Obedience Matters
Living a life that pleases God doesn’t come automatically.
Living life so God sees Jesus in us requires something of us: obedience. Accepting Jesus and what he did for us on the cross puts us in God’s good graces (after all, we are saved by His grace), but it doesn’t automatically mean we’re going to live our lives the way God wants us to. God didn’t force you to accept Jesus, and He’s not going to force you to live like Jesus. But He is asking.
More than anything else, God wants us to imitate Jesus in our lives. he wants us to look at each situation we encounter and ask the question, “What would Jesus do? Professor Dallas Willard put it this way: “Live your life the way Jesus would live your life is He had your life to live.” The best way we know to do that is to know what Jesus said and did, and then go out and do it.
Follow God’s example in everything you do, because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love for others, following the example of Christ, who loved you and gave himself as a sacrifice to take away your sins. Ephesians 5:1-2
Daily Diary of Thoughts
I know you can love Him enough to worship and praise Him…anyone can mask that task…but can you love him enough to completely obey Him?
Ananias and Sapphira said they had given their all and fell down and died, because they lied. Obedience is a surrender of all…nothing can be held back. ~KP
Real Hope
As a Christian, you have the unique ability to live both now and also in the future.
Do you ever confuse “hope” with “wishing”? When you say, “I hope I get a better job,” or “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow,” do you have confidence that what you hope for will actually happen? Or is your hope more like a wish? For the Christian, hope is believing. We put our hope in God, that what He says in His Word is true. And we put our hope in Jesus, that what He did on the cross counts for us now and for the future.
We can believe by faith that Jesus lives in us here on Earth, and we can look forward with complete confidence that Jesus is coming again to take us to heaven. This is not wishing hope. This is real hope, the kind that enables us to live for God now while we look forward to living with Him in the future.
We should live in this evil world with self-control, right conduct, and devotion to God, while we look forward to that wonderful event when the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, will be revealed. Titus 2:12-13
The Purest of the Pure
God will never see holiness in us unless He sees Jesus in us.
We shouldn’t be concerned when we come across things in the Bible that puzzle us. God’s Word is a book with many layers, kind of like an onion. Some verses are more on the surface and easily understood, while others are deeper and take more time.
The Bible’s teaching on holiness is one of those deeper truths. We clearly understand verses that say, “All have sinned” (Romans 3:23). But when we run across a verse that says, “But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God–who chose you to be his children–is holy” (1 Peter 1:15)–well, that’s tough to understand. How can sinners be holy?
The only way for us to be holy before God is for God to see Jesus–the purest of the pure–in our lives. Our job isn’t to try to be holy, but to let Jesus live through us.
For you know that God paid a ransom to save you…with the precious lifeblood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him for this purpose….And he did this for you. 1 Peter 1:18-20
