Tag Archives: Christianity

February 4, 2016 · 5:48 AM

The Sides Of God

  
One of the most fascinating things about God is that once you think you have Him figured out, you find out you don’t. There are so many sides to God that we will never be able to know them all. I find it interesting that He chooses to reveal Himself in different ways to us. In the Bible, He did the same thing. That’s why there are so many names in there to try to describe Him. To Hagar, He was the God who sees me. To Abraham, He was the God who provides. Throughout the Bible, and today, He continues to reveal Himself to us.

In Exodus 6:3 God told Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty [El-Shaddai], but by My name the Lord [Yahweh–the redemptive name of God] I did not make Myself known to them [in acts and great miracles]” (AMP). God was telling Moses, “There’s more to me than you will ever know. I’m not only powerful, but I redeem my people as well. Now you’re going to see me reveal myself through signs and wonders.”

The plagues that were brought on Egypt weren’t done for Egypt’s sake. They were done to show Israel how powerful their God really was and that Moses was the man He had chosen. Before the plagues, they wouldn’t listen to Him. Even after the first several plagues, he didn’t get much respect because the Egyptian magicians could copy what God was doing through Moses. Then God started showing off. The plagues began to only affect Egyptians and not the children of Israel. God does the same thing for us today. He tries to reveal Himself to us in our situations.

God continues to try to get our attention. He is trying to make Himself known to us so we will trust Him in our lives. He is Jehovah Nissi, God who gives us victory. He is Jehovah Shammah, God who is there for you. He is Jehovah Rapha, God who heals you. He is Jehovah Shalom, God who gives you peace. Psalm 46:1 says, “God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble” (NLT). He is a God who is ready to help you in whatever you’re facing. Look for Him today to be who you need Him to be in your situation. 

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February 2, 2016 · 5:30 AM

A Humble Heart

  
James 4:10 says, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor” (NLT). When James wrote these words, he had read all the stories in the Old Testament and knew how God operates. God has always had a special place for those who have a humble heart. Take Moses for example. He was raised as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, yet somehow he was a humble person. He didn’t think of himself as being above the Israelite slaves.

When God asked him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses’ response was very telling. In Exodus 3:11, Moses protested, “Who am I to appear before Pharaoh? Who am I to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt?” He was so humble, he didn’t jump on the opportunity to lead his people to freedom. He didn’t ask what was in it for him. He didn’t ask God for a signing bonus. Instead, he didn’t think he was worthy of the task and asked God why would He choose him.

God looks for people who are humble to use for some of His greatest work. He knows that the more humble the heart, the less chance for pride to interfere. Humility seeks God’s will while pride seeks its own. One way to humble yourself is to have a realistic look at your talents and to compare them to the task God has for you. Very quickly, a humble person will realize they don’t have what it takes and will ask what Moses did: “Who am I?”

When we are humble enough to to know we are incapable of doing great things on our own, then we are in just the right mindset to be lifted up by God. James 4:6 tells us that God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. That grace He gives is what gives us the sufficiency to accomplish His will. That grace keeps our pride in check and our heart in line with His. If we will learn to be humble like Moses, God will lift us up and honor us by helping us accomplish things we could never do on our own.

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February 1, 2016 · 5:30 AM

Strength And Peace

  
There are two things I find I need most often: strength and peace. There have been so many times I cry out to God, “I can’t do this on my own anymore. I don’t have the strength to go any further.” I always wonder if God gets impatient with me in those times. I wonder if he says, “Again? When will you learn?” I know that the joy of the Lord is my strength, but I somehow allow my situation to steal that joy which leaves me weak and vulnerable.

David must have felt this way pretty often as well. When I read the Psalms, they don’t always line up with this bad to the bone warrior I’ve built up in my mind. They often show an insecure person who struggles with his situations. It’s in conflict with the mental image I have of him, but the truth is, they show someone just as human as the rest of us. They show an accomplished person who loves God, but still relies on Him for everything.

I like being a self sufficient person. I like not needing to have to have help, but those are not qualities God admires. David was known as a man after God’s own heart. He was a man who wasn’t afraid to cry out to God for help all the time. The things that I think make him appear weak are the things God finds as strengths. We were not made to fight our battles on our own. We were not made to fight alone. We were not made to be self sufficient. We are to find our strength and sufficiency in Him.

In Psalm 29, David talks about how powerful the voice of the Lord is. He writes great acclamations of God, and then he finishes with a truth that is very relevant to us. In verse 11 he says, “The LORD gives his people strength. The LORD blesses them with peace” (NLT). Strength and peace are gifts from God. To act like we don’t need them is to deny God from giving them to us as blessings. David had it right. We need God’s strength and peace more than we care to admit. If we are willing to get over our pride and to ask Him for them, He is willing to give them to us.

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January 29, 2016 · 6:56 AM

The Path To The Promise

  
Have you ever tried to right your wrongs? Have you tried to do two good things for every bad thing you’ve done? Have you tried to play God in situations? We’ve all interfered with things thinking, “This is what God wants. Maybe He’s been waiting on me to do it.” So we stick our nose where it doesn’t belong and we try to do what only God can do. We try to enforce God’s will in a situation only to make it worse.

Abraham tried it with Hagar. He knew that God was going to give him a child, but he couldn’t see how. To me, that’s the most dangerous territory we can find ourselves in. When we know what God’s will is, but we don’t see the path to the promise. In those moments, we often try to do God’s work for Him. We improvise and innovate in order to make what God said co e true when we think it needs to. Why? Because we are impatient.

I imagine David felt this way too. It had been declared to him that he was the next king of Israel, but his best friend’s dad was the king. There was no path to the promise. As Saul hinted him down, David had the opportunity, on more than one occasion, to kill Saul and to inherit the kingdom. But David didn’t do what Abraham and so many of us do. He didn’t make his own path, he waited for God’s path to open up. What made him different?

I believe the answer is in many Psalms, including Psalm 19. In verse 13 David prayed, ” Keep me from stupid sins, from thinking I could take over your work” (MSG). David prayed often that God would keep him from doing what only God can do. He asked God to keep him from deliberate sins. He used the power of prayer to ask God to help him live the way God wanted him to. In return, he got the patience to wait for God’s plan to work itself out without him messing it up.

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January 21, 2016 · 5:30 AM

Consistent Christianity 

  

One of the things I love about the book of Job is that it goes into depth about his thinking during his suffering. So much of the book is him conversing with his wife and friends about his situation. You can feel the pain this man went through as you read it. After his children died and his possessions were stolen, he became very sick. He was covered from head to toe with sores. He felt like trash and that’s just where he went, to the dump.

In Job 6:2-3 he said, “If my misery could be weighed and my troubles be put on the scales, they would outweigh all the sands of the sea” (NLT). He was struggling with the loss of his family, the loss of his stature, and the loss of his health. He was weighed down by everything that had happened in his life, but he was determined not to let it affect his relationship with God. He refused to let his external circumstances dictate what His thoughts about God were.

For me, that’s one of the greatest lessons of Job. Choose to serve God anyway. Don’t let circumstances determine the depth of your faith and trust in God. We cannot be fair weather Christians. We cannot only serve God when things are going well and it’s convenient for us. We also can’t let the only time we run to God be in the bad times. God wants consistent Christianity out of us. He wants us to be in communion and fellowship with Him no matter what is going on in our life.

Consistent Christianity is more than going to church. It’s more than performing rituals and memorized prayers. It’s about taking the time to know who God is for yourself. It’s about having a daily time set aside where you pray and meditate on what God’s Word says. It’s about living your life the way you say you believe. It’s not about being perfect, but holy. It’s not about being a Christian in name only, but in our lifestyle and through the words that we speak. Consistent Christianity is a daily choice to live a life that is different than the world lives.

I Peter 1:15 says, “But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy.” It doesn’t say to only be holy between 9-12 on Sunday’s. It’s a command to be holy in every area of our lives. When we live that way, we can survive what Job survived and more. We can fall to our knees and worship God the way he did because our relationship with God is deeper than any struggle. That’s how we were intended to live.

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January 18, 2016 · 6:07 AM

Fruitful In Affliction 

  
When going through difficult seasons in life, it often feels like they will never end. The hits seem to keep coming. After a while, it’s easy to quit looking for the lesson and to start wondering what we’ve done to deserve it. Our prayers that ask God to restore us seem to fall on deaf ears and we question whether God remembers who we are. As time goes on. It becomes the new normal for life and we wonder if we will ever be restored to that place of joy.

Joseph, the guy with the coat of many colors, went through an extended period of hardship too. His season of sorrow lasted 13 years. He was betrayed by his family, lied about having his good name smeared, wrongfully thrown in prison, and forgotten. This season lasted 13 years of his life. We think God has forgotten us after 13 weeks. This man endured 13 years of sorrow, yet he remained faithful to God throughout it. We know this because God blessed him during that time.

Just like all seasons, there will be a turning point in your life. It will not last forever. When we are faithful to God even when we can’t see Him, hear Him, or feel His presence; He will reward us and restore us. He takes what seems like an end and turns it into a beginning. He takes a period of sorrow and turns it into a lifetime of joy. He takes the hardest times in our lives and shows us the greatest grace we’ll ever see.

When Joseph’s life was restored and things were going well, he had two sons. Their names are very telling of what God will do for us when we’ve been faithful. Genesis 41:51-52 says, “And Joseph called the firstborn Manasseh [making to forget], For God, said he, has made me forget all my toil and hardship and all my father’s house. And the second he called Ephraim [to be fruitful], For [he said] God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction” (AMP). God will help you to forget how hard the struggle was and make you fruitful in that time.

Jeremiah 18:7-8 echoes this for us. It says, “But blessed are those who trust in the LORD and have made the LORD their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit” (NLT). Even in your time of sorrow or your drought, God will cause you to be fruitful if you trust in Him. Even when everything in you tells you that God doesn’t see you and that He doesn’t care, stay faithful to Him. Your restoration is on the way. 

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December 14, 2015 · 6:47 AM

Faithful Friends

When life gets hard, you find out who your true friends are. Hard times have a way of weeding out acquaintances and fair weather friends. There are those who will stand by your side through the darkest night and those who will abandon you the moment bad things start coming your way. It’s hard to tell them apart until your faced with adversity. Proverbs 18:24 says, “Some friendships do not last, but some friends are more loyal than brothers” (GNB).

As you read that, I’m sure names are popping in your head. You can think of those who abandoned you, but you can also think of those who have stood by your side. It’s easy to get mad at those who have fallen by the wayside, but the truth is, you don’t have to be mad at them. You don’t need those kinds of relationships in your life. Let them go and wish them well. Don’t hold grudges against them because it may mess up your lifelong relationships.

We like to think of the parable of the Prodigal Son as a story about returning to God, but I believe it’s also about friendships. When he had his inheritance and was living recklessly, I’m sure he had a lot of friends. When his money ran out and the famine hit, where were those friends? No one offered him shelter. No one offered him money. No one offered him food. He realized that the friendships he developed were poor ones and he thought of home. He realized he hadn’t been a good friend to them.

He learned that friendships and relationships are a two way street. Relationships that are one way, don’t last. He went back to the relationships that mattered and they accepted him back. While hard times can take away friendships that are one way, they can also drive us back to the ones that matter. If you haven’t been the type of person who was loyal to others, ask for their forgiveness and try to work things out. If you’ve found a friend that is more loyal than a brother, reach out to them today and thank them for being in your life. 

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December 9, 2015 · 5:30 AM

The Habit Of Love

I believe that there are several habits we as Christians can adopt in our lives to become the type of believer we truly aspire to be. While Hebrews 11 has compiled a list of heroes of the faith for us, there have been many people who have lived since that time whom we can learn from as well. If I were to ask you to think of a person, past or present, who exemplified a life of faith as a believer, you could probably think of a name quickly. Whether they were written about in the Bible, history, or have just touched your life in some way, they have habits in their life that you and I can adopt into our own lives to become that type of Christian.
  

To me, one of the greatest habits we can adopt is the habit of love. In John 13:35, Jesus said that the world would know we are His disciples when we show love for each other. There’s no greater habit than to be able to love others the way that God loves them. To be able to do that though, we have to change the lenses that we use to look at people. We have to see them through God’s eyes and not our own.

The least valuable person on earth is worth enough to die for in His eyes. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (NIV). Romans 5:8 puts it this way, “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God’s love was not dependent on our actions and involved Him doing something for our good. It wasn’t just words.

It’s easy to say you love the least of these, but God is looking for more than words. He’s looking for love in action. He wants us to show His love to a broken world because that’s what can bring healing and worth. He wants us to feed and clothe the homeless, embrace those with HIV or AIDS, and to give grace to those who least deserve it. That’s the kind of love He has shown you and I. We are to do no less.

I John 3:28 say, “My children, our love should not be just words and talk; it must be true love, which shows itself in action” (GNB). Having the habit of love in our life doesn’t mean we sit around and talk about the problems in our world. It means we go out and do something about it. You’ll never solve homelessness, poverty, or other things that cause brokenness, but you can do something about it for one person. Andy Stanley said, “Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone.” Don’t let the enormity of the brokenness in this world keep you on the sidelines. Instead, let the love of Christ help you to run to all the crises in this world with open arms.

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November 19, 2015 · 6:12 AM

Refined Faith

  

We don’t have a choice of whether or not we will go through hard times. What we do have a choice in, however, is how we choose to respond. We can choose to look at hard times as if God is against us or that He’s making us stronger for something down the road. Some times they are a consequence of a past mistake. God rarely takes away consequences when we’ve chosen to disobey. No matter what though, He always offers us grace to endure.

God purifies our faith through hard times. I once watched an episode of “Gold Rush Alaska” on Discovery channel. Parker, who runs his grandfather’s mine, had been working all summer for gold. He took what looked like a lot of gold to the gold refinery. They heated it up and kept removing the dross from the top. In the end, he had a small bar no bigger than his hand. Though it was a small amount, it was worth more because it was pure.

God does that with our faith. He send us through the fire to remove the dross so our faith is pure. It may seem small afterwards, but it is more precious than gold. When I’m going through hard times, I like to read these verses. I hope they help you too.

1. Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.

Psalms 23:4 NLT

2. My brothers and sisters, consider yourselves fortunate when all kinds of trials come your way, for you know that when your faith succeeds in facing such trials, the result is the ability to endure.

James 1:2-3 GNB

3. Friends, when life gets really difficult, don’t jump to the conclusion that God isn’t on the job. Instead, be glad that you are in the very thick of what Christ experienced. This is a spiritual refining process, with glory just around the corner.

1 Peter 4:12-13 MSG

4. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the LORD comes to the rescue each time.

Psalms 34:19 NLT

5. But He knows the way that I take [He has concern for it, appreciates, and pays attention to it]. When He has tried me, I shall come forth as refined gold [pure and luminous].

Job 23:10 AMP

6. For You, O God, have proved us; You have tried us as silver is tried, refined, and purified.

Psalm 66:10 AMP

7. The purity of silver and gold is tested by putting them in the fire; The purity of human hearts is tested by giving them a little fame.

Proverbs 27:21 MSG

8. Their purpose is to prove that your faith is genuine. Even gold, which can be destroyed, is tested by fire; and so your faith, which is much more precious than gold, must also be tested, so that it may endure. Then you will receive praise and glory and honour on the Day when Jesus Christ is revealed.

1 Peter 1:7 GNB

9. I have refined you, but not as silver is refined. Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.

Isaiah 48:10 NLT

10. We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

Romans 5:3-5 NLT

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November 13, 2015 · 6:17 AM

Fan The Embers (Video)

That is why I remind you to [a]fan into flame the gracious gift of God, [that inner fire—the special endowment] which is in you through the laying on of my hands [with those of the elders at your ordination].

II Timothy 1:6 (AMP)

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