Time is money!

“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much…”
(Luke 16:10)

“I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?”
(John 3:12)

It seems the Lord was showing me that these verses can refer to how we manage and steward and understand TIME. He gives us TIME in this temporal world and watches to see how we will use it. And if we do well (according to His idea of “well”), then He is ready to entrust us with heavenly, eternal things!

Sometimes, when we experience God’s tangible Presence, Eternity invades our temporal reality and TIME seems to disappear, as it is overwhelmed and displaced by His eternal, infinite Glory. And as we experience Him like this, everything in our lives begins to be transformed. But if we want to experience this infusion, we need to approach and esteem temporal TIME rightly — by spending a lot of it on Him, being willing to lavish Him with one of the few types of CURRENCY that really impresses Him — our TIME.

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A God-centered Gospel for Valentine’s Day!

“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,
with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”
(Ephesians 4:30)

To avoid sin only because of its self-destructive
consequences is to create a me-centered Gospel.
The main reason we should not sin
is because it grieves the heart of God.

And a wonderful way to celebrate Valentine’s Day
would be to walk in the Grace He has given us (1 Corinthians 10:13)
and resist temptation because we love Jesus so much!

Gratitude and clarity…

Everything we need!

The fear of the Lord.

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom…” (Proverbs 9:10)

God’s love is amazing — and it’s essential that we know how much He loves us.  But we also desperately need the fear of God. Don’t you think Adam and Eve knew God loved them? They walked with Him, intimately interacted with Him, and lived in a glorious paradise He made for them.  But that didn’t stop them from choosing another way when it was presented to them by the enemy. And that’s because they did not have the fear of God. If they had, I believe things would have turned out differently.

The fear of the Lord is the unshakable knowledge that outside of God’s will, there is nothing but death, darkness and despair.  Even Jesus had the fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:3).  And if He “delighted” in it, perhaps we should too.

True kindness…

It is not kindness to comfort and affirm someone in a sinful, self-destructive (self-destructive from an eternal point of view) lifestyle or behavior. We will be held accountable for such things.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isaiah 5:20)

In the world but not of the world…

 

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1 John 2:15-17)

Typically the word “world” here (cosmos) is understood, in this context, to be the world system as organized by fallen men.  And we are called to love the people in the system, but to reject the system itself, and to not lust after what it has to offer — to be “IN the world, bot not OF the world.”

The exclusivity and passion of HOLINESS…

“Forsaking all other lovers, so long as you both shall live…”

A lot of people equate HOLINESS with purity. And I think purity is marvelous and necessary — but it seems to me that purity, as wonderful as it is, is merely a beautiful symptom of what true holiness really is: radical, exclusive PASSION for Jesus.

I know that there are times when we just have to be militant and war against our fleshly appetites and not let them win, because we know it is the right thing to do. But the BEST times are when we are so in love with Him that other “lovers” just aren’t an option.

ARE YOU A SEX TRAFFICKER?!

Dude — okay…so you go to church on Sunday, maybe even go to a small home group during the week.  And when the topic of sex trafficking comes up in conversations, just like everyone else, you say that it’s a bad thing and needs to be stopped. Maybe you even went to a fundraiser to raise money to combat sex trafficking.

But then you find yourself online looking at pictures of nekkid ladies, or renting movies with graphic sex scenes. Besides supporting an evil system, did it ever occur to you that you are pimping and sex-trafficking your own soul? Yup – by giving your eyes to these things, you are forcing your soul to be violated, over and over again, by this ungodly vileness. And the more you do it, the more of a toll it takes spiritually

Maybe it’s time you got out of the sex-trafficking business…

A game you cannot win.

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord ,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)

So…you’re smoking weed and partying like the world on Saturday — and raising “holy hands” and zealously shouting the name of Jesus on Sunday (or at house church). But holiness is not a club you join, it is a life you live.

Playing this double-lifestyle game is dangerous to a person’s eternal health. If we really want to change, He is waiting for us with open arms. But if we continue to play games with the Living God, we will one day learn that this is a game we cannot win.