Thoughts to Ponder in Your Walk with the Lord
READ, LINGER, PROCESS…
Life is a bummer of a blessing. Life is a repeat of wrong choices, bad and good decisions. With bad decisions there is a price to be paid; with good decisions, a reward is made.
We have given our full confidence to Christ. We have believed His Word regarding our sin. We have believed God that He sent His Son. The Holy Spirit has convicted us about our sin. The Holy Spirit has convinced us by God’s Word to trust in Christ Jesus Our Lord.
Proverbs 1:28-31; New American Standard Bible 1995 (below). Read it. Meditate upon it:
Proverbs 1:28-31
28 “Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;
They will seek me diligently but they will not find me,
29 Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the Lord.
30 “They would not accept my counsel,
They spurned all my reproof.
31 “So they shall eat of the fruit of their own way
And be satiated with their own devices.”
It is necessary as we learn, meditate, and study God’s Word that as we increase in knowledge, we increase in humility and decrease in pride and arrogance.
The frustrations of life in the post-fall world are suffered under the curse of judgment (Genesis 3), but the answer is our restoration, as in Romans 8:18-22. Christ purchased our restoration to God while we were yet dead in trespasses and sin.
We live, since the fall outside of Eden, but at the “day of ultimate salvation” we will stand at the guarded entrance to Paradise, the Garden of God, and Christ will open the gate for all believers to come in. I love you, Lord. Thank you for the cross.
The Judgment Day will resolve all the ambiguities of history since the fall—just as Christ paid for the sins which resulted from the fall. Judgment and restoration coming soon to the theater of life!
People come to church for a fix—a one-shot inspiration, a religious experience, the emotional music—and then they’re gone… off to do their own thing, leaving Jesus in the church until next time.
God is Master of understatements so that He can effectively communicate His Word to us (Ephesians 3:18-19).
God’s every cause for loving sinful mankind is never based on mankind, it is based from who He is—God is love. Not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10). God literally causes the believer, the child of God, to become part of Himself. We are partakers of the divine nature and divine love (2 Peter 1:4; 1 John 3:1-2; Ephesians 2:2 and 5:6). Praise the God of Love for His great love for us (John 3:15-18; Romans 5:8). Nothing can separate the believer from God, not even the believer!
Sic transit gloria mundi—Thus passes away the glory of the world (Matthew 24:35).
Advertising is the art of deceptively convincing you to spend your money, legally.
We believers are separated from the world by truth in truth.
It is inside each of us—where the light meets the dark, where light fights the dark—where spiritual warfare is fought for control of the soul. The Word metabolized in our soul is used by the Holy Spirit to make sense of right and wrong, peace and anger, love and hate, giving and taking in light or in darkness. The battle is the Lord’s.
Sin is our enemy, but we make it our friend.
The Bible is God’s gift of incalculable worth; it illuminates our dark lives; it causes us to see through the midst of self-deceit. Losing ourselves in the light of God’s Word is the ultimate intimate journey. It takes us from the selfishness of self into the chambers of charity and selflessness. We need each other as much as we need food and water—we need God’s Word even more. Without the Bible, the world is lost in nothing, blinded by darkness. Bible doctrine is more than a school of charity, it is the university of life that teaches us to put others before self, which is more important because it is self-sustaining. The Bible reveals unexpected capacities in us, capacities that take us further than we sometimes care to go, to a place of unexpected deliverance into the presence of truth and a life in Christ.
All quotes are by C. S. Craig unless otherwise indicated.