Night and Morning
“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” Psalm 30:5b (ESV). No matter how long your night is, you can always look for morning. Look back at other nights you have gone through when morning finally came. Hold His hand! He said, “I am the Light of the world.” To
Tenacious Hope
Our hope refuses to die because God has made a covenant with us in His Only Begotten Son. This blood covenant shows God’s relentless love for us. He will return. When He appears, “We will be like Him,” (I John 3:2). This hope will not disappoint us (Rom 5:5). The promises of God are
His Joy
Jesus has joy when we do the right thing. The souls who trust all to Jesus want Jesus to be happy with the sacrifice more than they want their own happiness. To want the joy of our Lord more than we want our own, makes us His love slaves. It is the foundation of
The Great Shaper
The prayer to be like Jesus is heavier than we think. The great Shaper will shape you through your circumstances. There may be rejection, loneliness, wilderness, mockery, persecution, sorrow, tears, weariness and manifold trials. These things that are often a part of everyone’s life will have a special role in your Jesus-like shaping. In
Perseverance Needed
Christian perseverance is persistence with faith in it. It may involve suffering, fatigue and fear, but it keeps on going. It has a goal in mind, an end in view. The believer looks to the Lord and endures. Perseverance builds a legacy and blazes a trail that can be followed. Perseverance invariably trumps talents,
Maturing Faith
The faith at the beginning of our journey is a grace inspired trust in our faithful Father. The goal of that grace is to produce holy character and restore us to the divine likeness. As the Spirit does His character shaping work in us, we begin to show true humility, compassion, gentleness, kindness, etc.
Sins of Others
Gossipers get a feel-good addictive surge out of bad news. Personal sins of others delight them like the discovery of hidden treasure. They are seeking to show themselves righteous by comparison. This is a sick kind of self-righteousness that wants the hearer to conclude, “I am so much better than that.” The solution is to confess our
Lord and Friend
Some friends bring out the worst in each other. The friends we select and the relationships we allow to develop out of those friendships can have great positive or negative impacts on our lives. Henry Ford said, “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” Jesus will do that.
Motions of the Spirit
There is a flow and movement to the Holy Spirit that the believer is to move with and not hinder. Our Father is moved with compassion toward the world. When our Father’s Spirit moves in us, in His purposeful ways and planned moments, we touch the needy as Jesus did. The motions of the
Loneliness
Focus on your loneliness and you will feel even more lonely. Instead, focus on the work God has given you to do. Get involved serving those around you. Focus on God Himself. Millions of people, by choice or circumstance, are left to live alone. To focus on your aloneness is to miss the
Creation’s Order
Live in harmony with the created order. Your body and soul gets out of sorts when you allow yourself to be filled with bitterness, anger, un-forgiveness and resentment. Human bodies and spirits work best with the Christian virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness and self-control. That’s the way the Creator
Looking at His Face and His Eyes
Some persons avoid worship because they do not want to stand before God and make eye contact. We either love the darkness because of sin or we love the Light and come to it. Some atheist will admit that they would have to change some of their behaviors if they believed that there was
Be a Jesus Bridge
The reason the world does not know Jesus may be because they have met us. The reverse can also be true: the reason they know Jesus is that they have met Him in us. It is a shame when we do not represent Him well. We must never forget whose we are and to
I Am with You
Testing in the life of the Christian is inevitable. We invariably go through dark valleys, rough times of testing and struggles that stretch us beyond what we think we can endure. But there is One who is with us, who will grant counsel and empower us while we are being tested. He is the
No Abstract Love
To love my neighbor is an expression of my love for God. This keeps my love for God from being abstract or sentimental. We like to receive God’s love, not always knowing that it calls for a commitment from us. We receive God’s love so that we might give it away. His love is
Resentful Service
There is a kind of service, which one may think is for the Lord, but that is done resentfully. The service is rendered, but loathed in the process. The ones served do not sense love nor concern with this attitude. It does not draw them to the Lord. There are certainly times that we
Misery
Miserable people are not available to serve other people or to serve the Lord. Their misery and self-focus has them sidetracked. They do not know that if they serve others, then joy would not pass them by. They have not learned that when you comfort another, then comfort comes back to you. They have
God as Father
Do we yet know God as Father? Is this knowledge imprinted on our minds and hearts? Do our emotions sometimes doubt it? Have we ever been lost in His kind embrace? Have we heard His Spirit in us crying out, “Abba Father”? The Spirit and the Son seek to draw us toward the Father’s
Let God Be God
Baal worshipers served a god who could be manipulated. Theirs was a fertility/prosperity cult. If people did the right things then Baal and his wife would become stimulated to intimacy, then the land would produce fruit and the cattle would multiply. God was revealed to Israel as the One who will not be used
Divine Fellowship
Jesus prays that “The love wherewith You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” We dwell in Him and He dwells in us in a mutual indwelling. To have Christ in us is to have the love of God “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” Rom 5:5. By this
Confess It
We must balance “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us” (Luke 11:4a, NIV) with “Whoever is born of God does not sin” (1 John 3:9). The key is intentional sin. The Father’s children want to obey Him. They have in themselves the seed of the Father because they
The Failure To Love
Measure sin by the law, and it leads to self-righteousness and legalism. The Pharisees were a glaring example of that. Jesus taught us that the essence of sin is the failure to love; it is the message of the whole Bible. When I examine my heart by the Great Commandment, then I find there
The Workings Of Death
The working of the flesh (i.e. the body controlled by sin) is death working itself out in opposition to the principles of life. “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I
The Workings Of Life
If we have eternal life, we have the principles of eternal life working in us. Jesus in us is the Life of God working His Life out through us. This is living in the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, and manifesting the fruit of the Spirit. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love,
Fan The Flame
Timothy apparently did not grow up in an “ideal” Christian home. His father was a Greek, and maybe not a believer. He was taught the Christian faith by his mother and grandmother. He was mentored by Paul, who was his spiritual father. He became His traveling companion and a trusted tender of the flock