All in Jesus
Are you satisfied with the state of your spiritual life? Does living water pour from you as Jesus said it would, or do you pray for it, and feel like your words are drawing nothing out of you? If this is true of where you are in faith, then do not be disappointed, and have patience as you divine the water that is within you.
There are times in our lives when we are self-assured and as we study the scripture we say to ourselves “Ah Ha! This is the truth, and I will base my faith on it!” but who are we to be so arrogant? Who are we to interpret scripture without the direction of He whose hand guided the pen? Yet, this is what we are inclined to do, and we build the castles of our faith out of sand on shores strewn with stone... we silence those into whose hand God has placed stone, and cover our ears.
If you recall the parable of the prodigal Son it is easy to forget that there were two sons, the one who squandered his inheritance and yet was welcomed home, and the son who remained steadfastly at his father’s side. Which one of these best describes you? The prodigal son gives us hope in our Father’s love when we are lost, or are frivolous with our faith, but the dependable son never lost his inheritance and never left his father’s side. Who would you rather be? Who would the prodigal son have wanted to be as he travelled the road home?
Every day I begin my prayers with an expression of love for God, then a plea for my forgiveness of sin, followed by my thanks for His many blessings, and next I ask for three things I would like to talk about today... wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence. Do you ask the Lord for these things? Not that you should receive them in a worldly sense, but more-so in a spiritual sense... Do you desire supernatural enlightenment in understanding God’s will for you this day?
It is Ressurection Sunday, and JESUS LIVES! He made a statement to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, about the transience of death as it pertained to those who believed in Him, and on this day He made good His Word! Today sin and death were defeated, and hope and faith became reality.
Do you seek out the will of the Father as you go about living each and every day? Do you say that you do the things which Jesus taught, and yet neglect to ask, seek, and knock on the door of God in search of His Holy will? If this is true then you are in dire straights, and Jesus will know you not when you stand in judgement. Nothing was more important to Him than to do His Father’s will.
Do you win souls to Jesus Christ, and by doing so fill the nets of heaven for God Himself? What did it take for you to follow Jesus once you heard His voice calling you? Did you drop whatever you were doing and follow Him, or did you look away and think about it for a while? When Jesus calls us, His presence is so overpowering that we abandon our old life and begin our journey with Him at once, but at that moment... do we really know who He is?
Do you really live your life for God? Do you order your day to please Him, and follow Jesus with everything that is within you? Or, do you live your life from one repentance to the next asking for forgiveness of sins that you deem to be acceptable and unavoidable wounds that you receive each day as you live life in the world? A price was paid for you, and it wasn’t done so that you could almost accept the transaction; so that you would remain the property of the world.
Do you suffer, or cry in this life? Do you hunger or thirst in your days here in this world? Do you long spiritually for fulfillment, and yearn to see the face of God? Well, take heart; for those who are washed in the blood of Jesus Christ have a heavenly existence waiting for them in which there will be no suffering, hunger, thirst, tears, nor longing to see the face of God. The blood of Jesus prepares us for the glorious eternity of heaven, and to be encamped with God.
Jesus loves us, this sounds like such a simple statement, and is indeed the repeating theme of a childish worship song whose lyrics begin “Jesus loves me this I know”, but do we really know this? Do we understand the depth and complexity of His love for us? A bigger question is, how do we experience this love.
Where do your blessings come from? Are you busy trying to earn them? Is your goal in doing God’s will to be blessed, or is your blessing simply that of being in His will? Where does our spiritual blessing truly come from, and how do you come by it? Do we really know what blessed means? Let’s look at the role of Christ in our blessings, and then ask again how we earn being blessed.
Do you dwell on who Jesus Christ is? When asked about Him do you tell of what He did, how He redeemed you, and taught you things like loving your neighbor as yourself? These things are all true, but do you also tell them that He is the jar that holds the essence of your life, the container in which you dwell? Do you reveal to them that He has so changed you that He has become engrained in your very DNA; so completely intertwined that to extract Him would certainly certainly destroy you? If you can tell them this, then your faith has become the fullness of Christ, and you are no longer about Christ, but in Him.
What is the state of your life right now? Are you proud of where you are in your faith at this very moment? When you address your actions of the past, even the last few hours, how do they make you feel right now? We hate the word “now” because it requires immediate action. We put off changing our lives, we neglect a marginal faith, we postpone a look at where and who we are. We say, tomorrow I will begin to __________. How do you complete this sentence within the bounds of your life? Jesus says NOW is the accepted time.
When we look at our children, what do we see, and how do we see it? We look on them with our eyes, and see their physical characteristics, we observe their actions, and come to know by studying them with our minds, their character. We go further, and see their heart through the eyes of our own, and come to know their love as it mixes with ours and grows, but there is one other way we should look at our children... one that many neglect, we should see them spiritually.
Has God called you to serve Him in a way that requires you to sacrifice something you own, or of yourself? Are you at a place in your faith that requires you to make a choice between believing and having faith in Him, and Jesus, or returning to where you once were in faithlessness? Well every believer comes through this fork in the road, and it separates the believers who go to the right, from the nonbelievers who turn back to the left.