Relational Bridges

  DEVOTE YOURSELF TO PRAYER Colossians 4:2 "Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart." The word "devote" in the Old Testament refers to the whole burnt offering. To devote something was to surrender everything, nothing held back, to be consumed by the Lord. Devoted to prayer entails giving your whole self to prayer in utter surrender of all you are to God in intentional communication, not religious meanderings. It is a seeking of the Lord, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal the Presence of God to you, to enter into the throne room in Jesus' name. This devoted seeking of the Lord in prayer involves communicating ALL the Holy Spirit brings to mind and heart. It is a remembering all He has done for you in Christ Jesus in gratitude, worship and praise. It will contain intercessions for family, friends, and those you know who are still outside the grace of God, lost and without hope in the world. Such devoted prayer will result in you bringi...

 HIS POWER...HIS PROMISE Helping people walk in the Spirit the devotional below is seminal! The devotion below is today from Oswald Chambers. I makes me think of some I have known that have assumed that the Lord doesn’t want them empowered by the Holy Spirit or that He won’t manifest Himself in them because they have reasoned otherwise. Given ministry opportunities to have the Holy Spirit confirm the Word of God with demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power, they rely on how they feel, their experience thus far and not on the reality that the will of God in mission and ministry is either done in the Holy Spirit’s Power or not at all. Our capacity to do what Jesus does has nothing to do with our imagined capacity, but upon the indwelling power of God through is. Now to Him who is able to do far above and beyond what we could ever imagine or think, by His power at work in us now, to Him be glory…   Matthew 25:14-30 Jesus told the parable of the bags of gold as a warning ...

 HE IS RISEN! IT IS FINISHED! After the Israelites had passed through the Red Sea by God opening the way for them to be saved, the whole of Pharoah's army, his horsemen and chariots pursued God's people into the opened way. Once they were all in, the waters flowed back into their place with suddenness and fury. Not one of the enemies survived. All perished in those waters. When Jesus Christ hung on the cross, all that sin contained, the full measure of the rebellion of mankind for all time, all the wickedness that was ever in human hearts were absorbed into the Lamb of God as He died our death, received our just judgement from God for all time, taking all that sin and death contained. In Him, sin and death died once and for all. They were overwhelmed, covered and drowned in the sea of His precious blood, poured out for the sin of the whole world. Not one enemy remained alive, all were stripped of their power to hold us in slavery to sin any longer. All their weapons were confis...

 GOOD FRIDAY'S SACRIFICE The sin of humanity is massive, but finite as we can produce nothing infinite. The wrath of God against sin (and those who still choose to be enslaved by sin thinking it will somehow and someday make life complete) is infinite. Only One who was both infinite as God incarnate and finite in His humanity could, in His human body, with human emotions and all the biological systems of a man could endure that Holy and Perfect wrath. Jesus Christ alone could die that death no one has ever and will never die to pay for the sum total of the sin of the whole historic human race. His was an infinite sacrifice, paid in eternal fullness. That is why as a follower of the Risen Lord Jesus, I plead with you who still cling to the straw and dung of sin, to be reconciled with God. God has done everything necessary for you to delivered from the kingdom of darkness and to be translated into the Kingdom of His dear Son, in Whom you will find redemption; the forgiveness of your ...

  HOLY LIBERATING DEATH God did not "wink" at the sin and rebellion, of humanity. God judged it with the finality He alone could accomplish. He did this in time, in history, through Jesus Christ, God the eternal Son, Incarnate from the Virgin Mary, fully God and fully man. Jesus Christ bore the sin of the whole of humanity for all time. He received in His own self the just and full punishment we all deserved. His death was the death of deaths. No one has ever died as Jesus did. He was and is Life itself.  The only way He could die is to choose to receive into Himself all that death, sin and the grave contained. By His death He has destroyed death, atoned for sin, and through that death and His resurrection, Jesus Christ has opened the door to eternal life for all who will believe. Sin has been dealt with. The Door was opened through the death of Jesus Christ (Who IS the Door to eternal Life) so that whosoever would, might come. We come in recognition and acceptance that we ...

REMEMBER All through the Bible, God calls His people to remember, to pass on to the next generation what He has done and why. It is a recorded fact that after the generation of Joshua died, the people of God forgot what He had done to deliver them from Egyptian bondage. Someone forgot to pass on what God had done and what it meant to be in covenant with Him. Forgetfulness is a human failing. Not passing on the Truth of Who God is and what He has done to redeem humanity is a fatal flaw. Satan does all he can to distract humanity so that it is so busy that there is little time for reflection and remembering. God gave festivals to Israel to cause them to remember what He had done AND who they were because of what He had done. The historical and orthodox church established the Liturgical Year which is purposely set up to remind the followers of Jesus Christ what God has done, how He has done what He has done and why. Christians are who they are in Jesus Christ, God the Son, because of what...

 THE UNITY OF THE TRINITY There is no competition in the Holy Trinity as there is no darkness, no sin, not jealousy. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are One. There is no other Name given among men whereby we must be saved. It is at the Name of Jesus Christ that every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. There is only One eternal source of Power, Salvation, Redemption, Repentance and Faith. That is the Holy Trinity. The Power anointing us in Christ Jesus is not a gift FROM the Holy Spirit. The Power to follow Jesus Christ IS the Holy Spirit. Eternal life has nothing to do with time. It is the Life of the Father and the Son being Life within us by the indwelling Holy Spirit.

 WORRY AND PRIDE Tim Keller said that it takes pride to worry. If we have made a mental or emotional determination about how our lives should run, what should happen and how things will play out and then things do not go as planned, we get upset. We decide what life should look like, trusting our own perspective and understanding, our own pride. We become worried due to the fact that our calculations have not proved to be accurate. Now what!? King Solomon, the world's wisest man stated, "Trust in the LORD with ALL your heart and don't rely or lean on your own understanding. In ALL your ways acknowledge that Him ( that He is the Lord of life, that He is in control and will lead those who believe, trust and rely on Him for all of life's details) and He will direct your path." Humility says, "Well, that's not what I expected, but then I don't see as God sees. I believe He has my life in hand, and He is directing things even if I can't understand them...

HELPLESSLY DEAD...MADE ALIVE BY GOD Romans 5:6 " When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners." Ephesians 2:4-5 " But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!)" It is utter folly to think that human beings can live strong, whole and complete lives without the Presence, Life and Power of God. Unless God, Himself, becomes Life within us, unless He is life within us by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit then real life, full humanity is an impossibility. Spiritually dead people have no more ability to change their condition on their own than a corpse has the capacity to become enlivened by the exertion of its own power. It has no power, no life in it to do anything. Even decomposition is not due to its action. What is dead cannot change its circumstance. Th...

 CONVICTION When the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, He doesn't ask us to make it right. We can never add to what Jesus Christ has already done on the cross to deal with the totality of our sin. The Holy Spirit asks us to accept the truth, turn from sin and turn to the Lord. Then He will make it right. Remember Who our faith depends on from start to finish, that salvation is of the Lord alone. Laying aside every hindering weight and the sin that so easily trips us up (different for everyone), we are to run the race He has given us to run with perseverance, fixing our eyes on Jesus. He is the One upon Whom our faith depends on from start to finish. He will never run out of eyesight any more that a good shepherd would go ahead of the sheep he was leading where they couldn't see to follow. Hebrews 12:1-2 "Surrounded then as we are by a great cloud of witness to the life of faith, let us strip off everything that hinders us, as well as the sin which dogs our feet, and let us r...

 FAMILAR SPIRIT OR THE HHOLY SPIRIT? There is a demonic subtlety that is intent upon binding the people of God to attitudes and behaviors that will not make for life but will convince you that they are essential to your livelihood and sense of self. Scripture calls them "familiar spirits". They are demons. The thing about a "familiar spirit" is that is a demonic force trying to establish a stronghold in one's mind, it lies and tells you in so many non-verbal ways that you need it to be safe and sound. The stronghold in your mind may be, "You must be in control. People will try and control you, even in what you eat! So, you must show them YOU are in control." Anorexia is such a familiar spirit. It speaks in demonic whispers that you are not what you see in the mirror. "You are fat!" As so, given heed and authority, this familiar spirit of control works to kill you, starve you, deny the true nutrition that would bring about physical health and ...

  JUSTICE If there is no God, justice is an empty concept; good and evil are merely constructs with no basis in reality and no practical application since without God, there is no basis for determining one from the other.  When someone says that something is unjust, they must have some practical, existing basis to determine what justice looks like. If that sense of "what it is" is grounded merely in their personal opinion or in something they heard in a college classroom without linking it to some immovable and substantive truth, then, anyone can come up with reasons to say your sense of justice is injustice because of how they feel. It's all emptiness and chasing the wind. BUT...if God Who He has declared He is and has recorded His character and Person by speaking His own Word to be recorded so we are not crawling in the dark looking for answers in ourselves, then there is a "ground" for justice. God is the One Who establishes and defines immutably the existent...

 Forgiveness Just because you have been victimized gives you no right to victimize those you identify as your "oppressors". To believe you can, makes you an oppressor.  Forgive as you have been forgiven by God. Jesus forgave from His cross as He bore the wrath of God against the sin of humanity, not just part, but the whole. Forgiveness is not the response to someone saying, "Sorry." Forgiveness comes from that deep God-given realization, that conviction that causes you to see that your sin was more deadly that their offense and God met you with grace so that you might be an ambassador of grace...forgiveness greater than yourself...the gift of God in Christ Jesus.

CONFIDENCE IN PRAYER We can hardly have confidence in prayer if we aren't convinced that His will for our lives far exceeds anything we could ever ask or conceive of. His will for us far exceeds anything we might "will" for our own lives. Isaiah 49:15 " Can a mother forget the baby at her breast   and have no compassion on the child she has borne?  Though she may forget,  I will not forget you!" God knows us. God will never forget, forsake, or abandon His own. He is the only One worthy of our worship. He alone is worthy to serve and love. People have trouble in prayer and doubt God because they don't get what they prayed for when they determined that what they prayed for should be answered in the way they had decided the "answer" would look like. They say, "If God was good, He would have answered this way at this time." They have made an infinite determination with a finite perspective and blind eyes. They have determined how God should ...