Acts 16:34 describes he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God.
What’s the difference between being happy and having joy?
I would suggest happiness is a result of circumstances and joy is the result of attitude. Feelings tell me whether I am happy or not but conviction tells me I have joy.
Interestingly, God promises joy but not happiness. (more…)
Matthew 7:14 warns small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
This generation finds offensive God’s instruction that He has only one way for entering heaven. It seems more fair, more loving, more gracious for all religions to be acceptable to God so that all people can get to heaven.
The problem with this thinking is that it ignores the love of God and the sacrifice God made for saving people. (more…)
Matthew 5:3 proclaims blessed are the…
Most likely there is no one on the planet who doesn’t want to be blessed by God. There is an entire Christian industry claiming wealth and health to all those who know God and have faith in Him (and give generously to His messengers).
The thinking we associate with blessing is always around money, influence and power, not the things God identifies as blessing when He lived among us in the Man, Jesus. God has told us what it means to be blessed by Him.. (more…)
Malachi 2:6 describes he passed on to the people all the truth he got from me. He did not lie or cheat; he walked with me, living a good and righteous life, and turned many from their lives of sin.
In this description of one of God’s favorite people, Levi, He is describing the role of the priest. At least among the Protestants, the belief is held that all Christians are now priests. The tribe of Levi has been replaced with the Spirit filled people of God who walk by faith and obedience under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. (more…)
John 14:23 reveals I will only reveal Myself to those who love Me and obey Me.
God loves everyone but God does not treat everyone the same.
God loves everyone as He demonstrated by coming to earth as a man to die as a sacrifice so that all humanity might be pardoned for all their evil done against God and one another. Yet not all of humanity will receive God’s pardon nor will all recognize Jesus as God the Savior while they continue in this life living selfishly and ignoring the commands of God.
It is only those who love God as demonstrated by obedience to God that see God and experience His presence in their lives. (more…)
James 1:13 teaches us, when someone wants to do wrong it is never God who is tempting him, for God never wants to do wrong
and never tempts anyone else to do it.
What is the difference between a temptation and a test?
The Bible declares that God has tested people but that He does not tempt people. Likewise, the Apostle Paul commands us to test ourselves to see if we are still in the faith.
Neither temptation nor testing is wrong only our response to them. God was tempted while living among us as a Man by His enemy the devil and passed those temptations without compromise. God never fell to temptation because it is not in His nature to do so which is also why He never uses temptation against a person.
So what is temptation? (more…)
John 6:54 promises anyone who does eat My flesh and drink My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him at the Last Day.
We call this symbolic participation in the body and blood of Christ the Eucharist, Communion or the Lord’s Supper. The earliest church practiced this event at every gathering, a tradition still in place by some of the Church.
But what is this eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood?
Many of the first disciples who heard God say this walked away from Him thinking He had lost His mind. Muslims find this teaching barbaric even cannibalistic proving in their minds the falsity of the Christian religion.
So what is God inviting us into when He invites us to supper with Him and He is the main course? (more…)
3 John 1:11 reminds us that those who do what is right prove that they are God’s children; and those who continue in evil prove
that they are far from God.
In Christianity, getting to heaven is easy, at least for us, but living as though we are residents of heaven is hard. God made getting to heaven easy by offering freely a pardon to us through His Son Who sacrificed Himself as payment for us.
It cost God His most precious possession to secure His most precious creation: His Son for you and me. For those of us who believe God, He has given us the right to be declared children of God; forever forgiven and forever sealed for spending eternity with Him in heaven and upon the new earth.
Christians don’t have to do anything because everything that was required for getting into heaven has been done by the Son and has been credited to those who humble themselves before God in submission to the Son of God Who is Jesus Christ the Lord. (more…)
Luke 18:1 declares Jesus told His disciples a story to illustrate their need for constant prayer and to show them that they must
keep praying until the answer comes.
Prayer is a mystery to most of us and therefore a difficult thing for us to consistently engage. On the one hand we think God knows everything so why should we pray?
Because God told us to pray doesn’t help us become more motivated to pray, we need a more compelling answer to our question. Because God modeled a life of prayer doesn’t help us either, we tend to dismiss some of Jesus’ activity because He is God and we don’t believe we have any chance of measuring up to Him anyway.
So why pray if God already knows everything anyway? (more…)
Luke 16.11 observes if you are untrustworthy about worldly wealth, who will trust you with the true riches of heaven?
What are the true riches of heaven? Knowing God deeply and enjoying Him forever is certainly first. God is about relationship not about stuff making the true riches deep joyful relationships.
After we have accumulated a bunch of stuff and put money into our bank accounts we too realize that life is not about what we possess but about the people we love and who love us. (more…)
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