reflections on the love that changes everything
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.
The whole idea of the book of Revelation—the whole purpose—is that God wants you to know, in a general sense, what is going to happen in the future so that you can have resilient faith as that future unfolds.
Training in godliness helps us to discern truth from lies and create habits of holiness that help us stay on track as we follow Jesus into forever. As we grow in godliness, then we can help others train in godliness. This helps them to become more like Jesus, and then they can help others, and so on, and so on. And that’s how the Kingdom of God grows.
Only God’s love can change us into being people who love him in return, and gladly accept and live by the structure he gives us because we know that it is good for us and others.
The stronger our faith in God to defeat the giants in our life and the more areas of our life to which we apply that giant-slaying faith, the weaker anxiety’s ability will be to rule over our lives.
… God chooses to work through human weakness because that is what we need to happen for us to realize that it is actually God who is doing the really good things all along. Confronted with the realization that God is actually the One who is making the good things happen in this world, our internal compass shifts from a self-centered focus, which is our natural bent, to a Yahweh-centered focus, and our eyes open up to see the rich, full, abundant life that we have in and with him.
…Jesus is taking us back to the Garden, where all wrongs will be made right, all brokenness will be healed, and we will get to live in the presence of God, loving, serving and praising him forever.
Farewell to Shadowlands 