I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back. I do not believe that once you say I’ve decided to belong to Jesus you can then just go off and live however you please and when you face God at the bema seat you will be as saved as you were the first day you confessed it. Once you’ve made a choice to follow Jesus your life has to change. We love that whole God loves you where you are statement. And He Does. But he also loves you too much to leave you where you are. If you remain the sinful, worldly person you were when you first accepted Jesus, then you have not truly accepted Jesus because when you accept Him He changes you. We have tried to make God soft and panda like. Rolls with the flow and doesn’t care. But God loves you 💯. He did not die so you could stay the old man. He died so you could be changed.
The stupidest thing I have heard recently was a person who claimed that now that they had accepted Jesus he no longer saw their sin. That now that they had accepted him they could live however they please and the blood of Jesus blinded him to their sin and it was not sin in his eyes anymore. There is nothing more ridiculous on the planet than that. You think Jesus can’t see your sins? You think he doesn’t see what you’re doing? If you give your life to Jesus then you are going to change to live for him. Does that mean we’ll never sin again? No of course not. But it means that like Paul said I beat myself daily. Does that mean that Paul stood there and took a bull whip and flogged himself physically daily? No. It means that daily Paul beat down his sins, he rejected them he prayed against them and he fought them all to serve the savior he had learned how to love. Just because there was blood over the door of the house did not mean that Jesus didn’t know who was in that house. When the spirit of God swept through Egypt and killed off the first born child, he didn’t simply look at the blood on the door and go oh well I don’t know who lives there but there’s the blood on the door so that’s all good. He saw the blood on the door and left the house alone but he knew fully who was inside and what kind of people they were. Jesus forgives our sins. But we have to be repented, we can’t just stand there and go about our lives sinning and go oh well I belong to Jesus now I raised my hand one day in church so I can do whatever I please. Today at my church we’ve had a baptism. And baptism is the public Declaration of a person who does decided to follow Jesus. A person who stands there now and says I wash away my sins I Repent of the person I was and I reject the person I would be without him, and now I will live according to God’s word. Being baptized is kind of like being knighted. You watched the other Knights in their flowing robes and shining, dented armor amd wanted to join them. Now you have gone through part of your training and have been knighted by the King. Now the real work begins.
Category: The Bible
The blood part 5
1 John 1:7 NIV
[7] But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
If we walk in the light.
That word IF makes a big difference. If. We have heard it said that Jesus died so we are all saved. But that is almost too broad of a statement. What the fact is, we have the chance to be saved by coming to Him and turning our lives over to Him. We are not simply saved because Jesus died. That sounds wrong, I know, but people talk as though they are saved but have never accepted Jesus as their savior. They have never taken the time to say, “Jesus. I know I am a sinner, but I know that through your death on the cross I have been set free. Please come into my life and change me to be like you. Forgive me for my sins and set me free from them. I want you Jesus. Thank you for loving me.”
Something similar. We have to ask Jesus to come into our lives. It’s not an, “ya, I believe in Jesus so I’m saved” thing. We need to ask Him to come and forgive us for our sins and to come into our hearts and minds. Only then are we saved. After that we must work to live in the light. You may say, “we don’t get to Heaven through works, only through grace.”
Okay. Let us open that one up.
No works will ever be enough to make us worthy of God, only His grace us enough for us to be pardoned unto Him. However, once we are reconciled to God we need to live accordingly. You say, “that sounds a lot like the Law instead of Jesus.” Yes. Because Jesus Himself said that He did not come to demolish the Law. The rituals and the things that were cultural instead of Biblical He did speak against, yet the rules pf the Bible still apply. If anything, Jesus made things even more strict, please reference the sermon on the mount where now holding hatred to your brother is the same as killing him. Ya, that’s definitely easier than simply not killing him no matter how you feel. It’s a narrow path that leads to Heaven. Living in sync with the scripture is hard and sometimes is certainly not fun. Please recall that in the OT we were permitted to hate our enemies and now we can’t. Jesus didn’t throw away the Law, but He also knew that we couldn’t make it on the Law alone, we needed a savior. We were going to screw up. We do everyday. That’s why we need God’s grace. But once we are accepted into Jesus’s family through His blood, then we need to live as children of the light. You can’t reach Heaven by simply being a good person, you need to have accepted Jesus. But you also can’t be truly part of God’s family if you live as a bad person.
If we walk in the light, as He is in the light. But we only get to the light through the blood of Christ.
The blood part 3
Ephesians 2:13 NIV
[13] But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
This is about us. The gentiles. We were far away from Christ and God and any kind of true relationship with our creator. We were the lost sheep. We no longer look at cultures as non-Christians because, as much as people complain about the crusades, there was a lot of good work done in those day to spread the gospel. Yes, there were bad things that happened too, but let’s focus on the good.
These days you can find Christians world wide, even in countries its illegal to be a Christian in. Back in the day of Paul, however, belief in Jehovah was mostly a Jewish thing. We as gentiles -all who were not Jews- were on the outside looking at these people who didn’t make any sense. Their ways, their food, their dress was all different. We didn’t understand at all.
But God.
It took Jesus coming to make it so we gentiles could be reconciled to God. We no longer have to follow Jewish ways and customs and become, in a way, Jewish so we can have God. Now we can have Jesus and be saved as the culture we are. We forget that God’s chosen people were the Jews, the rest of us have been grafted in by Jesus’s sacrifice.
We have been brought in by Jesus’s death and resurrection. Then, God sent Paul to let us all know that we belong to Him just as much as the Jewish people do. God knocked that man clean off his horse and struck him blind so he would change his ways and become the servant of God who would come and preach to us. When God wants something done He makes sure it happens. If He is calling you to do something to further His kingdom, don’t turn your back and sin against Him instead, He might knock you off your horse to get your attention.
All this to say one simple thing. Jesus wants you. Each one of you. No matter where your from, no matter your culture. He wants you to be His, and He might take a killer, knock him off his horse, strike him blind to convert him and send him after you, so that he can tell you the simple fact, “you who were once far away, have been brought close by the blood of Christ.”
The blood, part 2
Hebrews 9:20-26 NIV
[20] He said, “This is the blood of the covenant, which God has commanded you to keep.” [21] In the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tabernacle and everything used in its ceremonies. [22] In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. [23] It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. [24] For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. [25] Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. [26] Otherwise Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.
[28] so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
I wanted to start with this verse because it sums it all up. It sums up the difference it made to have Jesus come, it sums up the way it effected the church and the way things were done, it sums up the importance of the blood being spilled. Billy Graham once said that people want to avoid the cross because they are offended by the blood. It bothers them. Not just because it shows them their sins, but because blood itself is offensive. So people do away with the blood and gore of the cross and try and make it lovely and reverent, where in fact it was gruesome and vile. The only thing that makes the cross anything but horrible and gross is Jesus’s blood on it. This makes me think of the story of the three trees. The one became a small fishing boat, the other the Manger and the last one became the cross. All had big dreams and goals. All thought their drrams had been destroyed by what they had been carved into. All were proven to be of high value because Jesus was part of them. Two had happy connections to Jesus. One had the worst connection possible, and yet it was the most necessary one out of the three. Jesus’s sacrifice is what makes the cross something to love and strive after. If Jesus had died any other way, the cross wouldn’t matter, it’s because HE died on the cross that it is special and valued and important. We are like the cross. Only through Jesus’s blood on us and His Holy Spirit in us are we special and valued. He values us. We who beat Him and mocked Him and killed Him. Only through Him are we worth anything. He is the final sacrifice. His blood is the only thing pure enough to wash us clean. He changed everything, because we just weren’t getting it. The Law had been put there to help us and guide us but we were missing it. We weren’t able to keep up with it, many ignored it, some had contorted it and we needed an answer, someone to give us more than the rules, someone who would make it so we could be forgiven when we fell short of the rules. We needed Jesus. We still do.
The blood part 1
Hebrews 9:14 NIV
[14] How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!
Sacrifice. It’s something we hate as people.
We love it when someone sacrifices for us, but we don’t enjoy doing it for others unless we really love them. Jesus really loves us. We remind ourselves of that over and over and over again. But it’s hard to remember. We talk of God’s love and we seek to feel His heart close to us, but in no time at all we forget all He did for us and why. Because of that sacrifice we are no longer required to give God blood, but now are to give Him our hearts and to serve Him as living sacrifices, this is a privilege even if we don’t see it as one. We get to be clean before God because we are seen through the lense of Jesus’s blood. IF. We have given our lives to Him. Now our sacrifice looks like avoiding sin. Helping others. Obeying God’s laws. Sharing Jesus with others. Gifts to God because He gave us the greatest gift of all through Jesus. How much more than the sacrifices we give to God, will the sacrifice His son Jesus be in His eyes. Our gifts are like a sprinkling of sand in the desert. Yet God still loves our offerings because He loves us. We come to God broken, sinful and some days even insincere, and we lay our dirty, blemished offerings before Him. And He accepts them and loves us. Like a child who brings a sculpture of mud to her mom and the mother smiles and takes and says its beautiful, because she loves the heart of the child who made it. That’s what our offerings to God looks like. And His love of us and His love of what we do for Him makes our mud beautiful.
If our dirty offerings can be seen as beautiful. Imagine how much more so the spotless, blameless, pure sacrifice of Jesus is to God. Beautiful beyond compare. The only truly worthy sacrifice.
Cleanse us Jesus from actions that lead to death, so that we may serve the LIVING God!
Feet part 4
John 12:3 NIV
[3] Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
Mary uncovered her hair. She used her most valued asset to her beauty in those days and used to wash the feet of Jesus. A woman’s hair was of such value to her back in the time of Christ. Even up to withing this century a woman’s long hair, kept clean and well maintained was considered part of her dignity. Then came the 80’s and supercharged, big and loud styles, and the surf cuts and the wave cut and then, hold onto something, the beehive, then we wore hair in the lovely pixi cuts and now long is coming back. You’re welcome for the run down on woman’s hair styles over the years. I know we all needed to know that. My point is that we as women have always valued our hair and used it to show off our personality. But back in Jesus’s day a woman’s hair was actually part of her dignity. That’s why it was kept covered. Also, the cover helped keep out sand, they were in the desert. So to uncovered her hair and to use it as a cloth was the same as Mary saying, “all I am Lord, my honor, my dignity, my value, my beauty, all of it is found only in you.”
Mary was preparing Jesus for His death. She was anointing His body for burial. But she also washed all she was away in kneeling at His feet and cleansing them. She showed what it means to be a true deciple. To pour out everything you value on Jesus and to claim Him as all you are worth. The funny thing is, having Jesus as all we are worth is far more important than us being anything on our own, and yet we see it as a sacrifice. The only true sacrifice was Jesus on the cross for people so unworthy that all we can give Him in return is a jar full of perfume and our broken hearts.
Heaven
Revelation 21:3 NIV says:
[3] And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.
God is available. You can speak with Him and laugh with Him and listen to music with Him and go on hikes with Him, IF, He lives in your heart, if you have accepted Him as your Lord and Savior.
We all like the ‘God knows my heart’ statement. But do you actually like that? He knows your heart. Your every motive, your every deceit, your every wrong desire. It’s not a ‘God knows my heart so even if I am doing something wrong He knows that in my heart I’m a good person.’ But what your heart shows is not you as a good person, your heart shows the very worst of you. Not because you are a bad person, but because we are all sinful by nature. But God loves us enough to change our hearts.
John 14:3 NIV
[3] And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
God prepares a place for us. The only true Heaven is the one God has created. The one that is there for those of us who love Him. If you love someone you want that someone with you all the time so make space for him or her in your life. We often feel like our walk with God is a lot of work on our part, or at least I have often heard complaints to that rhythm. Yes, following God’s laws and serving Him may feel like too much work sometimes. That’s why so many want to change Jesus’s words to make it sound like the laws that God gave us are not still relevant. New flash. They are still relevant. And then we who know that Jesus never changed God’s laws only the rules that the leaders had adopted, we often feel like we aren’t living up to God’s standards because His rules are based on His perfect sinless nature. But God does not expect us to become perfect or to reach a state of enlightenment, or to be able to live on nothing but the basics because that’s Christ like. No. None of that is true. He expects us to do our absolute best. To flee from sin. To help our brothers and sisters in Christ. To love those who it would be easier to hate. But He knows we will fall and fail everyday, and even knowing that He will keep on helping us try again. He knows we will never reach perfection, what He wants to see is a child trying His or Her best to live as Jesus lives. Blameless. Will we succeed? Sometimes. Will we fail? Sometimes. But are we trying? Yes.
God is preparing a home for us. A place to reside with Him. Because He wants us with Him. He wants us to do our best and to finish the race. He wants us to keep the Faith. He wants us to get to live in His house with Him.
Philippians 3:20 NIV
[20] But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,
We are strangers, we are aliens, we are not of this world. Petra . We often forget that we are not of this world. But it’s true. Our citizenship is in heaven with Jesus. When a loved one dies we get so broken down because we look at this world, we look at the things they used to touch, the rooms they used to occupy smell like they did, they’re laughter and smile is now gone from our sight and hearing. But they were never meant to stay in this world, they have gone to heaven where they are happy and blessed and encouraged and better than anything else they get to be with Jesus physically every single day. And when we look around in our sad we have to remember that we are not meant for this world either, we are here for a little while to encourage others to come and to benefit the kingdom of God, but someday we too will be in heaven with Jesus always. There was a song once by an old band that said If by some mistake Jesus was not in heaven it too would be hell. The world makes heaven look like some big party Zone meant for nothing but good times. But what makes heaven heaven is the fact that Jesus is physically there and we get to be with him. In the end he is all we need, and it’s hard because we get it into our heads that that’s not true but it is. Jesus is all we will ever need. And he is gone to prepare a home for us in his kingdom so we can walk out our front door and say ‘hey Jesus want to go for a walk and get a coffee.’ All our pets that we have lost before will run around our feet our loved ones will come up and want to chat and people we never even knew will be like family to us. Best of all we will get to worship our savior physically face to face everyday. That’s what heaven it all about.
Hands part 2
Mark 12:36 referenced King David when David said that Lord spoke to Him, promising to keep Him at His right hand.
God often spoke of being at His right hand.
In this train of thought I looked up the importance of the right hand man. Of course this is not what God was meaning, but it brought a new perspective A website called Monster-work said the best right hand person should be as follows:
When searching for this key figure, consider the following: Trustworthiness: Look for someone with a proven track record of reliability. Complementary Skills: Your ally should possess strengths that enhance your own. Diversity of Thought: He/she should bring new ideas and perspectives.
This is very much what having God at OUR right hand is like, that is very different from being at His right hand but we will cover that in a second. God is always reliable! He is 100% trustworthy. He uses our strengths to bless His kingdom and His uses His power to bless us. He often shows us a perspective different from our own. And best of all, He is always on our side.
Now. Being at GOD’S right hand means that you are in place of honor. If God is defending you with His right hand, then He has placed you in a place of importance to Him. God’s right hand is often a metaphor for God’s power as well, He will say “I will strike them down with my right hand” < Paraphrased >
His right hand is both safe to those who love Him and dangerous to those who don’t.
Thankfully, we as His children are shielded by His powerful right hand.
Oh Holy night
Oh Holy night
Fall on your knees, hear the angel’s voices.
Do we?
Here we are about to open gifts and sing Christmas songs, and yet so many don’t know what Christmas is all about. Even some who wear the badge of Christian don’t really get what it’s all about. Not the day, but the reason Jesus came to earth. It wasn’t just about Luke 2, or John 20, it’s also very much about Revelation 22.
Jesus came as a baby, He died as an man, He is returning as the King. And through all of it He is our Savior. He was our Savior while sleeping in the manger, He was our Savior while dying on the cross, He is our Savior as He lives in our hearts today, and He will be our Savior still the day He rides in with His armies to conquer all.
Fall on your knees and worship Him. Seek Him while He is still to be found. That line scares me, some of the modern prophets of the 50s would speak of a time when God would remove His Spirit from the world. We must run to Jesus while He is still to be found. Don’t wait. Don’t miss this.
Prophesies
What child is this?
Prophesies. Prophesies ushered in the birth of Jesus. Prophesies helped people understand who He was. Prophesies told of His death and resurrection. Prophesies are in part why the Wise Men walked across the desert to find a baby. Prophesies, Prophesies and more Prophesies.
Yet not all believed the fulfillment of the Prophesies. Many still don’t. Even now as we look around our world we are seeing the answers and fulfillment of Prophesies from the Bible and from true God seeking men and women from a later date. But do we believe that they are happening? Don’t we mock when we hear someone shout ‘Repent! He is coming soon!’
So. What about those Prophesies?
What child is this reminds us of the fulfillment of Prophesies. We have seen time and again when God spoke and answered. If we are going according to the past then I would say we should be listening for the trumpet because the Prophesies are being fulfilled.
If we are going by modern thinking, then there are no Prophesies and we can live as we like. But people who say that are already deceived, there are too few Christians these days who stand strong and preach the gospel, too few who have faith enough to hear when the angels speak and say ‘I am the Lord’s servant.’ We want to be royals, not subjects, and do to this we fall into false truth and spread it to the masses.
We promote positive thinking and speaking your words to the air so the blessing returns to you. This is not Christian. We never remind people to Repent, or dare to mention that a second coming is true and that He is already on the move. If God fulfilled the Prophesies in Isaiah about a Virgin giving birth to God’s son, and about that son being slain for the sins of men and women, and then rising again to conquer death. Why do we doubt the prophet’s claims that Jesus will return with the armies of Heaven and vanquish all evil once and for all?
What child is this? He’s the perfect lamb, the conquering king, and my Savior.
Carried in the cross 