Relational Bridges

 CONFIDENCE Jesus Christ stated clearly, numerous times, that He would be crucified, die and be raised from the dead three days later. It happened just as He said. So, if you are ever tempted to question anything Jesus said, remember His resurrection. His Word is good, reliable and eternally true!

  Isaiah 2:5-6  Come, descendants of Jacob,      let us walk in the light of the  Lord ! 6  For the  Lord  has rejected his people,      the descendants of Jacob, because they have filled their land with practices from the East      and with sorcerers, as the Philistines do.      They have made alliances with pagans. This is a word of warning to the church! Spiritual practices from "the East" are forbidden by God because those "ways" are not grounded in God alone. They are at best syncretic, adding to what God has said and done, as if we just need one more bite of that fruit from Eden so that we need trouble God any more to become fully human. The "ways of the East" rely on human initiative. It is human pride that says, "Yes God is good. But I need more than what He has provided in order to "know myself" and to flourish. There is a demonic "pragmatism" that looks at Eastern reli...

 HOW I CAN KNOW Only the Word made flesh can interpret the Word of God written. He told us that the Holy Spirit would reveal to us what the He is saying and has always been saying through the pages of the Bible. The Holy Spirit reveals Who does the saving of a human heart. It is never human effort or initiative. God alone saves and redeems! Isaiah 1:18 “ Come now, let’s settle this,  says the   Lord .  “Though your sins are like scarlet,  I will make them as white as snow.  Though they are red like crimson,   I will make them as white as wool." Notice, God is the One who saves, redeems, cleanses, and makes a human being whole again. God says, "I will..." not, "Say, can you give me a hand in pulling this salvation thing off?"

  ENDURANCE 2 Chronicles 20:20 "Put your trust in the Lord your God and you will endure." The race of our living days here on earth is a long-distance run, a marathon. Being given a new heart and a new Spirit, we have been given a new Life to be lived. We are to fix our eyes on Jesus as we run. He will never run so far ahead that we can't see His footprints before us, His hand waving us onward. That is why we can run with perseverance the race He has set before us. Yes, He has a purpose for us to live into, reason and meaning are found in Him as we follow Him in the race He has set before us. Be assured that He knows the end from the beginning. Nothing will ever catch Him off guard.  The One who called us out of death into Life has given us the living resurrection power of the Holy Spirit, our strength and anointing to run and not be weary, to walk on and not faint.

 ONE AND DONE Jesus Christ has paid by His substitutionary sacrifice, the just judgement against the rebellion of the human race once, for all time. There was nothing we could do or ever add to what Jesus has done. There was nothing I or anyone else in all of human history could do to pay the debt of our sin. Being spiritually dead, I needed as does every human being, help from outside ourselves and the reality of our spiritual deadness. What is dead can never alter the fact of its deadness. Salvation is of the Lord God alone. Christian, you fight your daily fight of faith, love and an obedient heart FROM VICTORY. You do not fight FOR the victory of the Cross of Christ Jesus. He has already won the victory so that we might believe and receive what we could never earn nor deserve. Christian, you fight FROM victory, not for it!

 IN MINISTRY If you have received a ministry, a call from the Lord to service in His Name, you must come to know and accept as fact that the need is not the same as the call.  The needs placed before you are opportunities to exercise God's call on you.

 GOD'S PROVISION For just a moment, think of as many different animals as you can. So many species of birds, mammals, fish, insects, bugs and slugs. Now step back and see how God, in creating all these creatures, has provided to each and every one the perfect habitat in which they can flourish. They are not all the same. God's creativity is eternally "off the scale", not random, but exquisite!  God created you. The air you breath is calibrated in the only way that makes our being alive possible. That the dirt under our feet could grow every sort of food we might need for nutrition. Gravity is such that if it was off one way or the other even minutely, we would either float off into the atmosphere or have the life crushed out of us. God made us for Life and Life is found nowhere else but in a living intimacy with God. Humanity chose to believe an infernal lie that we didn't need intimacy and life from God in order to flourish. Sin has been rotting the human soul ev...

 PSALM 96:13 God will judge the nations with His truth, not by human opinions. "Before the LORD, for He is coming! He is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with justice, and the nations with His truth."  

 UNCHANGING When someone works to produce a will or other legal document, they do so to provide a record of the past, an assurance of the present and a hope for the future. God committed His promises to us in writing. He has made it perfectly clear that His promises, His covenant can never be nullified because it is eternally legal, signed, sealed, and delivered. God has spoken and His Word to humanity recorded for all to see and hear the Truth. It is unchangeable, secure, consistent, reliable and hope filled for His Word shows us Who He is. It reveals His love for us and His wrath towards anything or anyone that would try and supplant His love in our lives.

 CONFIDENCE IN PRAYER If we have little confidence in God's character and in God's Word, why on earth would we have any confidence in prayer? We pray puny prayers because we have this idea that God's will for us will certainly be more boring in life than our own will. We are deluded when we think that God's will is tighter and so constrained that if we obey, life will become religiously bland, adventure and joy a thing of the past.  God's will for us exceeds anything we could ever imagine. "By His mighty power at work within us, He is able to do exceedingly and abundantly more than we could ever ask or even imagine." Ephesians 4:20 The Holy Spirit brings radical change in the life of a believer. We are meant to resemble the Lord Jesus in both word and deed more and more as we follow Him. As we trust Him, we will obey Him, believing Him. We will find God conforming our wills to His own plan and purpose for us. What would our prayer life be if we knew God a...

 FINDING GOD'S WILL The will of God for your life is not revealed because you have ticked all the boxes and earned that insight from God. Your Heavenly Father WANTS to bless you, WANTS to help you, WANTS you to know His will infinitely more that you have ever desired to know it. He is the Good Shepherd. Sheep follow the Shepherd. The sheep are not in control of the direction the Shepherd will take them. He is the One who is in control, not us. It's utterly relational, this knowing God's will for our lives. Jesus states plainly in John 15:7 that if we remain in Him (He has become Life, itself, within His disciples, His followers) and His Word remains in us (active feeding on the green pastures of His Word, written), our lives will become so transformed that we find our "wanter" transformed by the Holy Spirit's applying the Word of God to every dimension of who we are. Jesus said that this intimacy, this feeding, this following, this trusting and surrendering ev...

 WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE Anyone on the planet with even a semblance of cognitive clarity can tell you that things are not what they should be. There is an "echo" of Eden still vibrating in the human heart, even the darkest and most corrupt of hearts, that longs for something inexplicable, unknown, but longed for. There is a desperation to find our way "home" but being spiritually blind, deaf and dead, we will never find that way by human effort or finite initiative of any sort. Things ARE meant to be different than what we see. Truth is, there is more to see than we have ever seen, and we will only "see" by God, Who gives us eyes to see. Until He opens our hearts to understand that we will never, can never save, rescue, redeem or heal ourselves. We remain blind, estranged from wholeness and true humanity.  That longing, that echo of Eden that tells us there HAS to be more than this, can only be satisfied by surrender and turning from self to the One who cr...

Your strength is NOT needed to receive God's strength. Surrender, humility, and honest acceptance that you need Help outside who you are that is infinite and unchanging and Who alone can save, rescue and redeem who you are.