I am a Christian, a retired teacher, a mother and a grandmother. I love to read and I love the Lord Jesus Christ! Unless otherwise specified ,all visual illustrations are from the YOU VERSION APP of the Bible.
Notice the promise that He WILL save us. No question! No doubts! God said it and He will do it. The same God who created us will also save us in the end to be with Him forever. That’s quite a promise, isn’t it?
Whatever we are waiting for from the Lord, He continues to be gracious and our strength. This is a prayer we can pray daily. Amen and Amen.
I know you have heard it, that lie from the pits of hell that Heaven is not hard to get into. You just have to do good, be good and God, because He is good, will take you to Heaven when you die. I have heard this falsehood from friends and family. “What kind of God would send someone to hell?” The reply is that God does not send anyone to hell; they choose to go there because they did not choose to believe in the only way to salvation that God provides, His Son Jesus. Don’t be deceived. God is a God of love and mercy, but He is also the great “I Am,” the God of Justice. He wants to set things right in the world that have been wrong for so long and the only way He can do that is to banish sin. There will be no sin in Heaven and no one can be good enough to earn their way there. No confessions to a priest or last rites will guarantee your way through the narrow gate. Only Jesus! It seems so simple, yet so many are perishing because they choose to keep living in sin and ignorance rather than accept truth and life. Since none of us knows when we will die, we need to live like it may be the next moment or as though Jesus is coming back imminently. God provided a way for us, narrow though it may be. We have to find our way back to Jesus and then stay on that pathway for the rest of our lives. God’s desire is to save all, that no one would spend eternity in hell, but He is a God of justice and He will allow us to go there if that is what we choose. Choose and live wisely…the narrow way leads to life!
Many decades ago, my grandmother collected green stamps in a little booklet. I enjoyed helping her lick the stamps and place them in the booklet in the correct spots so that when she had enough booklets she could go to the green stamp store and use them to redeem something she was saving for. I don’t remember everything she got, but I do recall the ice cream maker, with the nice sturdy crank, that would make yummy goodness after a few hours of cranking, adding salt and ice. Those little booklets weren’t worth anything until Nanny took them to the store to exchange them for a prize.
Jesus is my redeemer. I didn’t have to save up stamps or go to a special place. He just gave His life for me because He knew I needed to be redeemed, to be exchanged for a better version of me, one that is all cleaned up and ready to stand before the Father in His righteousness. No stamps, nothing I had to do except confess, repent and live for Him. In exchange, I get to spend eternity with Him. It amazes me that Job, one of the men most likely to turn from God turned to Him and recognized this truth, long before Jesus came as a baby in Bethlehem. Job knew with whom his salvation lay, in spite of all he had to go through. I know with whom my salvation lies, and I am thankful for Jesus and His sacrifice every day.
My whole thinking about this verse has changed, I think, because I have had a heart change. When I read this verse previously, I was exultant, much as one would be when a fierce enemy is defeated. Now, I read the verse and I am saddened to think that so many will perish in their sins, lost and without hope for all eternity. Instead of praying for Jesus to return quickly, I am praying for Him to tarry so that others may be saved.
Jesus did not want sinful men to perish. Instead, He desired that we become workers in the harvest fields, telling the lost about the way to be saved.
I like the way this verse is written in The Message because it is forthright and easy to understand. We don’t have to have a lot of knowledge in order to share about Jesus. We just need to keep what we say simple…who Jesus is (the only Son of God) and what He did (died for our sins). We can use various scriptures (like the “Roman Road”) or even our own testimony. The important thing is that we share. Refer back to the first Scripture. If we don’t share, then they die in their wickedness and are lost forever. Sobering thought, isn’t it? It is an awesome responsibility that the Lord left us, but He also gave us a Helper, His Holy Spirit, to guide our words and our steps towards the people who need Him in their hearts. We need to be obedient because I truly believe that the time is shorter than it has ever been before. I am no longer willing to sit back and gleefully look forward to God’s judgment on sinful men. I must, you must, we all must, hear the call of the Lord and rescue them, as much as it is in us to do so. We have to share the Gospel in the hope that some will repent and be saved.
Notice what comes after the action verbs. Trust in your unfailing love. Rejoice in your salvation. Sing the Lord’s praise. Why do we trust, rejoice and sing? Because the Lord has been good to us. Every day that we live is a gift. Every breath that we take is from Him. Instead of bemoaning circumstances that we cannot change, let’s choose to trust, rejoice and sing!
What does it mean to be redeemed? I am old enough to remember when my grandmother and mother saved S & H green stamps. They got them from the grocery story after each purchase and had little booklets that they kept them in. When they had enough little booklets for what they were saving for, they would go to the S & H redemption center and turn them in for an item on their wish list, like a new toaster. I used to enjoy sticking those little stamps in the books for my Nanny. They didn’t taste good but I felt like a was contributing to a new thing that would appear in the household soon. You gave the stamps and you got a prize, something worth much more than a booklet of stamps.
Jesus says that He has redeemed us. What does that mean? Like the book of stamps, Jesus has patiently put us together into something that has value and can be traded for something of greater value. What is the value? Eternal life with God! What was traded? Jesus’s own life at the cross. We did not do anything to earn salvation. We are saved by His grace and mercy alone.
There are about twelve different definitions for redeemed in the Merriam Webster online dictionary. The ones that have to do with our redemption are: freed from the consequences of sin, to release from blame or debt and to buy back. We have reaped the benefits of Jesus freeing us from eternal separation from God because He has released us from our debt to sin and has purchased us back for God with His own shed blood. Think about that for a moment. Jesus did it all for each of us because of His great love for us!
This verse is a beautiful word picture of what Jesus has done for us. But notice that we have a part to play, too. We have to choose to return to Him, confessing that He has done exactly what He said and that He is our Lord and Savior. There is absolutely nothing that we can do to be in right standing before God unless we have Jesus as our intermediary. He paid the full price for each of us and in His sacrificial death, He swept away all of our sins. Believe, confess, repent and live for Him. The steps to salvation are not hard but they do require reflection, an honest appraisal of life as we have been living and a desire to turn onto a new path with the Lord.
My prayer for each of you today is a renewed fervor to serve the Lord who redeemed you and to make each day count for Him.
A sweet online friend pointed out that I did not elaborate in my post yesterday about how to be saved. Thus, that is the theme of today’s post because I certainly want anyone who reads my blog and who needs salvation to come to the Lord in repentance and to be saved.
This is an astonishing promise! It doesn’t say that you have to walk right, talk right or be right. God makes you right with Him through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Part of our message in church yesterday was that we cannot be good enough to save ourselves from eternity in hell. Before I became a Bible-believing, Jesus-confessing Christian, I thought that I was a pretty good person. I didn’t do too many bad things and I generally felt bad and apologized quickly when I did offend someone. I didn’t kill or steal or destroy things, so I thought I was okay. Then, one night when I was alone and reading the Book of John, I was convicted that I am a sinner, saved by grace and that God had to send His Son into the world for die because of my sins. Well, really the whole world’s sins, but He died for me! I discovered almost fifty years ago that I would never be good enough to have a relationship with God without Jesus as my Intercessor.
No matter how much we think that we are doing right, even when we are doing things that we think are for God, we are not good enough to have a relationship with Him without Jesus forming the bridge between us. God established His plan of salvation from the beginning of the world. I am not wise enough to understand how God knew from creation that he would need to send His Son to save us all from our sins, but Genesis 3:15 is called the proto-evangelical verse because in it God says, speaking to the serpent in the garden: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.” (MEV) On the day of Jesus’s crucifixion, part of this Scripture came to pass, when Jesus was nailed to the cross. Satan thought he had finally won the war, but Jesus rose again and showed to Satan and all of mankind that the ultimate victory is His. God knew we need a Savior, yet so many are still lost in their sins, thinking that they are good enough and they just want to live their own lives without any “interference” from God. God doesn’t want to interfere in your life, my friends. He wants to bless it beyond what you can ever imagine. Furthermore, He wants to spend eternity with you. But, as the old saying goes, the ball is in your court now. You have to choose to believe that you are not good enough and that you need a Savior to be saved from your sin. Your eternal destiny depends on your own choice, so choose wisely!
God So Loved by We The Kingdom
Do you remember as a child trying to get your parents’ attention when you thought you were doing some great noteworthy feat? I’m not sure I recall my own childhood, but I do remember my children crying out impatiently, “Look at me, mommy! Look what I can do!” With my attention divided between three children, I could not always look on command and I’m sure sometimes I disappointed one of them during their daring attempts to defy gravity.
The times have not changed, nor have the children’s need for attention. Nowadays, though, it is the grandchildren clamoring for my time. “Look, Nanna! Look at me!” They do cartwheels, ride bikes, jump off sofas and build towers, all with my attention riveted on them for as long as I can manage before another child’s cry diverts me.
As children of the Living God, we also clamor for attention. Speaking personally, I know that I am constantly crying out to our Father to look at me and notice what I am doing. Or, conversely, I petulantly accuse Him of not paying attention and allowing bad things to come along in my life and disrupt its flow. Like a demanding child, I want all of God’s attention all of the time. Today’s Scripture verse addresses this conundrum.
God is omnipresent, everywhere at once, watching everyone. I am struck with awe that the Creator of the Universe watches the wicked and the good. So, I pondered that thought this morning. Why would God want to watch the wicked? Because, my friends, He created them, too. They may be making wrong choices, but He loves them and desires them to straighten up and go on the right path, to choose Jesus as their Savior and to enter into a relationship with Him. We don’t need to cry out to God to watch what we are doing because He is always watching. He sees me when I lose my temper and yell at my husband for something thoughtless I think he has done. He sees me when I grumble and complain about small things that have no real importance and won’t matter later. He even sees me when I quickly send up a prayer for His help and then choose to do my own thing. Because He is always watching, God is always aware of what is going on in my life. There is no “Hide and Seek” game with our Lord. We can’t hide from Him one minute and then demand that He pay attention to us and answer our prayers the next. It boggles my mind that God can watch the entire Universe, with all of its diverse people making all kinds of choices every second, and still have time to listen to prayers, calm fears and heal. God is always watching, always waiting for when we truly need Him and in reverence call on Him to come to our aid.
I’m so thankful that God is always watching and even more so that He watches over the wicked, too. For I was once a sinner and now I am saved by His grace. I pray that many more over whom He is watching will seek Him and His free gift of salvation before it is too late for them.
The Ultimate Appeal to Unbelievers
— Read on ettingerwriting.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/the-ultimate-appeal-to-unbelievers/
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