reflections on the love that changes everything
So my encouragement to you today, dear friend, is to lift your eyes. Look up. Let your heart be captured by the glory that awaits you at the end of time. Because of Jesus, winter will not have the last word. You are going home to God. You are going to live in his eternal spring, and it’s all because of Jesus.
In Jesus, you have God, and there is nothing greater than that…. Life with Him will always be greater than any life without Him, and you will never face a moment where Jesus is not enough for you.
Jesus not only fulfilled the old covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants. He also gave us a new covenant of grace, and that covenant of grace was applied to you personally in your baptism.
You are a child of the high King of heaven who has begun his reign. He reigns in our hearts, he reigns in this world, and one day, all the world will see Jesus for the great king he is.
…the moment when we empty ourselves of all our self-centered pride and self-righteous judgments, Jesus rushes in with more of His grace to draw us closer to Him.
If physical freedom is what we need to be free, most of us will experience a life of frustration. But what if God wants to give us another kind of freedom, a freedom that brings joy even when we are in prison? How can we live with that kind of freedom?
And it doesn’t matter where you are—regardless of the loneliness, pain, sorrow, suffering, or grief that you are right in the middle of right now—
your Heavenly Father is with you, and He loves you, and He will carry you through that time.
And He’s inviting you to come home so that He can embrace you and restore you as a beloved, forgiven child in His family.
For when we look at what Jesus taught his disciples about prayer in Luke 11, we see that prayer is all about relationship, the relationship between us and God. That relationship is a gift given to us by Jesus.
If our eyes are closed to what God sets before us, then the arc and trajectory of our life will never be what God intends for it to be….
And because each and every one of us only has one precious life to live, that would be tragic.
…How can we have our eyes opened to all that God has for us?
The reason that we can be people of hope in a hopeless world is that the grace of Jesus Christ has changed everything for us. It has changed who we are, it has changed how we live, it has changed where we are going.
Farewell to Shadowlands 