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Life isn't fair. Bad stuff happens to good people, and good stuff happens to bad people.  But, God gave us something, the only thing, that would allow us to truly love Him, love each other, and give us true freedom.  But, this very thing, call it our FREE WILL or AGENCY, also allows us to reject Him, reject our inheritance, follow Satan and this world. God is the perfect father. He cares for who we are and who we become. He does not concern himself with what a fallen world thinks of us. Satan HATES us, wanting nothing more than our BLIND IGNORANCE AND COMFORT, that allows us to ride that fur-lined coffin right into hell, because Satan IS NOT a good father. #Jeremiah 12:1-2 / #Job 21:7-9 / #Hebrews 12:6-7 / #Proverbs 3:12 / #Job 5:17-18

#1 Kings 16:30 / #1 Kings 21:25 / #1 Kings 21:20-26 / 1 Kings 21:27-29  How is it that I surrender to God, and yet completely break his law within, I guess, apparently minutes of that surrender?  Many of us have sinned in a way that we don't believe God could ever forgive, and even though we know what to say in church and with our Christian friends and family, we also know that we haven't completely walked away from that sin. And worse, we keep repeating certain sin. How can we ever expect God to show mercy and not punish us when we so clearly deserve it?  No matter what your sin, or what our sin, and how long we have been struggling with whatever sin it is, God's hand of mercy is ALWAYS there to forgive freely, quickly. WE NEED ONLY TO REPENT… sincerely and trust that mercy.

#Proverbs 3:5-6 / #Psalm 32:8 / #Philippians 3:13 / #Proverbs 4:25 / #Jeremiah 29:11 When considering our lives, most of us believe that we are the captains of our life. It's our life. We call the shots. “My body, my choice, right?” No.. wrong. In life, we are the helmsman, and the helmsman is a very different role. The helmsman is responsible for steerage… moving the rudder.  THE CAPTAIN is who the helmsman must listening to, and take orders from.  Why does this matter? The captain we have chosen to follow, is leading us to our destination. It's our job just to listen to his corrections, directions, and trust that he knows what he's doing. That is why we better choose the right captain to serve.  The ship (our lives), will ultimately end up where the captain has led the ship. The helmsman just get to manage the rudder.  The thousands of course corrections don't matter. They're all part of the journey. You're going to have good and bad days. We're going to have high and low years. Those are course corrections. Just LISTEN TO THE CAPTAIN, and when it's all said and done, our life will have been a straight  JESUS CHRIST is the only good captain. He is the only way that knows the way, to the only home that we would want for eternity.  Don't forget… There are many captains, but there's only ONE GOOD CAPTAIN that will lead us to him. TRUST IN HIM… ALONE.

Our minds were not built to consume all the ugly that the world has to offer. If we are doomscrolling… If we're consuming mass junk from Reality-TV, bad stuff on the internet, all of the stuff is having an impact. Our minds cannot swim in a sea of poison, with no consequences to the thoughts and ultimately to our actions.  The average TV show or media feed is NOT BUILT to fuel our spirit of gratitude and thankfulness. God did give us something very special, though. He gave us a heart for beauty, a mind that can potentially understand what is truly inspiring, a spirit that can detect His hands all around us.  IF… if… and that's a big IF, if our minds and hearts are open to these things.  If we want to begin to fix… REALLY fix our attitudes, heal our minds, and live in appreciation of God's creation, we need to consume good spiritual food.  We need to take a minute, and reorient refocus on the beauty all around us. Read THE TRUTH OF HIS WORD. Listen to music that praises Him, and think about the things that are pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy.  This will reorient our minds. We will reorient our attitude. We will reignite our gratefulness, and we will praise God, our King and our Savior, Jesus, like He deserves. Philippians 4:8 / 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 / Proverbs 4:25-27

We hope for all the promises of God's Kingdom and eternity. And the manifestation of that faith is our confidence that this will happen for us, because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  It isn't enough to go to church every Sunday, to give everything you own to the church, or or to be a so-called good person every day of our lives, if we are not sure that we will be spending eternity with our Savior.  In Matthew 17:18-20, rebukes his disciples for their lack of faith, which caused them to fail in casting out the demon.  To call ourselves Christian, we have to take several very big steps of faith, and we have chosen to believe things that we did not witness, or see with our own eyes. Faith cannot be faked. We either believe or we don't. And that is why faith is the key, that picks the lock to all spiritual expression of God's power in our lives. Salvation is through faith. We have to believe like a child who believes when asking a parent for food. This faith is going to be tested our entire walk, our entire life with Jesus as a believer. We have a Good Father who loves us, who wants a relationship with us, who wants us to spend eternity with Him. But, we must come to Him on His terms, NOT ours. We come under His protection, because He loves us. But it's on His terms, NOT ours.

We all know what sin is. Simply, if it goes against God's Word, or God has convicted us in our hearts, or puts anything in our life before Him and His will for our life, then by definition, that's sin. We struggle, of course, with all kinds of sin, and being a Christian, for sure, doesn't put us above it or beyond it; In fact, sometimes the closer we get to God, the more sin tries to hunt us down.  What should we do when we struggle with sin? Here's our pattern… We choose the path that we know we shouldn't choose. If we do love God and we do know right from wrong, we feel guilty. And then, Satan, whose very name means, “Accuser,” he gets in our ear, and he reminds us of every detail of our failure, and how unworthy of forgiveness we truly are.  We can handle this one of two ways… The accusation from Satan in our ear, in our hearts, can take us away from God and send us hiding. OR… If we really know who God is, and we use the wisdom that he's given us, we run to His throne, and we beg for His mercy, and we beg for His forgiveness. Those choices are critical, and make all the difference.  That heart of our submission to God's will, needs to be a lot more pure.  It’s no different than working out… Any muscle that you want to get stronger, you HAVE to overload it, and then you have to PUSH and RESIST against that load. YOU HAVE TO WORK. That's how you get muscles stronger. You can't just give up as soon as you feel the pressure, if you have any intention of getting better, getting stronger, improving.  We are responsible for our decisions. And while we can take peace, in a perfectly merciful father who is always ready to forgive, it's our responsibility to at least begin the process of getting stronger, and actually push back against the resistance.  Resistance takes many forms, and we want to encourage you with anything that you’re struggling, there is help in the body of Christ. There are professionals, and ministers, and therapists, and stuff that can help us. LOOK FOR THAT HELP!  We have to focus on getting stronger, putting up a resistance, and in turn, developing those muscles to a point, where we can be a great example to the world around us, and to the people that we love.

The first time I saw  the Michelangelo painting, “The Creation of Adam,” I was struck by the hands. The hand of God, and the hand of Adam, are telling the whole story.  God is reaching, and stretching his fingers, and fully spread out, trying to connect with Adam. Adam is relaxed, passive, his wrist is hanging. His hand isn't reaching for anything.  This is the WHOLE PICTURE of our relationship with God.  God pursues a relationship with us. He wants to be in our life. He loves us, and He's working moment by moment, to connect with us.  But, in our passivity, and our careless comfort, we continuously create a gap.  The beauty in the painting is the truth of it. Adam can hardly be bothered to reach back. Yet, God constantly pursues us, constantly loves us, constantly  pursues our souls. The Bible says, that it is His heart that NOT ONE of us is lost. He wants us all to be saved.  But just like Adam, how many of us are sitting back, passive and relaxed, waiting for the God of the universe to find us?  How about we put out a little effort? What if, instead of passively going through life, what if we started to take a direct interest in the things that God actually cares about?  What if we actually started reaching our hand back? What kind of amazing things could He do in our lives?  A gift as great as eternal salvation, a gift that was paid for by the BLOOD OF KING JESUS, is not something to treat passively. How about we reach back? How about we try?  Luke 15:4-7 / 1 John 4:19 / Hebrews 13:5

We are good at “Grace” in the modern Western world. Not necessarily the “Biblical Grace” that the Bible teaches. More like the, “I can do whatever I want and say sorry, and you have to forgive me” kind of grace. When God was made mortal, and the price of grace was HIS blood, and HIS pain and HIS suffering, our freedom was purchased, and it wasn’t purchased cheaply. If we as believers have genuine faith, we will produce genuine fruit. And God will use that fruit to nourish anyone who come across us. That's why when James said, “Faith without works is dead,” that's a TRUE statement. It doesn't mean your salvation is dependent on works. What it does mean is, if you have genuine faith, all of a sudden you're going to start doing something with it. It's going to start producing good stuff. You're going to start using your resources of time, and money, and energy, to share God's GOOD NEWS for all of mankind. So, when the Bible says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven.” What He means is, there's people out there throwing that "Jesus” name around, and throwing that “Lord” name around, and claiming this, that, and the other. But, God sees the heart. He sees whether that belief is real. And based on that, will determine whether or not we inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew 7:21 / Galatians 5:6 / James 2:26

I read something recently on social media, “Believing in Jesus, but not doing what he says, is the same thing that Satan does.” How many of us know what idolatry is?  Idolatry, quite simply, is making a god in an image, and assuming power that it has that makes us comfortable; A god that cares about, what WE care about, and wants what WE want. A god that is in alignment with all our various proclivities. If we believe in something… ANYTHING… amazingly, so does our god.  A god made in OUR image, is a god that makes US comfortable. And we can be in agreement with everything that this god tells us. We are called to take up our cross and follow Jesus. If we TRULY follow the Jesus of the Bible, we will not be the most popular people in our social groups. We probably won't even be invited to all of our church gatherings.  Hell will be full of people that believe in Jesus, but don't really concern themselves with what He wants for their life, or ever choose to live a life that showed that Jesus was even in it.  We don't get to choose what we like and what we don’t, because WE ARE NOT GOD.  Either God is sovereign over our hearts, and it is HIS will in our life, not ours, or He's not.  Anything other than COMPLETE WORSHIP, and bowing down to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the man described in the Holy Bible, the one who was killed and resurrected three days later… Anything other than that, is idolatry. Satan believes in Jesus. He just doesn't really care about following what Jesus says.

God commands us to, “Go and make believers of all nations.”  God gave us the machine. He gave us the Holy Spirit. He gave us the horsepower. He gave us words, attitudes, and behaviors that can that can share His goodness to the world.  So, when we become Christian, when we accepted Christ as our Savior, and surrendered to His will, we were given the keys to that race car. We were given the keys to the kingdom.  We upgraded our performance in the spiritual realm, to the equivalent of a Formula One race car.  In essence, the car that God put us in to race in the spiritual world, is built for competition and spiritual warfare. It's built with eternal stakes in mind.  We are not given the gift of the Holy Spirit and spiritual excellence to sit in our ivory towers, to drink coffee with all the other believers and talk about how broken the world is. God is the master engineer. He is the pit boss. He is the creator of this whole sport that we call life.  He is sending us out to engage the world around us, to to share THE GOOD NEWS, and to reach the lost. That is the Great Commission. This is what we are called to do. The “Go!” means get out of our church, get out of our Bible study, and engage in the world around us.  Because this race that we're in, this is for eternity.

God only gave Adam and Eve ONE RULE… Don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge; and because we have this really predictable pattern in human nature… We SIN… We RUN AWAY.  So, when we mess up, don’t hide from it. Don’t avoid the consequences of it. Don't be like Adam and Eve and hide, because we're naked and ashamed. Let's RUN TO our merciful King, and come before his throne, in honesty and thanksgiving. Ask for his mercy, and be healed in Jesus's name. AMEN. #Genesis 3:8-9 / #John 3:19 / #Hebrews 4:15-16

Being a follower of Christ, especially in today's world, is not a place for a lukewarm commitment.  As a Christian, we are called to take up our cross, and follow Christ. This cannot be done, when we are concerned with pleasing everyone.  Be truthful, be authentic, and stand up for what you know to be true.

The closer that we draw to Christ, the closer that we draw to TRUTH, Satan ends up taking a much greater interest, and real world dangers RAMP UP. How do we deal with this?  The Bible says, to always be ready to make a defense for the joy that we have in Jesus. Be ready! Know your story! Be ready to share it! Tell people why! And then speak the truth in love, and in Jesus’ name; Because, there is NO OTHER NAME UNDER HEAVEN, in which someone can be saved.  THE TRUTH WILL SET US FREE!

Jesus is fully God, and He is also fully man.  So, what would’ve caused Jesus to stall the beginning of His ministry?  When turning water to wine, Jesus stated to His mother, “My time has not yet come.”  What do you think He means by this?  Additionally, how does Jesus turning “water into wine,” connect to the Garden of Gethsemane?  Could it be that, as human as Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, He also knew that with the performance publicly of turning water to wine, the countdown to the cross had begun; that the INEVITABLE, brutal walk to Calvary had begun. He fully knew that He would soon experience stress and fatigue, maybe even fear, of facing unimaginable physical pain. He knew He would feel every cut, every tear of His flesh through the entire crucifixion.  Yet, even though His painful, human path was set, He STILL chose to endure… for our sake.

Traditional roles have changed A LOT in our modern world, and in many households, these roles are reversed 180 degrees, and all variations in between.  But one thing is beginning to show up a little too frequently, and that is we are becoming a lonelier and lonelier population, while ironically, at the same time, engaging with thousand of faceless names throughout the known universe, through all of our social media highways.  We are becoming more and more isolated, while living under the illusion that we're not, because of our heavy tech dependance and involvement.  The bottom line is… We need each other. We need REAL relationships, with REAL people. That's not a weakness!  Relationships are strength, and Christians are not immune to this problem.  Christians, are notorious for getting frustrated with all the world's changes, all the rapid breaking of tradition, and societal anchors and… and we end up leaving relationships behind.  As Christians, we love to stay in our own bubbles, and surround ourselves with people that agree with us. And sometimes those bubbles get very small.  BUT… We’ve been commanded, by Jesus himself, to bring THE GOOD NEWS to the world. And unfortunately for our comfort zone, the world is outside the walls of our home, and the safe church family.  While tech is an amazing tool, , and instead of just sharing the love of God on social media, we can sit down across the table from someone, and show them what the love of Jesus looks like, in a real world engagement. We no longer live in our traditional world. Very few families just sit around the dinner table every night and talk about their day. People are tied to their phones, and they're tied to their devices, and and we all do it. A TikTok video, an IG video… It's not the same as a relationship.  A follower on any of your social media platforms, is not relationship. We need to be face to face with people.  Show them the love of Jesus face to face.