Relational Bridges

 THERE IS A WAR Isaiah 54:17 “ No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you . This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and this is their vindication from me," declares the Lord. ” It is important to hear this Word from the Lord God clearly. He is not saying that there will be no weapon forged against you, nor that its purpose is not that of trying to destroy you. Paul makes it perfectly clear in Ephesians 6:1-30 that we are involved in an ongoing spiritual war against principalities, powers, rulers of spiritual wickedness in the high places. Satan and his minions are the foe of everyone who belongs to Jesus Christ, those who are committed to following Him as Lord and Savior. God has given us “armor” for this fight. That Armor is the Person and Presence of Jesus Christ living out His Life and Salvation in and through us in the Power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Jesus is the truth, He is our righteousness, He is our sa...

  FORGIVENESS 1 John 2:2 “He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world.” On a Roman cross over 200 years ago, Jesus Christ bore the sin of the whole human race, once for all time. Sin was nailed to the cross in Jesus’ body. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That means that He bore all my sin, all my innumerable sins, all my brokenness, all my rebellion, all my indifference, every evil and putrid thought or act, all my idolatry, all my unfaithfulness, everything that could be defined by Him as sin. Not only that, He bore my sorrows, all my weakness, all my grief, all my unbelief, all my failures, He bore all the evil and abuse that would ever done to me, all malignant acts against me that try to destroy me, all slander, all lies spoken against me, all the pain due to betrayal and abandonment, all my sadness over every loss, all fear from the past, in the present or of the future, all anger and wron...

  As the New Year begins...think on this. Self-righteousness is a word used to describe an ethical, moral and spiritual self-deception. God has made it perfectly clear that there is no one righteous as God define righteousness. No one comes to human perfection by human effort. Since He declares that ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, there is no one who can honestly vaunt themselves pridefully thinking they are better than anyone else. The term “self-righteousness” is, self-contradicting. The concept that one is a moral and ethical person is always based on some kind of comparison between oneself and someone else. You have an internalized “scorecard” by which you evaluate yourself and others and the line for what is acceptable, laudable and “OK” is always drawn behind you. There is an internal mechanism in the human soul that actually verifies there was a Garden of Eden and that there was a “fall” out of that singular life-giving relationship with God, our Crea...

 PERSPECTIVE I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the will of God and how He wants to make that clear to us in the everydayness we walk in. One thing's for sure, I can actually know what His will only because He reveals it and that "will" can only be lived out in and through the work and power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus made it clear that apart from Him we can do nothing.  The follower of Jesus Christ is not apart from Him because He lives His very life within us. In fact, for the Christian, Jesus Christ IS Life within us. The important thing to ground your life in, is that the will of God is only done by the Power of God, or it's not done at all. When your life is submitted to the Lord Jesus, He gets you "on track"...kind of like a railroad car. You don't determine the track's direction. He is the Engineer, and He asks us to yield it all to Him and trust with the whole of life and its direction. If you have ever looked down a railroad tr...