We're taking a trip chronologically through the Bible this year.
As God’s chosen people,
Put on compassion,
Put on kindness,
Put on humility,
Put on gentleness,
Put on patience,
Put on forgiveness – how much has God forgiven us?
And over all of these virtues, put on love which makes it all work in perfect harmony.
How do we do this?
* By letting the peace of Christ rule in our hearts everyday.
* By talking about God and sharing with each other what we have learned and experienced.
In your name and for your glory, dear Jesus.
Enlighten the eyes of our hearts, dear Father, so we may really know and experience the hope you have called us to.
Please help us understand the riches of the glorious inheritance we have received as your holy people.
We want to experience more of your incomparably great power in our lives. We know we were spiritually dead in our sins, following the ways of this world and helping Satan with his plans and schemes by living in disobedience.
But we now know your great love for us. Your great mercy, dear God! You have made us alive in Christ, showing awesome grace and kindness to us.
We now know and believe that we are your precious children, redeemed by Christ and called to fulfill your purpose for us here on hearth before we come home to live with you in heaven.
Amen, Hallelujah!
The gospel is growing in us and through us as we continue on our journey towards the truth. As we understand more and more about God’s grace, the gospel is able to bear fruit in our lives.
Paul wrote to the Colossians over 2 thousand years ago to encourage them in their journey. God speaks to us today through these same words as he encourages us on our journey.
Dear Father, we praise your name. We are so grateful for your grace. We are so grateful that – yes – we have heard the truth of the gospel and our understanding of it is growing daily as your spirit works in our lives.
Please help us grow the gospel in the world around us so that your hope can set other prisoners free.
We love you! In the redeeming name of your son, Jesus, we pray. Amen.
When we put our faith in Christ, we are transformed into new people. And the message God entrusts with us to pass on to others is that everyone needs to be reconciled to God.
God has already reconciled us to himself by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Now all we have to do is accept God’s gift of grace to complete the process.
We don’t have to ‘do good things’.
We don’t have to give up all of the fun things in our lives.
We don’t have to try to be ‘good enough’.
After we accept God’s grace and are restored into a relationship with him, we become his ambassadors. God makes his appeal to the world through us as we grow in our relationship with him.
The old is gone! The new is here!
Thank you, dear God.
How much of our time do we spend working? Watching TV? Playing games on our various devices? On our hobbies?
Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that, when the day of Judgement comes, whatever we have accomplished will be tested by fire. The fire will reveal the quality of each person’s life.
Things that were done in Christ’s name and for the glory of God will survive.
All of the other things we have done will be burned up because they have no eternal value.
If a person has accepted salvation through Jesus Christ, they will be saved even though everything they’ve done in life will be burned up. They will be like ‘one escaping through the flames’. They will have nothing to show for their time on earth because they will have wasted their lives on things that just weren’t worth it.
So – all of the things we spend our time on……
Are they worth anything?
who have been with Jesus.
Peter and John are witnessing to the Sanhedrin – the chief priests – about who Jesus really was in Acts 4.
And the Sanhedrin were astonished by what Peter and John said to them. Peter and John were just ordinary men but it was obvious to the chief priests that they had ‘been with Jesus.’
There are powerful words! They point directly to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.
Peter and John had been with Jesus and now they were forever changed because the Holy Spirit was living inside of them.
And the Sanhedrin could tell.
Dear Father, It is our prayer today that people around us can tell by what we say and how we act that we have ‘been with Jesus”.
We want our lives to be an obvious testament of the redeeming power of salvation through Jesus Christ.
Please let the words that come out of our mouth be courageous and pleasing to you, Dear God.
Help us to shine out of this dark world by letting your love flow through us to others. We desire to overcome evil with good and we can only do that with your help.
We have the Holy Spirit living in us so we are no longer ordinary. We are your extraordinary children who are overwhelmed by the blessings you have lavished upon us as we continue on in our journey towards the truth – towards you.
We pray all of this in the awesome name of Jesus who has saved us. Amen. Hallelujah!
This is one of my very favorite scriptures – John 17.
Jesus is praying for all those who will believe in him because of the message the disciples will share – that’s us!
The disciples were obedient to Jesus’ command to go and make disciples, teaching others to obey just like they were obeying and baptizing them. Because of the disciples’ faithfulness to this calling, we have the opportunity to know and be redeemed by Jesus.
They were witnesses to what Jesus had done and they shared what they knew.
They started a legacy of faith that has been passed on to each generation for over 2000 years.
And now it’s our turn.
Now we are the witnesses who need to speak up about Jesus – who he is, what he said and what he has done in our lives.
Now it’s our job to pass the opportunity to know and believe on to the next generation. We are all called to be witnesses. We all have personal stories of how the Holy Spirit has moved in our lives and has transformed us.
And we’ve got to pass it on.
So – how are you doing?
That was my first question when I started to seriously consider Jesus’ first and greatest command to us – Love the Lord your God will all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind. The 2nd commandment is to love others as we love ourselves.
The first commandment sounded so overwhelming that I decided to start there and worry about the 2nd one later. I’m glad I seriously tackled the first one on its own because I found that, with every baby step I took towards loving God with everything I have, a truly supernatural thing started to happen. 
God helped me with all of the rest.
I wanted to be a better wife and God helped me do that when I put him first.
I wanted to be a better mother – God also helped me do that.
I wanted to be a better employee at work and God helped me with that as well.
I wanted to be a better friend and neighbor – God helped me with that and gradually my obedience to command #2 was also improving without having to work at it.
These are all areas of my life where I was working very hard to improve yet feeling frustrated because of so little progress.
All of them improved and got easier with every step of faith I took closer to God.
That’s why God wants us to put him first. He wants to help us with all of the rest. And then he wants to take it to the next level by blessing us with the things we didn’t even have on the list!
In my experience, we only have to open our lives up to the power of the Holy Spirit and he helps us grow our obedience with both commands.
It’s not always easy, but it’s worth it!
Thank you, dear Father!
Traditions. We can have a lot of them – especially in church.
They can bring comfort and familiarity. They can provide structure and bring back great memories.
They can also bring rigidity that refuses to change and grow. They can create an attitude of mindless observation and boredom because we’ve done this a million times before.
Jesus confronts the teachers of the Law in Mark 7 with the fact that they had started making their own rules and traditions more important than God’s command.
Do we ever do that?
One of the most important messages to us in the New Testament is that Jesus changed EVERYTHING!
He turned the religious traditions of his day inside out and upside down.
Why?
Because doing God’s will was more important to him than observing the religious traditions of his time.
Jesus started a revolution over 2000 years ago by being radically sold out to God. In his life, obedience to God was more important than following traditions and the current acceptable cultural norms.
THIS should be our tradition.
Thank you, dear Jesus, for coming to earth to save us and to show us how to live.
It can be scary when God starts doing something new.
It’s strange. It’s different.
It takes us out of our comfort zone.
We have a choice – we can embrace it and move deeper into God’s will for us.
Or we can be afraid of this new thing and miss the opportunity to know God better.
In Matthew 8, Jesus releases a man from possession by a legion (a lot) of demons. People from all over the countryside come to see what happened. When they see this man who was a lunatic for so many years dressed and acting normal, they were afraid.
So they asked Jesus to leave.
They missed it! They were in the presence of the King of the Universe and they asked him to go away.
This was too different.
It was too new.
It made them uncomfortable.
So Jesus left.
Of course he did. He wants to be wanted. When we choose him, he will come into our hearts and minds to help free us from our own demons. And, if we give him more and more room in our lives every day, his influence on our life grows and it all starts making sense. The journey begins to have an eternal purpose that makes it all worth it.
If we’re too afraid, we’ll miss the ‘more’ that God has for us.
Dear Father, please chase away our fears.
