Relational Bridges

PRAYER The purpose of prayer is not to get God to give me what I think I want/need, but to get to know the God to Whom my prayers and petitions are directed. Knowing Him, learning to keep my eyes fixed on Him, is the motivating power leading me to seek Him, to surrender to Him. For He, alone, is worthy of my praise, my obedience, and my absolute trust.

WHERE IS MY SECURITY FOUND? We feel most secure when we know what is going on around us and that in knowing, we have some degree of feeling like we are in control. Being "in control" can be synonymous with feeling secure. But then, how "in control" are we actually? I believe that a great part of human anxiety and insecurity come from the tidal wave of information about what is going on worldwide. I think that we were never wired to know EVERYTHING going on behind the closed doors of nations and peoples. We cannot fix the brokenness and madness around us. Most things being reported by news agencies are things traumatic, chaotic, evil and sensational. That's what sells newspapers and fuels viewer statistics from news outlets. The vast majority of "news" postings serve to emphasis how little control we actually have over life-events. We are deceived into thinking IF I know about stuff, I then have greater control over the terrifying "stuff." My ...

 WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR? Am I seeking evidence of God's Kingdom or am I recognizing that, regardless of what I can see or feel, God's absolute sovereign control is eternal, and nothing can alter it. The fact is, God has been there all along, but I could not see His Kingdom at work until I received His very nature for myself. Then life begins to be transformed. Life transformed, sanctification is the theological term, is not my idea of what I want God to do for me. Sanctification is God's idea of what He wants to do in me.

 WHERE GOD SAVES US Psalm 91:15, God declares that He will be with us IN trouble. God saves us IN trouble, not from it. Jesus made it very clear that in this broken and sin infected world, followers of Jesus Christ will have troubles, tribulations, persecutions and the like. We have to face the truth that the world we live in is broken and hates God. So, since we are His, Christian, the troubles aimed at defying Him, the lies spewed out to defame Him, the hatred for the only truth that can save mankind will flow toward us. Jesus told us that this is so and will be our experience as we follow Him and share the Good News of His salvation. The Lord also told us that He has overcome the world. Satan is a defeated foe, and Jesus Christ has given us His authority to dismantle the works of the kingdom of darkness. As His own, we can only lose in our sufferings things that are expendable, for the Kingdom the Holy Spirit lives out in us is eternal and cannot be defeated. The real "you...

 TRUE WEAKNESS There is no one more ineffective than a dead man. There is no hope for change or renovation if it is to be initiated by the dead person. There is no hope of resuscitation. Everyone born of woman, except for the Lord Jesus Christ, is born with the active DNA of sin embedded in them by heritage and inheritance from Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve lost this indwelling Presence when they rebelled against Truth and believed the damning lie that they needed something more than God had already given them to grow into.  Real human life is to have the Life of God uniting us to Himself and filling us, replacing sin and death with forgiveness and the Resurrection Life of Jesus Christ. True humanity is mankind filled with the Life of God, the Power of God for living each day, and an ongoing adventure of being changed, transformed, and conformed to the Image of Jesus. Weakness is not a random circumstance in me, but the real condition of my life in every aspect. Apart from a livi...

 BECAUSE JESUS IN THE MESSIAH Because Jesus is the Messiah, because He is the Word of God made flesh, fully human while remaining Who He has always been, fully God, we can expect (and expectation is not demanding something; it is embracing the truth of who Jesus is) Him to always do what He always does. We can have this expectation that what the Lord did in His ministry on earth as the Incarnate Word He will continue to do because He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He has chosen to do these things, to manifest the power and victory of the Kingdom of God through His present-day disciples, His followers, sons and daughters of God, the Father's own heirs, fellow Christians. Jesus clearly stated that the things He was doing His church would continue to do because He was going to the Father and the Holy Spirit would be poured out on all His people, saturating, anointing, soaking and indelibly dying us with the color of Heaven's glory. He even said that greater things would...

 HIS SHEEP In His Word, God calls us His sheep. Jesus Christ, Eternal God the Son, the Word of God made flesh, is our Good Shepherd. That is true. And so, I can trust Him to lead me through life. The sheep don’t lead, they follow. Trusting that God has both told us and shown us His Good News of rescue and salvation through Jesus Christ alone, we can follow. The real issue of faith is Who is the object of our believing, our faith? The strength of our faith is not in how we feel, but is grounded in the One who has called us by His grace to follow. It is Who we have put our trust in. Only God is worthy of your trust. A disciple is a follower, a learner. Our Savior’s Life and wisdom are infinite. Thus, I am assured that He will teach me, transform me, and lead me by the Holy Spirit. Always being a learner is a great freedom. It’s about Jesus Christ, Who He is and what He has done. I have Life because He is life within me. Adventure is before me! He enables my humility, my obedience, my...

 WHAT A WONDER Meditating in the Word of God today and I am as astounded at this moment as much as I was when Jesus Christ opened my eyes to see what He had done to rescue me from sin, death, hell, and the grave. The Lord saw my conception take place by His ordained plan. He saw my very beginning as well as my last breath here on planet earth. He saw every act of idolatry, rebellion, indifference, lust, hatred, unforgiveness, and everything His holiness revealed as vile and death-deserving. Nothing has ever been hidden from Him. He, faithfully and persistently, pursued me making Himself real to me at the age of seven and again at 19 rescuing me from demonic forces that were encouraging me to commit suicide. He intervened and grabbed ahold of me, bringing me back from the edge of eternal separation from Him. I have deserved nothing that I have received from Him. I can never and will never ever earn His love. I have it as a gift that, once given by His grace, can never be rescinded. ...

 WICKEDNESS The love of wickedness is a cheat. Its pleasure is fleeting because wickedness ends in debauchery, death, and the perversion of humanity. Wickedness mars and seeks to destroy any and all that is good and replace it with the love of lies and the delusion that, once embraced, brings about ultimate destruction. Ezekiel 20:13 "They wouldn't obey my regulations, even though obedience would have given them life."

 BEWARE OF LIES Satan destroys (lies), divides (counterfeits) and discourages (deceives). He is an accuser and a slanderer casting aspersions on the character and nature of God as if God is a liar and is not safe. The devil tries to deceive us, but what he does is to project his own evil intent and malevolent character on God. He wants us to doubt that God can save the least, the lost, the broken and the enslaved. But that is what the power of the Cross accomplished!

 PEACE God, You alone are that unique place of peace that cannot be disturbed!

 RIGHT WITH GOD Trying to become "right with God" indicates a lack of confidence and hope in the atonement of the Cross of Jesus Christ, God alone can make me right with Himself and He does so through the Life, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ and by Him alone. I am to accept and embrace the fact that salvation is of God alone!

 ABLE? We are so arrogant and systemically seduced into thinking that we are capable to or competent to run our own lives. We are not. We were never meant to live in rebellious independence apart from God. In that state, we will never become fully human ever again.

KNOWING THE TRUTH Micah 6:12 "Your citizens are so used to, lying that their tongues no longer tell the truth."

 DEPENDANCE I embrace utter dependence upon God when I realize and accept that I bring nothing to the table. Change takes place because He is Life within me and salvation (life transformation) is done by God alone. The Holy Spirit IS Life within me and it's by His revealing and applying the Word of God to me that I ever know salvation. My circumstances do not determine the will of God. His Word alone does that.

 GOD SAID Hosea 10:12 God said, "Plant the good seed of righteousness and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow the hard ground of your hearts for NOW is the time to seek the Lord that He may come and shower righteousness upon you.":

 WHAT DO YOU WORSHIP? Worshipping the "ways and means" of this present age will sap away any and all energy needed to do what is good and right. It will sap away the strength to do righteousness that comes from God alone. Only in God is my soul at rest. In Him comes my salvation.

  ENCOURAGEMENT Daniel 10:19 "Peace, be encouraged, be strong! " What God declares ALWAYS comes to pass. He gives us Himself. He is out peace and refuge. He alone is our encouragement. He puts "heart" in us. He alone is our strength, our song, and our salvation.

 CHOOSE Choose to stand for something greater than yourself. Jesus alone ius stable, eternal and strong. Be prepared to lose friends who have accommodated their lives with the world system, its values and assumptions. Darkness has never tolerated the Light of God.

 PASSING IT ON The Israelites who had seen the power of God on display in His deliverance were supposed to make clear to those who had never seen His signs and wonders what had happened. They were to articulate and share specifically that God had delivered Israel from slavery and bondage. They were to share, as eyewitnesses who God is and what He had done. It was a command of evangelism. The people of God must NOW pass on what God has done for mankind in Christ Jesus. The Holy Spirit will conform that Word declared with signs and wonders!

 BORN AGAIN We were all born sinners. That is why we MUST be born again!

 NEVER FORGET We MUST remember that salvation is of God from start to finish. He enables us to cooperate with Him, working in us to both will and do His good pleasure: wholeness of life in every aspect of living! Everything God does is worth waiting for.

 DEDIVCATION When we "dedicate" to God the gifts, abilities and talents we have, we forget that all we have had come from God. We can't dedicate to God what is not ours to begin with. All gifts and talents are His gifts alone. We surrender these and all of life to the Holy Spirit so that they become all that God intends them to become.

 FOLLOWING JESUS CHRIST How can we follow Christ Jesus? It is because God has, by the Holy Spirit, given us a new heart and a new spirit that WANT to follow Jesus and God provides the power and life transformation of eternal life to us so that we might trust and obey. And then follow by His grace.

DECEPTION The Israelites were to proclaim what God had done and was still doing in rescuing mankind. BUT they forgot and in forgetting, they were seduced by the pragmatics of the idolatry of the age. That pragmatics focused only on what seemed reasonable to them. There is ongoing satanic delusion that there might be some part of salvation that we are responsible for, Israel...and us...can compromise with things that have NO LIFE in them to give.

 WHAT DOES OUR CULTURE WANT? Make no mistake, culture wants your conformity, not your integrity. Babylon is not just different. It is opposed to all the Gospel sands for. It is in utter rebellion against God, His holiness and His ways. Make no mistake...His ways ALONE will make for Life, Eternal Life.

 MAKE NO MISTAKE The New Life given to us by grace through faith is either lived out in the power of the Holy Spirit, or it is not lived out at all.

 GOD'S INTENT Ezekile 33:11 " As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord , I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways (their rebellion, unbelief, immorality, dishonesty, and self-sufficiency) so they can live. Turn! Turn from your wickedness, O people of Israel! Why should you die?" Why should you die eternally? God has made HIS ONLY WAY for any and all to turn from sin and death and live again, eternally through Jesus Christ!

 SPIRIT OF ADOPTION Romans 8:15 God has given us the Spirit of adoption. By this He has designated us as His heirs by the Holy Spirit.  A Roman citizen, when wanting to designate his heir, would hold a ceremony where he adopted his own flesh and blood. A natural-born son could be disowned. An adopted son could NEVER be disowned. We are utterly secure in the Love of God that cannot ever be undone. We can never be disowned, and it has nothing to do with our own achievements, but solely by the grace of God. We are never subject to being disowned or being subject to indifference. We ARE sons and daughters of God by His own designation. It is not a metaphor!

 FOLLOWING JESUS Following Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life is not due to some kind of religious pragmatics, but is solely due to what God has done for us to enter into.  His Wod must be the ground of our obedience and faith. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  WEAKNESS ACKNOWLEDGED The ancient Roman empire did not count weakness a virtue. It didn't count meekness, humility, kindness, mercy or compassion as virtues either. They worshipped power, might, ruthlessness, greed, lust of all sorts, gluttony, selfishness, and tyranny. St. Paul writing to the church at Rome wanted them to know clearly that Rome's "virtues" were to be given no place to reside in the life of a follower of Jesus Christ. Romans 12:1-2 " And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him.   Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect." Following Jesus Christ as Lord entails the surrender of all we are to ...

 REMEMBER...NEVER FORGET...NO MATTER WHAT Follower of Jesus Christ, when you see nothing and feel nothing that you could use to define God's presence with you...and THAT will happen in this world where we do experience tribulation...recall, remember what God has done for you and in you. Remember, lest you forget that He does not change and what He does cannot be undone by anything in all creation. He Who revealed Himself to you in Jesus Christ and redeemed you is STILL causing His salvation to transform you from the inside out. He is eternally committed to conform you to the image of Jesus Christ, His Eternal Son. He is the same eternally, yesterday, today and forever whether at the age of 7, at 19, at 29, yes, even now and always. From the moment of your conception to your last breath drawn on this earth H is faithful. Then, you will breathe the air of heaven with a new body that neither sin nor death could ever touch or taint you will see face to face the One Who has saved you. T...

 GIVEN BY GOD In Christ Jesus, we have been given wisdom from God, forgiveness from God, new hearts from God, and power from God that we might live in such a way as to fulfill the designed new nature God has given to us. Sadly, our faith can seem to falter when we stop or somehow refuse to put our trust in the reality of God's Presence in us. Like the Apostle Peter, we become distracted by the stormy circumstances surrounding us and even our impatience at not seeing the spiritual progress in what we may have anticipated would BE at this juncture in our lives. Our ancient foe is at the ready to fan our short-sighted discontent into flame. We can act like six-year-olds throwing a tantrum that we are not allowed to drive the family car yet. We will one day, but the present inability of a six-year-old forbids it. Think about it, we are still maturing in the faith God has given us. Even St. Paul told the Philippian church that he had "...not yet arrived or am yet made perfect....