Archive for the 'Salvation' Category
As a Christian, there are many things in my life that I wish I didn’t struggle with. To be honest I hate the fact that I struggle with certain things at all! These struggles can be small and personal, while others can be large and known by all. To me though, it doesn’t matter the size or how many people know. All that matters to me is that these things continue to be constant stumbling blocks in my Christian walk.
I hope you are not getting the wrong picture. I am not saying that I am addicted to porn, that I have fits of rage constantly, or that I find my self contemplating murder. But I find myself stumbling less often everyday with the less evident versions of these like lust, frustration, and jealousy. Although I am a Christian and I know that I am not saved because of how good I am but by the grace of God, I still feel like the world is over when I realize that I have been stuck in a rut with these hidden sins.
So what should I do? The first thing I always do is pray. I know that God wants to see me live for him. So I ask him to give me the strength to not fall back into these sins, I also ask if he could help me discern situations that would tempt me to fall into these as well. Then I will usually think about it and feel bad about it for a long time, but I don’t think God wants us to linger on the sins of our past.
Although the sin may have been committed 2 minutes ago, it still was in the past. If we sit and linger on that sin we will only let the glory we should be giving to God, go somewhere else. And that is no good. We should glorify God in all things, including our sin.
How do we glorify God in our sin? We can glorify God in our sins by not continuing to sin. We can strive to live pure and holy lives, and when we come to a point where we stumble we shouldn’t allow it to take our eyes off of the greatness of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ who died for the forgiveness of our sins. If we get stuck and depressed because we have sinned in such a minute way, I don’t think that we really are glorifying the work of forgiveness which he accomplished through his love for us, on the cross.
What do you think? Is it possible to glorify God through our sin by seeking to become more pure? And if so, is it also possible to steal his glory by lingering in our past sin?
July 11 2008 | Christianity and Jesus and Salvation | No Comments »
Today I was browsing through a clothing site called www.EphraimClothing.com. I had never heard of these clothes until recently when a good friend of mine mentioned that she liked them. So today I didn’t have too much to do so I clicked over to see what was so cool about them. As I was browsing I found a t-shirt that was called, “Heaven in your Head, Hell in your Heart.” This t-shirt definitely caught my eye. The design was sweet, but the message was even sweeter.
I know that once we get a firm understanding of who Jesus is, and we begin to venture into a world of knowledge and not emotion it is really easy to forget about the condition of our hearts.
Do you know what I mean? It is seemingly so easy to take the time to read your bible, write a blog, listen to a sermon, read a book, and discuss issues surrounding theology; but it isn’t always that easy to actually apply what you are reading, writing, listening to, or talking about to your own personal life. For example, if you take the time to read the Bible you will quickly learn that lust and sexual sins are greatly hated by God, but it isn’t always easy to actually take that truth and remove that form of sin from our heart. We can also see that we are not walking in the footsteps of Christ if we have filthy mouths, but it isn’t always the easiest or most satisfying thing to try to control. But I want you to listen to what I have to say… It is so important that we do take the time and the effort to control all things in our lives.
We should not go around sinning against God, yet feeling justified because we do truly recognize that what we are doing is wrong. We must pray, asking Jesus to give us the strength to purge those sins from our hearts. We need to make sure that we don’t let the little things grow into larger things, which will eventually make us crumble, and the only reason that we will crumble is because we are not building our house on the solid foundation of truth of Jesus Christ, which we think we know so well, but instead we are ignoring what we have read and are building our houses on the sinking sand of our own knowledge and deceitfully apparent wisdom.
What do you think? Are do you see this in your life? How about in the lives of others? What have you done to get rid of this kind of sin?
July 07 2008 | Christianity and Jesus and Salvation | No Comments »
There is a song written, which is pretty old, that says love cannot be described, so it describes what love is not. I used to think this was so cool. I was like, wow, what is love? I know that may sound silly, but it is truthful. The world has no idea what love is. They often relate it to sex, spending lots of money, and many other fleshly things.
But I want to tell you something. As Christians we should all understand love in a totally different way than the world does. The reasoning for this is simple: (Romans 5: 6-8)
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Love is shown by God in the most real form ever. He gave his life that we may have life. There is no greater love than this. It is a great example, and it is how we should approach love. I don’t mean that we should all go and die, but I do mean that we should be completely selfless in our love towards others. We don’t love others so that we can gain, but we love them so that they can benefit, because we want to help them, and we want to see them do great thing. The reasons could go on forever, but here is a great passage of scripture, it is Paul telling the church what love is and what it isn’t: (1 Corinthians 13)
The Way of Love
13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
So let us take this and learn to love others in our patience, and kindness; and let us also show it by not being irritable, or resentful; and lastly let us show our love by not envying, or boasting. Paul wrote the book of Romans, and he also wrote 1 Corinthians, so that means that the love which he is describing in this passage is a description of the great love he described earlier, and let us never forget that great example.
June 30 2008 | Christianity and Salvation | No Comments »
How often do you really think of yourself as the dirty sinner that you really are? I mean, it is really easy to skim the surface and assume an understanding of your sinfulness which is extremely misconcieved. Let me explain…
I go through life knowing that all that I do isn’t enough to please God. I understand that I can’t work my way to heaven, and there is nothing I can do to get myself closer to God. But I don’t always understand the great contrast between God’s holiness and my sinfulness.
Through life it is easy, especially lately for me, to get caught up on irrational stresses. These stresses cause me to focus more on myself than God. While doing this I fall further and further away from what God wants me to be, but through it all it has brought me to a more realistic understanding of who God is compared to me.
Tonight during the praise and worship at our church I came to a point where I could almost taste my filthiness. It was crazy. I truly felt like everything I had to offer during my praise was worthless. I felt so extremely humbled as I began to reach out for God, asking him to forgive me for being the sinner which I am. I began to think of all the things I have done in my life: the wrongs, the rights, and the inbetweens. I began to realize that no matter how hard I try to please God I am always stumbling over some form of sin wether it be lust, anger, jealousy, gluttony, or whatever other sin I happen to get caught on, and the image and definition of the contrast between God’s holiness and my sinfulness became more than real to me.
I wanted to share this with you, because I think we too often get caught up on what we are doing, instead of what he has done. It is so amazing. I still have a hard time understanding why a God as perfect as our God would come down from heaven to redeem someone as sinful as myself. But then again, I guess that is why he’s perfect.
June 17 2008 | Christianity and Jesus and Life Experiences and Salvation | No Comments »
Let me start this post of by simply defining two of these words…
- Christianity: (According to me) is following the teachings of the Bible. Which include all of the teachings of Jesus Christ. As a Christian you strive to be more like Jesus in all that you do.
- Churchianity: (According to Wikipedia) is a pejorative term used to describe practices of Christianity that are viewed as placing a larger emphasis on the habits of church life or the institutional traditions of a specific Christian denomination than on the teachings of Jesus.
Which are you following? Jesus or the church? You have to first understand what I am saying. If you are a Christian you understand that as the Church we are the body of Christ, but as Christians we don’t follow the traditions and teaching that are created by the church, instead we follow the teachings of Jesus and the other things which are spoken of in the Bible.
I am not saying this because I am ticked off at somebody, but I am saying it because I think that many people have a very distorted perspective of Christianity, and should actually be calling there belief “churchianity.” To these people Christianity is not about Jesus, it is about showing up on Sunday mornings, being involved in church activities, and supporting the various ministries of the church. Sometimes it may even consist of things such as not drinking, not cussing, not doing drugs, and not having sex before marriage. All of these things are great, but if you are doing them because you feel like you have to do those things to be a Christian you may be walking on thin ice.
It is not the church that saves us; Jesus saves us. He didn’t say that we have to do all of this stuff to be saved, but instead all of these things are a result of us wanting to humble ourselves and serve him. I am not saying that Christians should drink, do drugs, have lots of premarital sex, and be uninvlolved in church; but I am saying that we need to be real about why we are Christians, and the things we do will never save us, including the things we do to better ourselves and the church.
June 16 2008 | Christianity and Jesus and Salvation | No Comments »
Did you know that we are not saved because of the things which we have done? We are only saved because of the grace of God. When God became a man and walked on this earth, he didn’t do that just to make an incredible story. He did that to pay for our sins.
In and of ourselves we don’t have what it takes to meet the standards of God. We fell short from the very beginning, and we have tried to impress him ever since. But it never worked. Everything we do pulls us away from him.
People, including myself, sometimes feel that if we fall short in a certain area of our walk with God then we are not saved by the blood which Jesus shed on the cross. But when we do fall short, it is important to remember that if God was expecting us to never fall short he would have never had to come and paid for our sins with his substitutionary death on the cross. God expects us to fail, and he wants us to trust in him.
I hope that when you read this you examine your own life. It is not good to constantly fall to sin or temptation, and if you do then you may really need to reconsider your trust in God. But if you find your self stumbling and then feeling horrible about it, pray and trust in God. He will give you the strength to avoid those situations if you realize that you are not the one who is good, but he is.
June 10 2008 | Christianity and Salvation | No Comments »
As a young generation we need to be honest when we evangelize by sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others. A lot of people have a very twisted view of what the Gospel is. The people who have this twisted view may not actually know that their presentation of the Gospel is actually corrupt. So, it is our duty to show and speak the true Gospel every time we get the opportunity.
We need to remember these things:
- The Gospel is not here to make you rich.
- The Gospel will not make all your troubles go away.
- The Gospel isn’t here to make you more important!
but…
- The Gospel will give you an eternal hope.
- The Gospel will allow you to do something with your life.
- The Gospel brings glory to God!
I know it will be an awesome day when this world no longer has a corrupt view of the Gospel. When this world can truly understand the most fundamental part of Christianity, I believe that more people will come to have a true relationship with their Creator.
The people of my generation don’t want to hear lies. We are smart enough to discern between garbage and truth, although, many of them don’t believe in truth; but that is a totally different topic. So please, be honest with what you believe. Let’s show the results of the true Gospel, honestly, in your everyday lives.
May 20 2008 | Christianity and Culture and Evangelism and Salvation | No Comments »
As I was browsing Myspace earlier today, I read a post from an old acquaintance talking about how people can create there own truth, and it arose some old thoughts. About a year ago I was really into this whole emergent, postmodern idea, but I eventually stopped talking about it; because I felt like I had turned it into a bigger deal than it really was.
But this post I read earlier really reminded me that there are people that have forgotten that there is really something called truth, and it is not relative. The concept which I keep hearing is: what we are exposed to and taught throughout our lives constitutes what we know as truth. This is correct, kind of. We may conceive things one way, for instance; if I was raised in a home where my older siblings, whom I thought were really smart, did drugs, drank all the time, and dropped out of school, I may come to an understanding where my conceived truth is that drinking, doing drugs, and dropping out of school will make you smart. Obviously this is not true though. The truth is that none of those things will help you become smarter.
So what I am trying to say is this. Many people will choose not to believe in God because they say he doesn’t exist in their eyes. But if he really does exist it doesn’t matter what that person thinks. Do you get my drift? One of my favorite analogies is this, if you were standing in the middle of the road and a bus was going seventy miles an hour directly towards you, and it hit you; it would kill you or severely hurt you regardless of what you believed. This is because the bus was really there, and you were really in its way.
Jesus Christ is the same way. He is either real, or fake. There is no in between. If you are a Christian who chooses not to tell your friends about your believes, you need to start now. Don’t let this lie of relativity hold you back from what is true.
May 15 2008 | Culture and Evangelism and Jesus and Salvation | No Comments »
… in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting
their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with
a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure
he is…. (Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life)
May 12 2008 | Books and Christianity and Salvation | No Comments »
Vintage Jesus which is written by Mark Driscoll is possibly one of the most informative, yet interesting books I have ever read. Driscoll takes this book, and gives his readers a new approach to who Jesus is. He doesn’t change Jesus, but he just comes across it in a new manner. He starts off the book by trying to place into perspective what Jesus would be like if he came today, instead of two thousand years ago. Some people may find it offensive the way he describes him, but Driscoll is just trying to take a very realistic approach.
He then continues through the book talking about why Jesus is God, why Jesus is the only god, and what Jesus has done, is doing, and will do in the future upon his return. Driscoll really just takes an approach in his writing that I have not seen before. It is highly informative, but it flows easier than most books I have read in the past. On top of that this book has so many references and so much information that you will feel as if you took a class in Jesus 101 by the time you finish the book. There are hundreds of scripture references, and dozens of quotes from influential people of today.
All in all this is a great book. It is extremely deep, but a pretty easy read. I would highly recommend it to people investigating the person of Jesus, or to anyone who just wants to learn more about Christianity. And like with most of Driscoll’s other stuff, it seems to be tailored to young men. So be prepared for anything! Hope you enjoy it.
May 05 2008 | Books and Christianity and Jesus and Salvation | No Comments »
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