reflections on the love that changes everything
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?
You and I cannot do anything to prevent problems from happening. The only thing that we can do anything about is the way that we respond to problems. Our responses tell us something about ourselves and if we have the courage to look at those responses, it can help us grow.
We try to live a good life, and by a “good life”, I mean a life that makes a positive difference in a long-term sense, and we try to live that kind of life without God’s power in us. And this is tragic because God has put all the power that we need for life with Him in the Bible, his Word.
God’s redemption will result in cosmic transformation, so our inner joy is based on God’s redemption of us.
Many of us love to cheer for the underdog, but not many of us want to be the underdog. How do we get through those times when the odds are stacked against us?
When times are tough, it is difficult for us to have hope. We want things to get better, but there is nothing in our circumstances to indicate that they will. Yet we hear this story from long ago of a humble king who came to a dark and desperate world. Why would that make any difference in our lives two millennia later on the other side of the world? He came to give us hope.
Jesus cleanses, enlivens and nourishes our soul so that his life flows through us.
