Safetypinlove

The choice is entirely yours. It all boils down to your will against God’s, and just who is on the throne of your life. It’s the difference between being obedient or rebellious, faithful or faithless. It means willingly yielding your allegiance to God rather than holding on to selfish wants & desires. Your choice to serve God is entirely your choice to make… and it’s a deliberate determination you’ll make…not something, I’m sorry to say, that you’ll automatically fall into. For you can’t serve two masters, (Matthew 6:24) otherwise you’ll sadly find out that you’re devoted to one & despise the other.

John 9:31 puts it well, “God doesn’t listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does His Will.” But nor can we suppose that God can be manipulated, cajoled, bullied, or flattered into helping those who are habitually disobedient. Sin separates us from God & hinders our prayers, for you can’t continue to sin and expect your voice to be heard on high. (Isaiah 58:4) So in the end, the words of Jeremiah 5:25 ring so true…”Your sins have deprived you of good.” … the goodness of God, happiness, wisdom, peace and joy.

Forgiving ourselves…interestingly enough this thought is not found in the Bible. So if it’s not found in the Word, it didn’t come from God. So why do we feel compelled to forgive ourselves? Usually it’s after doing something we knew was wrong…and now we’re carrying around this heavy burden of shame, disgust, guilt, & self-blame. But who tempted & enticed us in the first place? James 1:13-14 makes it very plain…God can’t be tempted, nor does He tempt us, so we must look to the father of lies, Satan instead. And when Satan has accomplished his mission…he heaps condemnation, shame & guilt on our heads for giving in. So there we sit, miserable and filled with self-loathing for the stupid mistakes we’ve made…our old self wrestling with our new self, or as Paul lamented to himself, he found himself doing the things he shouldn’t rather than the things he should. But as Believers we are called to forgive others (including ourselves) in direct response to God’s forgiveness & grace. For it tells us in I John3:19-20, “This is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in His Presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything.” God’s grace received by us allows us to be gracious towards others…and that includes ourselves.

This is called Common Grace…that God is kind even to the ungrateful & the wicked. That’s because He pours out loving kindness to all people, including those who deny, defy, and reject Him. For what God has created, He also sustains for all mankind…even those who are underserving & unthankful. This Common Grace then allows both the righteous & the unrighteous to share in the beauty & majesty of this world without prejudice…and we as Believers are then called to be imitators of this grace to our fellow man. (Ephesians 5:1)

There’s an old Arabian proverb about a camel & his owner’s tent and how first the camel stuck his nose in, then slowly more & more of him crept in, until his entire body was inside the tent. It reads, “If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” The lesson being – To stay happy & satisfied, we must learn to appreciate what we have rather than focusing on what we don’t. The insatiable quest for more only leaves us frustrated, ungrateful, and unhappy. That’s because if we aren’t content with what we currently have, we’ll never be satisfied, even if it’s doubled, or tripled. Our pursuit of more things then only feeds into FOMO…the fear of missing out and we become a sucker for anything “New & Improved”. But as Paul told Timothy, “Godliness with contentment is great gain.”…for Paul had learned the secret of being content in any and every situation. (Philippians 4:11-12)

If you sit with people who sit at the feet of Jesus, you’ll quickly discover that the conservations are different, & you’ll leave feeling inspired not inferior. That’s because our Christian walk is a race, but it’s not a competition. And you’ll find that those whose focus is firmly on the Lord, and not themselves, will foster goodwill not rivalry. It tells us in Proverbs 13:20 that, “He who walks with the wise grows wise.” …the simple lesson from this being…we become like those whose company we keep. So if your walk with the Lord needs some bolstering, consider first who you’ve been hanging around with…and then, whose Christian walk you admire…and go sit with them for awhile.

The invisible God is revealed through the visible medium of the sights & sounds of creation. We can observe the lightening, the giant redwood trees, or the ocean waves… and we can listen to the babbling brook, the wind in the trees, or the thunder in the distance and know they all are figuratively proclaiming God’s glory & power. It’s this Creation language that’s constantly declaring, pointing to, and proving God’s existence or as Romans 1:18-20 says, No man is without excuse of knowing God through Creation’s Message.

With God there is no such things as luck, fate, karma, chance, or accident. Our Creator God is sovereign and totally in control, never leaving any missed detail, or needing to fly by the seat of His pants. As Jeremiah 32:19 tells us, “O great and powerful God, Whose name is the Lord Almighty, great are Your purposes and mighty are Your deeds.” God’s plans & purposes were written before the beginning of time…each goal, aim, and design divinely devised in order that His purposes will be obtained in perfect timing. And so we can trust & believe this…for as God Himself said in Isaiah 14:24, ” Surely, as I have planned, so it will be and as I have purposed, so it will stand.”

It tells us in Genesis that The Garden of Eden was a sanctuary where God invited Adam & Eve to enjoy fellowship & peace with Him. The garden itself filled like a banquet table with all good things to eat for the first Adam, created by God in His image…perfect, blameless, and holy. But then we see their choice to disobey and rebel against God’s Word. This original sin, or the Fall, not referring primarily to the first sin committed by Adam & Eve but to the result of that first sin – the corruption of the human race. In the Garden of Eden we see God’s great love for mankind…but we also see His great wrath as the earth is cursed & fellowship with Him is broken. Fast forward to The Garden of Gethsemane and we see what was started in the Garden of Eden fulfilled by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane…the paradise lost by the first Adam is being restored forever by the last Adam. Again we see a perfect, blameless, and holy man, but when it came time to make a choice, Jesus chose to do the Will of His Heavenly Father…even though it cost Him dearly. The agony Jesus suffered in that garden He did willingly…fulfilling His destiny as the Savior of the world. His agony the basis of our Salvation…His triumph on the Cross our only way back to God. With the First Adam, hope was lost…but with the Last Adam, it was restored.

Even with all of the God-given wisdom Solomon possessed, and a lifetime of pursuing worldly things in order to find peace & joy…he now calls it all empty, fleeting, or as here, meaningless. That life became futile when he sought earthly & secular things rather than seeking after God. The Hebrew phrase translated “under the sun” occurs 28 times in the Book of Ecclesiastes and refers to life in this world…a life that has been adversely affected by the Fall. Which essentially means, a world without God. (For God exists “above the sun, or in Heaven” or as Ecclesiastes 5:2 says, “God is in Heaven and you are on earth.”) And sadly, it’s “‘under the sun” where all of mankind experiences the frustrating & perplexing side of this life, a life full of elusive fulfillment & empty joy…all because God is left out of the picture.