on the way I viewed the Christian Journey.

“For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”‭‭Romans‬ ‭1:17‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

I thought!-Once I took the one step of Faith, I was set. The Christian Journey has levels. There are different steps to this walk and we cannot make it without Christ.

At the beginning of the year God made promises on my life that the enemy spoke against every single day since. It is literally a daily battle to fight doubt, fear, and insecurity regarding the destiny on my life. To make matters worse: My environment or surroundings all speak against the promises of God. To the natural man (me) it looks completely impossible for these things to come to pass.

What I love about our God is that-In the midst of what I see, He reminds me that the just shall live by Faith & Not By Sight. He also presented me the pioneers of faith in Hebrews 11-which all faced impossible situations (Like Sarah well advanced in age; and Sarah had passed the age of childbearing.”Genesis‬ ‭18:11‬ ‭NKJV‬)

This type of experience is definitely a new level of Faith & Trust in God. This week God is teaching me the importance of waiting and preparing for the promise. He is teaching me the importance of relying on Him. As His strength is greater than my insecurities, fear, and doubt. He will carry me through to the end, He and Only He is Faithful to complete the work He has begun in me.

I share this to remind you not to beat yourself up when you fall flat on your face. Don’t give up when the doors are closing. If you don’t qualify today; that’s okay!

We have to allow the Lord to work in us and do His will. We have to be willing to grow/endure or else we will never become what God intended.

As stay rooted in Jesus, we will begin to bear the fruit necessary to reach the next step. The Lord will grace us in each level of our lives. I believe this is why He used the vine and branches to explain our life with and without Him.

“You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”

‭‭John‬ ‭15:3-5‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

Think on Jesus, His Greatness, & How He never Fails. Keeping our eyes off of others, ourselves, and anyone’s thoughts, That will take us from Faith to Faith!

Full Circle

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4:32

When God calls, our first instinct is to run in the opposite direction. Instead of seeing His invitations and commands as opportunities, we trust our own judgment and allow our fear of what will happen to dictate our actions instead of our trust in God. We forget God’s goodness.

Jonah is the perfect example: Instead of obediently traveling to Nineveh, he fled in the opposite direction. When Jonah was swallowed by a fish, he deserved to die for his disobedience. Instead, God heard his cry for deliverance and gave him a second chance. Instead of celebrating God’s compassion and forgiveness, Jonah clung to his judgment of the Ninevites. He ignored the truth that no one deserves God’s forgiveness. It is a gift.

Instead of preaching with joy, Jonah was unwilling to let go of his resentment. His lack of forgiveness revealed a heart untouched by the forgiveness he was given. When we cling to grudges, resentment, and bitterness, there is no room for God’s forgiveness to flourish in our lives and to flow out from us into the world. God’s Word is clear: we are to forgive as we have been forgiven. Is there anything you need to release and trust God with today?

God gives where He finds empty hands. Augustine

The Unconditional Love of God

1 John 4:7-10

One of the biggest struggles many people face is a feeling that the Lord couldn’t possibly love them. Yet, today’s reading clearly tells us He does. Far from just saying so with words, God has also given us ample proof. Creation itself is an expression of the awesome way He cares for us. He designed this earth as the perfect habitation for humanity and provides us with the necessities of life. But the highest expression of His love is manifested in His provision for our eternal needs. He sent His Son to redeem us from sin so that we could be forgiven and reconciled to God—and then live with Him in heaven forever.

Why, then, with all this evidence, do so many of us still doubt His love? Perhaps the reason is that we are looking at it from our own limited perspective: Since human beings cannot love others unconditionally, we doubt that the Lord can. After all, worldly logic considers it reasonable to be loving towards people who measure up to our standards but to hold ourselves aloof from those who don’t.

Or maybe we just feel unworthy of His love. Well, I have news for you: No one is worthy. God’s love is based not on whether we are deserving but on His character—we need to understand that love isn’t simply something God does; it’s who He is (1 John 4:8).

Divine love is a demonstration of God’s commitment to our greatest good. It’s like the ocean’s tide. You can stand on the shore and say, “I don’t believe in waves,” but that doesn’t stop them from coming. Likewise, nothing you do or feel will stop the Father’s love from washing over you.

Stand Ye Still

“Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the LORD with you, O Judah and Jerusalem . . . to morrow go out against them: for the LORD will be with you.” (2 Chronicles 20:17)

The Ammonites and Moabites and Edomites had organized “a great multitude” seeking to destroy Judah under King Jehoshaphat. But the king and his people came together to “seek the LORD” in prayer for deliverance, and God answered. “The Spirit of the LORD” spoke through Jahaziel, assuring them that “the battle is not yours, but God’s” (see 2 Chronicles 20:2, 4, 14-15).

Then the Lord sent what may have seemed a strange instruction. “Stand ye still,” He said. Just watch God do it! And He did. All their enemies were constrained by the Lord to fight and destroy each other, without the Israelites having to fight at all. Similarly, at the Red Sea when everything looked hopeless, “Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD” (Exodus 14:13). So, they did, and all Pharaoh’s armies were overthrown in the midst of the sea.

In Isaiah’s day, when Israel was tempted to call on pagan Egypt for help against pagan Assyria, God said concerning Israel’s armies, “Their strength is to sit still” (Isaiah 30:7). As the ship was being buffeted in the storm, and the sailors in panic were about to flee in the lifeboat, Paul said, “Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved” (Acts 27:31). So, they stayed, and God spared every man.

There are times for action, of course, but the principle is this. When we have done all we can, and the situation seems hopeless, this is the time to sit still and trust God to work it out in His own good way. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Got any rivers you think are uncrossable? God specializes in things thought impossible! HMM

Only a Few Things Matter

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? —Mark 8:36

It has been suggested here before that life, for all its apparent complexities, is at bottom very simple indeed if we could only realize it. Thank God, only a few things matter. The rest are incidental and unimportant….

What really matters after all? My personal relation to God matters. That takes priority over everything else. A man may be born in a sanitary hospital, receive his education in progressive schools, ride in an air-conditioned car, sleep on a foam rubber mattress, wear synthetic clothing, eat vitamin-enriched food, read by fluorescent lights, speak across 12,000 miles of empty space to a friend on the other side of the world, lose his anxieties by taking tranquilizing pills, die without pain by the aid of some new drug and be laid to rest in a memorial park as lovely as a country garden; yet what will all this profit him if he must later rise to face in judgment a God who knows him not and whom he does not know? To come at last before the bar of eternal justice with no one to plead his cause and to be banished forever from the presence of the great Judge—is that man any better off than if he had died a naked savage in the hinterlands of Borneo? BAM088, 090

Lord, we have so much, yet that “much” so often gets in the way of our finding the only thing that matters. Keep me uncluttered and focused on eternity, I pray. Amen.

Have Confidence in God?

If our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence in God. (1 John 3:21)

This is surely one of the great realizations that can come to us in the Christian life—we can put our complete confidence in the God who has revealed Himself to us!

It was a gracious day in my early Christian experience when I realized that it was not in God’s character to pounce upon me in judgment. He knows that we are dust and as our God He is loving and patient towards us.

If it were true that the Lord would put the Christian on the shelf every time he failed or blundered or did something wrong, I would have been a piece of statuary by this time! It is surely true that God will bring judgment when judgment is necessary, but the Scriptures say that judgment is God’s strange work. Where there is a lifetime of rebellion, hardened unbelief and love of sin, judgment will come.

But God watches over us for spiritual growth and maturity, trying to teach us the necessity for fully trusting Him and coming to the place of complete distrust of ourselves. We have met God, and can now say with Paul, “That the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.”

It is easy work to pray when we are grounded

It is easy work to pray when we are grounded, as to our desires, upon God’s own promise. How can he that gave the word refuse to keep it? Immutable veracity cannot demean itself by a lie, and eternal faithfulness cannot degrade itself by neglect. God must bless His Son, his covenant binds him to it. That which the Spirit prompts us to ask for Jesus, is that which God decrees to give Him. Whenever you are praying for the kingdom of Christ, let your eyes behold the dawning of the blessed day which draweth near, when the Crucified shall receive His coronation in the place where men rejected him.