Commands of God

Throughout the bible God has many different commands for different people.  As we are reading and listening to God, we should pay attention to the commands that are present in the bible.  Whether it be a command that’s one of the 10 commandments, or even a command that talks about being a husband, or whatever the command may be we should pay attention to it.

 

The commands should be payed attention to because those commands really do mean a lot and they should be followed.  Why should they be followed? You may be asking.

 

To answer that there are many different stories in the bible that show what happened to people if they didn’t obey the commands of God.  In the bible, most people that disobeyed God died either on the spot or shortly there after. 

 

People dieing quickly is not what happens today because if that were the case people would be dieing randomly as we drive to work every day.  What does happen though is God ends up essentially leaving us and letting different things happen to us so that we can learn from our experiences and come back to him. 

 

We don’t always listen to his warnings and we continue to do what we want to do, and we end up in a place that we never meant to end up in because we have ignored God’s commands and have did not come back to him.

 

What I’m trying to say is that every one of Gods commands are important and should be obeyed even if it seems trivial and like it wont affect you in the end.  It will affect you in ways that you would not expect it to.

Promises of God

God makes a lot of different promises to all of us during out lives.  Those promises are made for a reason.  For each person that reason is different and we all know what that reason is for each of us.

 

The promises that God makes have many different reasons, but in the end the reason all comes back to bringing him glory, but that’s not what this post is about.  It is about listening and believing those promises that God makes to us.

 

When God makes a promise we should listen to him, and believe him. We should listen and believe him because when God speaks he does not speak to just hear himself listen, but he speaks so that we can hear him speak and hear everything that he has to say to us.

Those promises that God makes to us are not just full of false hope, unless we do not follow him and seek him with out hearts.  God makes promises because he loves us and wants us to know that he is there with us no matter what the situation. 

 

Some of God promises may seen to us like they are next to impossible to do because to us as humans it is impossible.  An example of this is a lot of the different wars that happened in the bible.  Most of the time the people of God were outnumbered by at-least double what they had.   In reality this situation the people with more would win, but that is not what happened.

 

When the people of God sought him and believed all of the promises that had been given to them, God showed himself and helped them to do the impossible and win the fight.

 

We need to do that same thing as them.  When God gives us a promise we need to listen to that promise and constantly be seeking God because he is there and he is wanting to help us with the impossible, and even the small things that we think we can do ourselves. 

 

God entrusts us to seek him in the small things and then he gives us bigger things because he knows that we can handle it and will seek him even in the things that we think we can handle ourselves, because he has seen that he can trust us with the small things that he has given us.

 

So what we need to do is listen to the promises God gives us and we need to believe them. Along with listening and believing we need to seek God in everything, no matter the size and difficulty.

 

God is amazing and loves all of us and wants us to follow him.

God is not a selfish God

While having my devotional today, my thought was completely changed about God.

 

My thought was changed because I had always heard of God as a selfish God only thinking about his glory being spread throughout the world.  This is not totally true.

 

Yes God does care about his glory being spread throughout the earth, but he also cares about us and the fun that we have.  God delights when he looks at us and sees us having fun.

 

The type of fun that he delights seeing is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.

 

All of these things point toward good right fun, not some fun that will hurt someone or cause someone to do something that is not right and should not be done.

 

If we would just spend time with God daily and rest in his presence, we would be able to have the type of fun that God wants us to have not just some stupid fun that God looks at and is not delighted in.

 

God is so wonderful and he cares about all of us in a way that we could never imagine because he does delight when he sees us having fun and when he gets to spend time with us.  He is not all selfish like we often think.

Fragility from God

I know some people who have had something going on all of their life that has affected them physically and stopped them from doing a lot of things that they would like to do.  These people I know would really like for God to reach down and heal them, but God hasn’t for a reason.

 

Today as I was reading my devotional it gave me a whole new outlook on situations like the one described above where you know God can do something but hes not and hasn’t for your whole life.

 

Today what I learned is that God made some people to be really strong and energetic, but others he made them to be fragile and weak.

 

This may sound like a really horrible thing for someone to do, but it really isn’t.

 

This is not a horrible thing to do because in our weakness God is made strong.  Also in our weakness we are able to grow closer to Christ. 

 

He wants us to come to him and rest in his arms in our weakness.  God uses those that he has made to be weak to teach those of us that are strong to come to him in our times of weakness because that is when his power is made strong. 

 

Another thing about those that God has made weak is that they are given an opportunity to blossom in God presence.  That is such an amazing thing because yes we can all blossom in God presence, but those that he has made weak are given that extra opportunity.

 

I am sure there are many other reasons that God has made people to be weak, but this is what I know for sure.  God made those to be weak for a really good reason and being weak is not a bad thing to be because it can be used as a teaching tool to the strong.

Righteousness as a gift

God came to this world and died for our sins.  When he did this he did not die for no reason.  His reason was to cleanse us and give us a gift that we could never imagine having.

 

This gift that Jesus died to give us is righteousness.  When Jesus died he gave all of us that accept him robes of righteousness.  These robes are a really high position that God himself has given us, but we as humans don’t see it as something we deserve.

 

In seeing it as something we dont deserve, we try and get rid of them in someway because we dont want to have something we dont deserve.

 

Something we do not see as humans is that we do deserve these robes.  We deserve these robes because God gave them to us as gift and we are made to be the righteousness of God.  The robes are not for us, but to show of God righteousness.

 

When we sin and try and throw off the robes, God looks at us and wants us to understand that the robes are not what needs to come off, but the sinful nature and old ways is what we need to cast off.

 

When we realize that our old self and sinful nature is what we need to cast off, we will realize that this gift that has been given to us is a huge honor and we should accept it as that and hold ourselves to the standard of that position.

Mastery and Understanding and Peace

Look around at your life, what are you and others that you know constantly doing?

 

The answer to that question is always trying to understand or master a problem that you have in your life.

 

As we go through our lives more and more things come at us pushing for our attention to try and understand it and master it so we can move on to the next problem that gets thrown at us.

 

Instead of going through life mastering problems, there is something we should really be looking at instead.

 

What we should be looking at is the peace of God.  The peace of God is not something that we have to master or understand.  We dont have to understand it because he told us to “trust in him, not in our own understanding” Proverbs 3:5

 

What that is saying is we need to look to God for peace in our lives, instead of jumping from problem to problem trying to master and understand everything just to get a break.

 

God peace is always with us.  His peace comes with his presence.  We do not have to travel around in a really complicated maze of traps to try and get to his peace.  We already have it.

 

God is with us at all times and that means is peace is with us at all times.  We just need to put down everything that we are doing that is complicating our lives and look at him and listen to him and relax in his peace that he gives us.

 

God is wonderful and he wants us to be peaceful and relaxed in him.  dont be like Solomon and end up running from God peace because you cant seem to find it or understand it.  You already have it and it does not require any understanding at all.  It is there to be enjoyed by all.

Listen for the message in every little thing

God speaks to us in many different ways.  How he speaks to you may be the same or different from the next person that you meet. 

 

Besides being different though, there are many similarities in how God decides to speak to us.  The biggest way that he speaks to all of similarly is the fact that he speaks to us in all of the small things every day.

 

As we go through our day, we need to not just drudge through it and just “make it through the day”, but we need to look and listen for the messages that God has for us in the small things in our life.

 

An example of the small things that God can use to speak to us is through nature while we are sitting there looking at nature relaxing during out lunch break.  God has a message of some kind for us even if it is just his love for us.  His love for us is a message because he wants us to remember and be reminded every day that he loves us and he will do everything he can to take care of us.

 

Another thing that God can speak to us through is music.  We can be sitting there listening to music and God can have a small message for us in that. 

 

So instead of just fighting through the day, look and listen for those small things that God has for us because without his small messages our days will be long, boring, and not really worth going through.

 

As we listen and look for those small things, God will not just give us the small messages that he has for us, but he will start to give us more and more as we grow.  He does this because he has a plan for us and that plan includes us growing to become like him and those messages that he gives us take us on the path that he has made for us.

Yours and yours alone

Take My Life Lyrics – Chris Tomlin

“Take my life and let it be
consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
Take my moments and my days,
let them flow in ceaseless praise.
Take my hands and let them move
at the impulse of Thy love.
Take my feet and let them be
swift and beautiful for Thee.

Take my voice and let me sing
always, only for my King.
Take my lips and let them be
filled with messages from Thee.
Take my silver and my gold
not a mite would I withhold.
Take my intellect and use
every power as You choose.

::Chorus::
Here am I, all of me.
Take my life, it’s all for Thee.

Take my will and make it Thine
it shall be no longer mine.
Take my heart it is Thine own
it shall be Thy royal throne.
Take my love, my Lord I pour
at Your feet its treasure store
Take myself and I will be
ever, only, all for Thee.
Take myself and I will be
ever, only, all for Thee.

Here am I, all of me.
Take my life, it’s all for Thee.
x3

(Take my life, Lord take my life. Take all of me)

Here am I, all of me.
Take my life, it’s all for Thee.”

 

 

This song is the story of my life right now, I know that God has big plans for me.  what those plans are I am still not totally sure.  I know that he is working in my life and tonight I want to make this song my life and be all of Gods and let him use me as he sees fit.

 

I am not my own, he owns me and I want to be his and do his will, not my own.  I want to have the relationship with him that he deserves to have with me.  I want to love those that he puts into my life.  the biggest one of those is my wife.  She deserves to be loved in a way that only God can love and I want to love her in that way with the help of God.

 

I wish I knew why things happened the way that they did, but I know that it happens the way God wants it to happen. 

 

Tonight I pray that God helps me to do his will and to do what needs to be done.

 

I also pray that God helps me to learn and pursue the things that he wants me to pursue.

Faith like a child

During our lives we all have times that it seems like our faith is going down hill or just non existent, and those times are really hard to get through some times.

 

When we arrive at those times there is one thing that we all need to remember and it is something that Christ has told us himself, and that is to have faith like a child.

Mark 10:14-15 & Luke 18:16-17  “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.  I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it.”

 

What does this mean?  Well when we are children and we played with out parents whether it is your mom or your dad, you trust them and have faith that whatever you ask of them, no matter how impossible it seems.  The most common one that I hear is “Daddy catch me”.

 

This saying is normally said not right next to the dad, but all the way across the house when it is next to impossible for the father to get there and catch the kid.  Yes, the father does get there and catch the kid a good portion of the time, but that is irrelevant.

 

What really matters is the concept of having faith like a child.

 

So why have faith like a child?  To answer this question lets look at a child and the faith they have in their parents.  As said before a child will tell/ask their father to catch them even if he is not anywhere near the child.  When this happens the father has to work to get there so that the child’s faith is not thrown out the window.

 

When the father gets there the child’s faith is strengthened all the more because the father did not let the child down.  In the same way our father in heaven is like out worldly father except that no matter what we ask he can achieve it.

 

The lesson to be learned here is this.  Have faith like a child and even when it seems like the task is impossible to us humans, it is never impossible for God because he can do anything.  So have the faith in God and ask him, but that is not the end of out part.

 

After we ask, there is one more thing that we need to do.  That one thing is to believe that it will happen.  We can ask anything we want, but if we don’t believe in God and that he will do those things it will be harder to actually see when God does things.

 

When believing, just remember two things.  Those are that our timing and God’s timing are two totally different things and stuff will happen on his timing not ours.  Second that when we believe we do not need to do anything else even if it seems like there should be something else happening.

 

All we are to do is ask and believe, nothing else.

Reminder Rainbows

In Genesis after the flood, God promises to Noah that he will never destroy the earth again with a flood (Genesis 9:12-17 “And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.””).

 

His symbol of this is a rainbow as we can see in the verses.  Today I was reminded of these verse when we had rain, and after it was over a really bright and vivid rainbow appeared in the sky.

 

Right before the rain I have having some difficulties, but when i saw the rainbow I instantly thought of Gods promise to Noah.  Apart from the promise, i feel that rainbows have more meaning and promises to them than just that God wont destroy the earth by flood again.

 

I feel that they are a constant promise to us that he will always be with us no matter what we are going through, and he is promising that even in the hardest of times when it seems like there is nothing good about the situation he is there willing to give us the strength, joy, peace, and happiness that he has for us.  But to get those things we have to ask and have the willingness to ask not just ask because we have to.

 

Reminder Rainbow

God is awesome and he is always there for us and will comfort us in our times of need.  Just learn to ask, and when you see a rainbow remember God’s promise and thank him for all that he has done because he is one worth praising for simple things that remind us of who he is and what he has done.