Month: December 2015

Today brings to a close another year. Tomorrow we begin a new year with new opportunities and new experiences. How will we know what to do? Where will we get the proper guidance for making God-honoring choices from the first moment of the year to the last? J. I. Packer discusses the issue of God’s guidance toward us and how God’s promise to us is a blessing:

    …it appears that the right context for discussing guidance is one of confidence in the God who will not let us ruin our souls. Our concern, therefore, in this discussion should be more for His glory than for our security — for that is already taken care of.

    Guidance, like all God’s acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us His way, that we may tread it; He wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home. Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God’s promise; this is how good He is.
–J. I. Packer

How wonderful to remember this truth as we move into a brand new year… That God is so good that as He guides us this year, even if we slip and stray from His guidance, He will bring us safely home if we are His children! His strong and mighty arms are beneath us and He will catch us when we fall to rescue and and restore us back on His path.

Do your very best to try to follow God’s guidance throughout 2016, but when you find that you’ve missed the mark, realize His grace still covers you and He still loves you and wants to put you back on the right path. Repent of errors, and once again make the choice to always do the next right thing!

The second greatest command is: Love your neighbor as much and in the same way as you love yourself. We are relational people who are called to intentionally build relationships.

Here are two quotes to help us think through more of what that means:

Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence, not only that God is God and humans are human, but also that our neighbor really is our fellow human being.
–Henri Nouwen

Both words — intentional and relationship — are necessary. As with many dialogues, we swing back and forth on the pendulum. We either become so programmatic we lose sight of people and relationships. Or we become so purely relational that we don’t accomplish anything. And the place to be is not just in-between, but at both ends: both highly relational and highly intentional, with neither one watered down for the sake of the other.
–Bob Logan and Tara Miller

We must become people of compassion that truly care for and love our neighbors – the other people who share this planet with us. Not only must we be people of compassion, we must also be people of action who are highly relational with others (involved in their lives in a personal manner) and highly intentional about ministering to them and discipling them.

I pray that you are constantly looking for new people to begin a new relationship with – people with whom you can share more about your love for Jesus. And I pray that you will be intentional in thinking about how you can disciple them toward a deeper imitation of Jesus Christ.

Who is God putting on your mind for you to become highly relational and intentional with?

You are only a few days away from the New Year. Will you make any resolutions?
Here is a resolution you can adopt that comes from 500 years ago:

if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart…
Let our chief effort…
be to study the life of Jesus Christ.
–Thomas à Kempis

If you make no other resolution this year, at least make one – that this year you will make your chief effort to study the life of Jesus Christ.

If there were nothing else to do but praise the Lord God with all your heart and voice, if you had never to eat, or drink, or sleep, but could praise God always and occupy yourself solely with spiritual pursuits, how much happier you would be than you are now, a slave to every necessity of the body!
–Thomas à Kempis

What a wonderful day that will be, when we are no longer a slave to the necessities of our physical bodies, and we are able to do nothing but praise God and pursue Him with no other distractions.

I long for the day when God will bring me to Himself, and I am able to experience the joy of praising Him that we see in Revelations which says that we will join with those who are around His throne:

and day and night they do not cease to say, “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY is THE LORD GOD, THE ALMIGHTY, WHO WAS AND WHO IS AND WHO IS TO COME.” and “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created.”

What a glorious day that will be!
Come, Lord Jesus, Come!

Yesterday, I wrote about surrendering all of yourself to Jesus. But does that truly mean dying to self? If I am faced with choosing life by denying Jesus or death by affirming my relationship to Him, should I really be expected to stand with Him and die?

    If being a Christian costs you your life, how with that help you make much of Christ? Many have made God look great through their death. When the hour comes for everything to be taken from us but Christ, we will magnify Him by saying: “In Him I have everything and more. To die is gain.” If we learn to die like that, we will be ready to live. And if we don’t learn this, we waste our lives.

    Some of us would be willing to die for Christ, the question is are we willing to live for Him, suffer for Him, and magnify Him with our lives.
–John Piper

Questions every follower of Christ must answer.
I hope you truly are able to say: To die is gain. To die for Christ would be an honor I do not deserve.
These were the beliefs of the apostles and of the martyrs of history. May we hold to the same beliefs.