Relational Bridges

  GOD DWELLING IN AND AMONG US In the Old Testament we are shown the infinitesimal details of how God wanted the Tabernacle to be built. In Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers we are shown overwhelming details on the construction and utilization of the Tabernacle.  That Tabernacle was a tangible sign to God's people that He was going to dwell with them. He had chosen them to live in His Presence, not as some religious addendum to life, but as the very ground as essence of life itself. That's what it meant to be God's own people. The Tabernacle was ordered and precise, exact and beautiful, holy because His Presence with them was the very thing that made them holy, set apart to know and be filled with the Life of God. He would make them holy so that in all the detail and liturgical precision of the worship He was calling them into, they would know that their life was grounded ONLY in Who God is. Life could only be what God intended for us to know. The Tabernacle was a tangible mean...

FROM START TO FINISH Philippians 1:6 "And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." This is an eternal truth: salvation is of the LORD. There is an Old Testament verse that states, " Seeing eyes and hearing ears are from the Lord. " ( Proverbs 20:12) God is the one who make the spiritually deaf to hear His voice, to understand His Word. He causes the spiritually blind to see the desperate condition of the human heart and its deadness apart from the intervention of God. He alone saves, rescues, redeems, restores and renews, giving eternal Life where there was only spiritual death at work in a person's life. This work in us is possible only because God has finished the work of redemption through the Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. All of salvation, from the moment a person receives new life being born again by the Holy Spirit, till that salvation is brought ...

FORGIVENESS Forgiveness flows from humility. Humility is a gift from God when He causes us to see just how desperate our own hearts were before God and how desperately we need a Savior both now and always. If Jesus Christ has forgiven you by His grace through the gift of faith: to trust in all He is, all He has done, and all He is doing, you are called to forgive as HE has forgiven you. He paid the full price for your sin and rebellion long before you were born. He purchased forgiveness for you by His death on a Roman cross over 2,000 years ago.  Grace humbles you so that you may forgive and release those who have sinned against you before they even admitted it. Jesus Christ forgave those gathered around His cross mocking and cursing Him. They didn't admit, let alone confess the heinous nature of their sin before He forgave them. Being forgiven by God, there can exist no condemnation for you. The Lord will never rub your nose in your "stuff" for He's taken it away. Yo...