Victory

This is the last part of I John, my favorite book in the Bible along with Romans. May we apply everything to our lives as we seek to live radical lives because our King lived a radical life.

I John 5:1,4

For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world... And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. 

Children of God. That is who we are. We have found our identity in Him and have given up trying to make a name for ourselves. Family, as children of God do we overcome the world as we are told that we should? Today, we have become so caught up in diluting the scripture in our personal lives and rationalizing it in our minds. This verse literally means that we can overcome the world and all of its pleasures and temptations, IF we are born of God, meaning that we have been saved by Him and have become imitators of Him. Verse 4 tells us plainly that due to our faith, we have victory over the world, over our former addictions, former selves, former thoughts, future temptations. We can win this fight through God’s grace and power. We can’t do it on our own. Family, do we truly believe this? Do we live as if we are able to overcome the temptation to be like everyone else, or “improve” our life, or to give into addictions? I honestly can say that I didn’t for a long time. I did not live as if Philippians 4:13 was my reality. Family, may we truly believe that through God, ANYTHING is possible. If we are going through God, we have to be with Him and we allow our wills to conform with His when this happens. Faith is the key to freeing us from our bondage. May we realize that GRACE HAS ALREADY BROKEN OUR CHAINS OF ADDICTION, but we need to leave them in order to experience freedom from it. And more importantly, may we live as if we believe that all things are capable through our God if we truly are His children. 

May we seek to please the King

Crazy Love

I John 4:10-11

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

Today, on Christmas 2010, may we remember that God the Creator and King over all creation, became like His creation 2000 years ago. He came because we rejected Him and His plan for us. We committed treasonous acts against the King and reaped death and other consequences. So then, He humbled Himself in a way that we can never comprehend, going from God to man, He lived a perfect life, experiencing many of the things that we go through so that we can never say that He doesn’t know what we are going through, He died a death after being betrayed by one of His closest friends, and that death was a death of embarrassment, one of agony, one of excruciating pain, and He did that so that we may know Him. He gave us this gift that we did not deserve. We deserve death, and He offers life. We choose darkness and He exposes us in light. He offers redemption for us who have prostituted ourselves to other gods. He offers love to us when we deserve hate. He offers us mercy when we deserve punishment. He offers us grace when we deserve no such thing. This is crazy love my friends. This is reckless love. Love that would stop at nothing to know you and to have your love in return. The price is not much, you take your beaten life, faulted plans, and broken heart and exchange it for fullness and healing, purpose and meaning, and love and grace and mercy. It’s a daily choice though. One day of acceptance does not guarantee something. It is a lifetime of living and walking. You can run a race and never finish it if you stop along the way. May we finish this race depending on the strength given to us from our God. And may we pass on this gift that He has given us to others with reckless abandonment. May we give our all for those who God loves and for our God who loves.

It starts in our heart, this love, and becomes a large part of who we are. May we seek to be people that love like God loved us, with reckless abandonment, not seeking repayment but seeking to love unconditionally regardless of the cost.

May grace and peace and love abound to you my family

Crux Point

This may hurt. This will be deep. This requires us being honest with ourselves and God. As we read from I John 3 may we remember who God made us to be, what He hoped for us. He made us to not experience sin. He desired that we may be blameless and pure and innocent children of His, not knowing the evils that have become so ingrained in who we are. The question should echo in our heads throughout this devotion is “In all honesty, do I devote myself to God a multitude of times more than I do to any form of sin (whether it is blatant sin, disregarding God’s commands, exaltation of oneself over God, or idolatry)?” And “Can I go a full day without sin? If not, why can I so often go weeks without God? Which do I depend on more, sin or God?”

I John 3:6,9

No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him... No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God. 

Family, though no one of us will ever be perfect until we pass on from this life into eternity with God, one of our goals as Christians is to be holy as God is holy (I Peter 1:16). My question is how much do we pursue to live lifestyles that are pleasing to our King? And I am not necessarily discussing solely actions, but rather intentions and desire. If we go through the actions without the passion to please God and without a desire to serve Him joyfully, then what good do our actions do for anyone? Faith without works is dead, but works without faith is meaningless. If we do not have the belief in our God and the desire and passion to serve Him then why bother serving someone that you don’t love? Furthermore, if we are to call ourselves children of God, shouldn’t we be representatives of Him to this world? Instead, we often find ourselves entangled in addictions and lifestyles that are not pleasing to God and instead camouflage us in this world. Nothing sets us apart from them aside from our statement of beliefs which is not in practice. I say this out of love family. I have often found myself in this place of addiction and that place of living a lie. I know the pain that occurs there, the dark places that we do not want to revisit or have exposed, but if they are never dealt with, are we telling God that He cannot have what is rightfully His, that the Creator of everything known and unknown to us cannot have an area of our lives because we don’t want Him to. My response is, which do we love more? It is easy to reply that we love God more than the addiction, but if we are willing to reject Him for the addiction, the addiction is what our heart truly desires and what we truly love. We must fight this war family. Now is not the time for rest. THIS IS WAR! Will we fight the fight so that we may please our God or will we allow our sin to control us and our desires, causing us to reject the One we call Lord? I, for one, choose to fight.

This choice needs to be a daily one. It is a daily war. Will we fight it? It is a core foundational piece of our life. It is a crux point. This declares our true intentions. May we not be complacent, may we not be compromising, may we not be content.. May we be driven by Grace.

Blessings

Daily Living

1 John 2:15-17

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Every day of our life that we wake up, we make a decision, a decision that is a declaration of what/who we will live for that day... We wake up to check our phones, eat, go on facebook, or just go through our day. However, how much more significant is it to stop, before anything else begins and just spend a bit of time with God? Though this may not be your personal devotion time, why not spend a few minutes at His throne in order to start your day out focused on Him and prepared by stating your purpose for that day in Christ. Honestly, very rarely do we ever even have a legitimate excuse not to do this. If we think about it, we sleep in to give ourselves more rest, we have other options and even if we wake up earlier, 5 minutes won’t kill us. We check our phones and facebooks and reboot our social life within a matter of minutes it seems, but we tell God to wait for us to finish with our friends and our social life. My family, this should be so heavy on our hearts if we do this, I am one who does this many times and am greatly convicted of it. We are telling God, the Creator of the Universe, the One who gives us life, our Father who saved us from an eternity of hell and has forgiven our heinous actions against Him, and we look at Him and tell Him that our social life is more of a priority to us than spending five minutes with Him. When we think about it that way, it’s a lot more serious. 

In this passage John warns us of loving the world. It is so attractive. Everything is presented to us so nicely. Alcohol  is advertised to take away your problems and help you have a great time, where really it makes you look like a fool, brings problems back stronger, and leaves you with a headache. Sex is presented to be the greatest thing ever and to be pursued in every relationship and hookup. Only thing is, it doesn’t fill that gap that is there. It just widens it. It doesn’t take away pain or make you more or less of a man/woman, it only says that you have given in to whatever everyone else wants you to do, a real man/woman would stand up for their beliefs. Lying is the easy fix, but never really seems to get easier as lies compound among each other. Pursuit of one’s own happiness never gets you to where you hoped you would be. You may reach the pinnacle of fame/success/love/etc... as you hoped, but it isn’t exactly what you had thought it would be. You still aren’t happy with it. This, my family, is the great lie of the world, that if you do/get these things, you will be happy. This is the truth, you will be far from happy. God wants you to find true joy and that can only be found in Him, by searching for Him, by knowing Him, by spending quality time at His feet. Will we do this today? 

May we seek Him from our very innermost being, allowing Him to have the core of who we are and everything else

Lifelong Commitment

I John 1:7

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 cleanses us from all sin

A prayer is not our salvation as Christians, a lifestyle is. A lifelong walk with God; one that may hit hard spots, pain, and much more, but never ends is what saves you. You don’t really know someone because you spoke with them once. You know someone because you have a true relationship with them. If this is the case, why then do we so often refuse to make God the best relationship in our life? I mean, He died for us, so that we can be forgiven, yet we barely acknowledge Him in our lives anymore. It almost seems like we personally are fine with Him taking the backseat in our life or not even being there at all. It’s so easy to just let life get in the way of knowing God, but God needs to come first.. Life is short and anything can end it at any time.. We need to make sure that we are ready to meet Him before its over because it can end at time. Are we prepared to stand before God? Will He say that He is proud of us, or that we had great potential but didn’t do anything with it, or that He never knew us? I hope that we all live in a way to receive the first statement. I can’t wait to hear God say “well done my good and faithful servant.” He truly has given us so much to live for, what will we give our life for?