reflections on the love that changes everything
In a way, all of us are living in a giant Skinner box. We have various opportunities around us that we can choose to engage with or not. Some of these opportunities bring us pleasure, while others may bring us pain. …How do we decide what we should be feeding on?
It is not God who condemns us, it is our sin that condemns us. But Jesus has taken our sins away from us and given us new life in a new ship, and with him as our captain, he will safely pilot us to the safe harbor of the wonderful future he has in store for us.
We all have ruling thoughts in our minds, and we all use those ruling thoughts to interpret what we see going on around us and inside of us. How do we know if the ruling beliefs in our minds are correct?
The greatest greatness of God was disguised as an ordinary human being who came to save the world: Jesus Christ.
The only way that we can be truly kind, loving, generous and gracious toward the world is if we believe deep down in our hearts that God is kind, gracious, loving and generous toward us.
As you embrace God’s amazing grace and unconditional love for you, that love and joy will shine through you, and you will be filled with joy as God’s grace touches the hearts of others and welcomes them home.
We immerse ourselves in God’s words and promises to us, allowing the Holy Spirit to impact our memory so that we remember what we need to remember, to impact our understanding so that we have room for resurrection life in our understanding of reality, and to impact our heart so that we believe what we need to believe about Jesus.
If we do not give our time and attention to Jesus, we are not able to know him in a close, intimate way and we are not able to receive the blessings that he wants to give us. Attention is the currency of love.
You cannot lose with Jesus…. The Good News is that, because he loves you, Jesus willingly went to the cross to suffer and die so that the cost of forgiveness for the sins of the whole world could be more than paid for in full. With his resurrection from the dead on the third day that followed, Jesus has opened for you the door to new life with him, a new life that begins in the moment you first believe in him as Lord and Savior, a new life that continue into forever, and which reach its fulfillment when Jesus comes back to this world to make all things right and new, including us.
…our actions flow out of our identity, and sometimes, especially when we do things that we later regret, it is because we suffer a form of amnesia, we temporarily forget who we are, and we do something totally out of character for us. So how do we find our way out of this dilemma of reoccurring temporary amnesia that keeps leading to regretful actions?
Farewell to Shadowlands 