The tree
Today I ate a banana. Bear with me. I have a point 👉
As I ate the banana, I thanked God for loving me so much that He made fruit. Then later I remembered something. Something we all forget. God made everything. EVERYTHING! First. Then He made people.
He made it all for His own enjoyment.
Here’s the special part.
When mankind sinned and ate the apple, what happened? God cast us out of the garden where all was perfect.
But. Don’t miss this.
God didn’t take these wonderful things from us.
We have to work the gardens and cultivate the fruit. But He let us keep it.
We sinned and messed up big time, so we were punished. But God loved us and still loves us, so much that He permitted us to keep the things He had called good.
The sun. The shade. The stars. The sea. The animals and birds. The plants. The sweet fresh fruit. He let us keep it all. Despite what we had done.
When we mess up we feel like God will snatch away all our blessings. We worry and fall into works over faith very easily. (you need both. Don’t misunderstand me.)
But when the first sin happened and the ‘lie broke the stillness’ as Larry Norman said, God still loved us enough to let us keep things He had made to please Himself. As a Father letting his child keep an object that he himself loves. God let us keep His goodness and what He made out of His wonders.
I hope that thought brings you as much joy as it does me.
Category: The Bible
Last days burn out
Last days wear out is something no one talks about.
I would like to start this Devotional with the releasing statement that I am not one the great people who study in depth and know great and terrible things involving the end. However, if we believe the Bible (which we do) and read it fully we will know that all the days after Jesus ascended are the last days. So we are in them even if we are or are not fully in the book of Revelation yet.
What I want to speak of is last days wear out.
The Bible says:
â€â€2 Timothy‬ â€3:1â€-‬5‬ â€NIV‬‬
[1] But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. [2] People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, [3] without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, [4] treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— [5] having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
And it says:
â€â€2 Peter‬ â€3:3‬ â€NIV‬‬
[3] Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.
There are many more but we will stay with these for today. The last days for those living in sin will look a big party with no rules or rulers. But for those us who belong to Jesus, we can see the truth. What about those of us who long for righteousness? Those who tread carefully on the narrow path? We see all around us and try and remain pure, untainted and faithful, but as the final days of the end draw closer and closer things are getting worse. The world is dying and we can see it and for many of us it’s frightening and tiring. We feel like we are fighting against so much every day. We have lost friends and connections with loved ones and we wonder if we are doing the right thing. But God.
God warned us that this would be what these days would look like, He’s not surprised by any of it. Is He sad? Probably. Is He angry? Probably. But Is He surprised? No. He is still in control.
â€â€15] Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. [16] He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. [17] Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. [18] But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.
We are called to stay on guard and to help our fellow Christians do the same. But it does wear us out. I am worn out. My friends talk and I hear how worn out they are. Being a true Christian in these sad and heartbreaking days is hard work. We pray harder and more often. It seems like the list of needs keeps growing. Evil is standing in the center of everything and is reaching its fingertips towards the church and all we want to do is scream or cry. But God is holding us. He is keeping us together and waiting until His time is right for His second coming and in that we have hope. The wars, politics, lies and deceit are banging around in our heads and Jesus is saying, “just be still. You are here for my chosen purpose. I am always with you.”
So maybe some days we need to take a break and rest and disconnect from social media, TV, and the radio just so we can become realigned with what matters and what is true. Then let us stand up and say:
[20] He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. [21] The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen. Revelation 22:20- 21
Hey there little red. Who have you been listening to?
Hey there little Red. Who have you been listening to?
Imagine how that story would have gone if Riding Hood had listened to the wolf. She would have been a lovely dinner for a hungry wolf family and the story would have been shorter and without space for all the sad remakes.
We too are walking through the woods, we don’t really know where we are going or if it’s going to stop being dark. What we do know is that there is an enemy waiting for us. Prowling. If we listen to what he says we will be dinner. The wolf says stuff like, “everyone is doing it.” “It’s legal now.” “It won’t hurt anyone.” “God loves me despite my flaws.”
The wolf isn’t stupid. He takes things that sound good and use them to twist the truth. Lots of things that are legal are that way because they are fine, but some are legal because the law makers gave into pressure, or chose to lower the law’s standards to make extra money. Sometimes when everyone is doing something it’s a good idea, like brushing your teeth or eating less salt. But lots of stuff everyone does is simply people living according to the flesh and not God’s word. It won’t hurt anyone is a good policy, unless it will hurt you and you haven’t considered that a worthy concern.
God does love you despite your flaws. But it doesn’t stop there. God want you to leave your sins behind and follow Him.
See? Twisting. The wolf is always twisting the truth. He speaks softly in your ear and tells you half truths that pull you off the path and lead you to his den. Sometimes he even infiltrates grandma’s house, (the church, your small group, your friends, your family) and gets to you that way.
You have to not listen to the wolf to get back home safely. Going into the woods is mandatory. Going off the path is optional. Listen to the word of God. As one of my favorite preachers once said, “get to know God so well that when the devil comes to tell you lies, God’s voice blocks him out.”
Take God’s hand and stay on the path. Beware the false words of the preditor and trust the Truth of God.
( disclaimer: I do not believe actual wolves are evil. They are wild animals and need respect but should not be killed or trapped due to fear. Use sense and caution when dealing with all wild animals.)
He is the breath
He is the breath
He is the breath inside my lungs, I am just the breather.
I am simply using what He has given me to get through each day. We make everything about us. We make music meant to worship Jesus about our carnal relationships, we make our bodies meant to honor Him a temple of worldly pleasures, we make our minds that were meant to serve Him a battleground against Him. We don’t even acknowledge that God gave us all these things. That they are gifts from Him.
He is the breath inside our lungs, we simply use what He has given us.
Like CS Lewis said when speaking of God. He said, ‘we are like children, who ask their Father for money to go and buy Him a gift. And like the good Father He is, He always rejoices when we give our lives back to Him.’ -Mere Christianity (rough quote from my memory. I recommend reading the book for he says it so much better than I have here)
When we give our lives to Jesus, we are simply giving back to Him what always was His. We think we belong to ourselves, but we belonged to Him first.
He is everything that is important about us. Do we make Him our desire? Do remember to prioritize Him? He prioritizes us. We are His desire. We are nothing but hollow human shells without Him filling us with life. He is our redeemer. Let Him redeem you.
Hiding from the light?
John 3:19-21
And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their Works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his Works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his Works have been carried out in God.
When people do evil they love the darkness because it hides their deeds. But when people do good they love the light because then people can see the good they have done. This is the same in those who follow Jesus. Those who truly follow Him love Him, and His word and His teachings because they live lives that do not require hiding from judgment. But those who do not truly follow Jesus hate the light and hate getting too close to Him, they hate His word and His teachings because they expose their evil as evil. If you claim to love Jesus but hate His word and teaching then you aren’t a true follower of Him, just a person who thinks claiming the Christian badge will get you an easy pass to Heaven. That’s not how it works. You must love Jesus, pick up your cross daily and follow Him. It’s hard, but true.
Jesus can see past the door to your true motives
“Jesus only looked at the blood on the door, not at who was inside.”….. really?
People think God didn’t know who was inside? Yes the blood on the door in Exodus is used as symbolic for the blood of Christ on us, but it’s not the same situation. Read the whole book, understand what was happening, then come up with your slogan. Yes the blood of Jesus covers our sins, but we can’t be purposely living a filthy and sinful life and expect that Jesus will let all that go because we accepted Him once. Jesus warns many times of living a life that will cause His Spirit to leave you and cause you to fall short of Heaven. He knows who you are. He isn’t blinded by the blood He gave so generously that He has missed the fact that you misuse it as an excuse to sin. If you keep your evil ways you never truly accepted Jesus and if you need a slogan that makes it easy for you to keep on with your lifestyle the way it is and still claim to be a Christian then you’ve missed the point. This post is not a rant. Just a warning. It’s too easy to over look the hard stuff in the Bible and simply take things people have twisted to fit our sin and fly it like a banner. We need to get to know Jesus personally and to want to please Him by living lives worthy of Him. If not then we’ve missed it. We are missing it. Following Jesus is more than saying words at church and then going on like nothing changed. We need to change and to serve Him.
Living a thankful life
When speaking to Timothy he said: But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
2 Tim. 3:1â€-‬5 NIV‬‬‬
Our Era is an Era of thanklessness. It was prophesied by Paul that the spirit of thanklessness would come, the question is why? Perhaps it is because the devil knew that if we had a thankful spirit, a mind set naturally to be grateful, we all would look upon the sacrifice of Jesus on and all the way up to the cross, and be so grateful that we would all turn to follow Him. Perhaps that is why the devil fights to keep us ungrateful. Being ungrateful damages your soul. A soul with the Holy Spirit in it will always lean toward gratitude even if things are bad, because the Spirit knows that even when the season we are in is hard God has still given us things to be thankful for. Those who give in to thankless attitudes permit their souls to be damaged and they become jaded.
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.
Colossians 3:15 NIV
We can find peace in situations that call for chaos due to the Holy Spirit within us. That is something to thank God for. Much of Paul’s writings seem to be a call to action. When Paul here says and be thankful I feel he is using it as a weapon against the enemy. Your peace that comes from Jesus is a weapon against the devil, your thankfulness that comes from Jesus is a weapon against the devil. So be thankful and use it as a defense against our enemy.
If you disagree that Paul is calling us as soldiers to use thankfulness as a weapon, then check out Chpt. 4 verse 2:
Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.
Colossians 4:2 NIV
Thankfulness is a weapon. So wield that weapon today as you look around at what you have and thank God even for the bread crumbs. Praise Him for He is holy and worthy to be praised.
Happy Thanksgiving
The Shepherds humility
This weekend was my last weekend for camping before winter comes. My dog and I took our first day at our camp spot to go hiking. The fall colors were beautiful and we went for a long hike down the trails. At the end of the trail we had chosen we ended up in a farmer’s field. He had just finished taking off all of his wheat and the sharp unbending stocks stood in our way. My dog is a Jack Russell, so he’s not very tall. The stocks were too high for him so I had to pick him up and carry him. We have been hiking for a really long time or else I would have turned us around and taken us back the way we had come. But the road lay ahead of us just beyond the field so I picked my dog up and carried him in my arms. He’s not a very light Jack Russell. He was too heavy to carry in my arms the whole way so I placed him up on my shoulders, like shepherds do with sheep. In doing this I realized a couple of things. We often see images of Jesus carrying lambs (representing us) on His shoulders as He traverses a rocky or dangerous area. He is always carrying the lamb on His shoulders, because that’s what shepherds do. When I placed my Jack Russell, who’s considerably lighter than a lamb, up on my shoulders it caused my body to bend forward in a position of bowing humility toward the terrain that I was navigating. Holding his little feet on either side of my neck and having him trust that I wouldn’t let him fall all seemed to he symbolic of the way Jesus carries us. And of the way He carried the cross. He humbled Himself. We hear people say that all the time but do we really acknowledge what it means. He humbled Himself. Bowing is often a sign of respect or humility. I see Jesus bowed under the weight of the cross on His back and shoulders, like He would have carried the lamb in the images we see. When Jesus placed the cross on His back, He was carrying us every one of us. Every person, every name that would ever exist was attached to that cross, when He sacrificed Himself for our sins. And like the images we see of Him carrying the little lamb on His shoulders, He had to bow forward. To put a sacrifice of humility on someone who didn’t ever need to be humbled, God didn’t need to humble Himself, if anyone had the right to not be humble, it’s the guy who created the whole world. But He still chose to humble Himself for us, in dying on the cross, in carrying the cross, in carrying us He had to bow forward to take the strain and the weight of our sins upon Himself as He carries us forward toward the end goal. We can’t do it on our own, we just don’t have it in us. We can try and we will fail, but He will never fail. Like I said earlier we have to trust Him, as He places us on His shoulders, to never drop us. But He won’t, He’s God, He loves us. And He buys Himself forward to take our weight on to Him, because that’s just who He is.
Happy October 1
Let all idols fall
When the ark of the Lord had been in Philistine territory seven months, the Philistines called for the priests and the diviners and said, “What shall we do with the ark of the Lord? Tell us how we should send it back to its place.” They answered, “If you return the ark of the god of Israel, do not send it back to him without a gift; by all means send a guilt offering to him. Then you will be healed, and you will know why his hand has not been lifted from you.”
1 Samuel 6:1â€-‬3 NIV
I love this. It scares me too, we often forget just how powerful our God is. I love that God’s enemies thought they had won. They paraded around and celebrated defeating Isreal and taking the Arc of the Covenant. They mocked God by placing His Arc next to the false idol of their god, thinking it was greater than the God of Israel. Then came day 2. God struck them with plague after plague and set death and sickness on every city His Arc was brought to. He showed His enemies His power until they repented of their actions and sent His Arc back to His people, alone with a guilt offering, so basically an apology. God decimated those who mocked Him. I love this because it’s cool. I also love it because it reminds us that we don’t have to fight in our power against the enemies of God who are also our enemies. God will fight for us, through us and for Himself. He destroys evil with the flick of a hand. We simply need to wait and know He can do it. Somedays it feels like God will never slay Goliath, Somedays it feels like the lions will eat their fill and the furnace will burn us up. Somedays it feels like the light will never win. But He does win! He has won! The cross declared it. God is the Victor over the devil and all evil. The devil keeps fighting even though he knows he’s lost because he wants every soul he can get to break God’s heart. But God has defeated him. He has thrown down the devil’s idols before and will do it again. We simply need to trust and be patient in His timing.
Lesson learned from Timothy
Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.” When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”
(Point: Sometimes God let’s us go through hardships to show us His power. Lazarus would have been qaiting for his friend, Jesus to come and heal him. The sisters were waiting for Jesus to renew the body of their brother. Each was suffering in his or her own way. One physical, one emotional, both serious and in meed of Jesus to come, Right NOW! But that wasn’t God’s plan. That is so hard to deal with and happens often in our lives. God let Saul hunt David for so long because it was part of God’s purpose and plan. God permitted the three Hebrew slaves to be thrown into the fire to prove His power. Even Jesus being born the way He was was a struggle that happened due to God saying years before that He would prove Himself by sending His son in this way. Just because you are struggling does not mean you are outside of God’s plan, sometimes the struggle is God’s plan. Before anyone says something about a good father not permitting struggle and pain to His kids, let us take a moment and recall Gethsemane and Golgatha. He is good, but hard times will still come. But the blessing is that He will be with us during those times and won’t let us fall farther than we can bear.)
Continuing the Scripture:
Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” “But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world’s light. It is when a person walks at night that they stumble, for they have no light.” After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
(They still didnt get it. They were physically with Jesus everyday and still couldn’t understand that He knew all and had everything in His hands. This is why He was glad He had not been there to save His friend from death, because now the deciples were going to see an even bigger miracle, one that would guide them to have even more faith, faith that was about to be kicked down and stepped on in the death of Jesus. They needed Faith that Jesus really COULD bring people back from the dead. Sometimes when we dont get it Jesus will permit us to go through a trial that proves He is still God and He knows what He’s doing. It hurts and shakes us, but in the end we will see and understand exactly who we serve.)
Next passage of the verse:
Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
Let us go that we may die with Him.
I’m a Thomas fan. Mostly because I relate to him. He was a realist. He wanted things he could see and touch and make sense of. Which can be hard when following Jesus. Thomas gets a lot of criticism for his upper room moment, no one criticizes the other deciples for doubting the women when they came and told them that Jesus had risen, yet Thomas gets everyone’s scorn. No one recalls that earlier in history Thomas had been the only one to encourage the others to go back with Jesus to Judea where they had literally! Just escaped from. Some have suggested that the upper room shows that Thomas was being sarcastic here. Or a nay sayer by suggesting they would die. I don’t see that. What I see is a man saying to Jesus. ‘I know I will die, but I’m coming with you anyway.’
Whatever his statements tone really was back then doesn’t matter. He knew the risk and still wanted to go back with Jesus.
Carried in the cross 