All in Christian
Have you met Jesus Christ, and become determined to study and understand the truths of God? Do you say to yourself that you want Jesus to abide in you, and yet you are not really certain that He has done so? Well when you ask Him, He will anoint and enter you, but in the beginning you may feel only His peace and joy, but little more... this is the first day of school, and from here you will begin your education by being taught how to learn.
The human view of knowing is based almost totally on our minds, as evidenced by the fact that we judge the worth of each other based on intelligence and intellectual achievement, but although God places value in that as well, He founds His judgement of our relationship with Him on what happens in our hearts. Do you love God? This is the greatest commandment! This is the greatest of our emotions, and is not an intellectual pursuit that we can control and dictate. It is the greatest commandment Indeed!
Through the intercession of Jesus Christ, Satan cannot have his way in us. Oh, he might beat up our lives and our bodies, but within us abides Jesus who prays from there, and even through us. In this way Jesus defends what is His... our heart, spirit, and soul, all of which He has been given.
Do you sit at the feet of Jesus to learn, and if you do, exactly what is it that you are expecting to learn about? Are you there to learn what God can do for you, or maybe about what heaven looks like, what is required for you to be healed of something, the secret of eternal life, how about to increase your power... or, perhaps some other hidden knowledge that you think He might give you? Jesus came to do one thing, the will of God, and that is what we should expect to learn by sitting at Jesus’ feet.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States; a day when we corporately give thanks to God for His goodness, and many blessings throughout the past year. Years of joy make this easy, but, some years are filled with tragedy, mourning, and heartbreak... are we expected to thank God equally in those, or in the midst of our suffering too? Satan attempts to cast a veil over God’s joy, and to spotlight our sorrows and pain as a means of drawing us into his darkness... so friends, lift up your voices in thanksgiving this day, and always!
Do you regularly go to church, and if you do, how do you worship God? More to the point is this... do you worship God together as a church body? Do you lift up your praise, worship, and prayers as one, and then wait on Him? Congregations that don’t worship together might contain specks of brilliant faith scattered within the pews, but never really meet God as He desires.
You believe in God, and are determined to seek Him all the more each day. Is your burning desire to reflect a perfection of faith; His amazing characteristic of holiness? Well, it should be, because who sets out to do something, or to be something, and has set mediocre as their goal?
Do you believe in the Word of God, and hold it up as the one truth by which you can orient your life, and find your way into eternity with God? This is our key to sanctification and to all the promises for which we long. In the Word of God we find our way towards becoming one with Jesus Christ, and God Himself... do you approach your reading of the Bible, God’s Holy Word, with this understanding?
This morning’s message is unlike anything I have written previously. I had a dream last night about a woman with ovarian cancer who was fighting for her life. Then I awoke from this dream to find that I was late this morning, so I opened my devotional reading and the subject was “Waiting for God in Humble Fear and Hope.” Are you or a loved one facing death in some way this morning?
Sinning is an addiction that is impossible to get over on our own, but once we ask the Lord to pull us free, and he does, it becomes a daily, hourly, moment by moment struggle to maintain. Satan knows we can resist going into the neon signed bars of sinning, so he challenges us with a sip at a wedding, or a taste at a get together. These temptations are usually not sins, but they give us the aroma of it; the allure. Have you been there? Well, thank God for Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and our daily renewal... our strengthening.
Do you follow after men, or Jesus Christ? Do you put your faith in the hands of those who appear pious and tell you about what Jesus said, or in Jesus who said these things Himself, lived this way, and has given us these commandments? Do you place your relationship in the hands of men who die, and depend, as we do, on Jesus to lift them again from the dead, or in Christ himself who laid His own life down and picked it back up again? He who lives forever at the right hand of God.
Do you pray for those around you who are sick, or lost? Do you wait on the Lord in prayer for those who are unrighteous, and don’t know enough to pray for themselves? Do you peel back the sin in your mind’s eye, and pray for the sinner beneath? Can you bring yourself to love the sinner while detesting the sin? does God punish the sin, or the sinners?
When you look at Jesus, do you see Him sitting at the right hand of God radiating light, do you see Him hanging on the cross at Calvary, or do you see Him carrying, and dragging that Cross down the Via Dolorosa? What is the Cross of Jesus Christ to you? If you really don’t know then you had best decide because it is by the Cross that we follow Jesus.
Have you sought after the blessing of Pentecost and yet it has eluded you? Have you prayed, wept, and pleaded for the Holy Spirit to reveal himself in you through tongues or other gifts... yet you feel unfulfilled? Or, maybe, you suddenly feel separated from the Spirit. When this happens it is not necessarily that you are unworthy, or no longer the child of God, but that the Lord has a lesson for you that can only come by a continued and determined seeking within yourself.
Can we pray like Elijah? Do our prayers have the ability to reach up to the heavens and let not just drought come and go, but answered prayer rain down? Well, scripture tells us that Elijah’s nature is the same as ours... so how is it that his prayers are so powerful? Elijah had one more characteristic... righteousness. When we pray, do we possess that fullness of faith? How is our righteousness? How is our prayer life?