The Value of Your Relationship

The Value of Your Relationship

The Value of Your Relationship

I have mentioned this many times before in my previous posts, but I think it is time that I expand on it a little bit. I am talking about your relationship with your Heavenly Father and how it affects everything you do and how important it is to keep that relationship at the forefront of your life.

How often do you read your Bible? Once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Sounds sad, doesn’t it, that last one. But I know people who call themselves Christians and they have not picked up their Bible in several months and their relationship with God has now become stagnant and boring. There is no joy in their life and they do not really pursue God.

I have heard people say that you can have a great relationship with God without reading His word, and I hate to say this but they are wrong, and I mean dead wrong. To not read God’s word and say you have a great relationship with Him is like saying that you have a great relationship with your husband or wife, son or daughter and you have never taken the time to get to know all about them. When you loose touch with God’s word, you are not making any effort in trying to get to know God, His plans for you, what He wants to do in your life or what He did for others like you in the past.

It goes in a circle, the more you read God’s word the stronger your relationship becomes and the stronger your relationship becomes the more time you want to spend in His word. But you have to put in the effort first, you have to want to get to know Him, you have to desire Him and seek after Him. And the easiest way to do this is through the reading of His Holy Word, and through prayer (that will be my follow up post J)

This is where we find out how much value you put into your relationship. Those who put in great effort like reading their Bible everyday, have a great relationship with God, those who do not value it as much and only read their Bible on occasion do not have the same thing, and eventually their relationship with God becomes stale.

I hope you are getting at what I am saying here.

Believe me, I am completely imperfect in this department, I do not read my Bible everyday, in fact I let life get in the way so much that I am lucky if I read it once a week, (you can yell at me later for that), but I think we are all guilty of it to some degree. There are times when we all get a little too comfortable and complacent with our relationship with God, and we take it for granted. We think that He is always going to be there, and He is, don’t get me wrong, but do we have the same outlook on things when He is not at the forefront of our lives. Do you not find life a little harder when your relationship is not as strong as it should be? I know I notice it allot.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it and have taken something of value from it.

Start to build on that relationship with God, take baby steps. Maybe it is just one verse a night, or maybe a chapter but I strongly encourage you to read His word, it His story for you.

Forgive, forget, and let God's will reign in your life!

You can now follow me on twitter @guyfromchurch

Who is in control?

Who is in control?

            Who is in control in your life? What sways you and influences you? Where do you get your direction from? This is probably going to bring me some harsh criticism, but I believe that it needs to be said. This is my general view, and it is not necessarily true of everything and all churches, but I do believe that it rings true for a lot of them.

            Some of you, have read my previous post about my view on the church and how I feel that they have become more like institutions than vessels of God’s church, well I am going to go into more detail about why I feel this way and what basis I draw my conclusions from and what scriptural merit I have for it.

            Now before you get all mad and huffy about this and say that I am wrong in my views of the church or how they are run nowadays, or that I am just a person who has had a bad experience with a church and is bitter from that time, I am going to tell you right now that you are wrong. I have a great love for the church and the people that dwell in it, I have been to many different churches of many denominational backgrounds. My problem is not the church, my problem is that people have taken over church and left God out of the picture. We preach freedom and forgiveness but we tie people down to our creeds doctrines, rules and leadership that they become spiritually bound.

            Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to Father except through me.” John 14:6 NIV. He did not say, seek out your elders, deacons and pastors then you find me and then I will lead you to the Father, NO! He said I AM THE WAY THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE! NO ONE ELSE, NOT ONE CAN COME TO FATHER EXCEPT THROUGH ME!

  

            Paul told us “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:17. If we are busy tying people down with our human ideas, and thoughts and doctrines how can we say that we have the Spirit of the Lord in us? There is freedom where He dwells and in with whom He dwells.

            In our churches nowadays there are 2 rulers, either the Pastor or the people.

Pastors who rule their churches rule with their creeds and doctrines, they are bullies and make people fear change and the truth, and often discourage interactions with other church communities. They preach but they have no heart or conviction about what they are preaching because they do it for one reason. It has always been this way, and the old way is the best way. They are not free, but bound by their pride and lack of humility and compassion towards others.

People who rule their church think the same way but they have their pastors living in fear of either being fired, ostracized, or thrown out from the church. They dictate what should be spoken, and how it should be said, and who should be aloud to speak or allowed into their inner circles. They live by their creeds and doctrines and refuse change with harsh criticism. They are not free and captive to their own ideals thoughts and religious views.

Jesus came to set us free from bondage, to give us new life, and set the old church free from the rule of the Sadducees and Pharisees that seem to be ever present still in today’s church. He came to set us free from religion, and tell us that we are free to worship and praise Him how he taught us to, that in humbling ourselves and giving up our doctrinal views and focusing on only His word, and His truth that we could be set free.

God gave us pastors for a reason, as well as other church leaders. Not to rule over us, but to walk beside us and teach us the truth, no matter how hard or how harsh that truth can come across. The people are meant to walk hand in hand and learn from each other what God is revealing to them and His love for all people, no matter what denomination they belong to, or how they worship.

I love the church, but I love what God wants the church to be not what we want it to be. I love the church for what it could be, not for what it is right now.

I am not in anyway saying that I have it all right, or that I am perfect in my understanding, I am just saying what I think and believe needs to be said. I welcome any comments or ideas on this subject as it has been a great weight upon my heart, and as I hope to one day become a pastor I am hoping that the church will change and the people who attend it. I am seeking out God and what He wants in my life and what He wants me to become, I don’t always have it right but I am working hard trying to discover the truth that He is revealing to me in His word.

Forgive, forget, and let God's will reign in your life!

You can now follow me on twitter @guyfromchurch
Also if you want to read a great book on this I highly suggest “Joshua” by Joseph F. Girzone. He describes things in such way that I myself cannot do yet, but it carries the same thoughts and ideas. 

Fish Out Of Water

      At first glance I am sure you are trying to figure out exactly what I am talking about, and to be honest with you at first I didn't know either. Like so many of my previous blog postings it has not been about my thoughts or what I wanted to write about but what God wanted me to write about, but nothing could be more so than this one.

      I have grown very distant from God as of late due to circumstances and the going's on in my life, I have been very frustrated with how things have been going, and the change of events that have over occurred over the past few weeks. I had truly thought I was following His plan for my life and when everything fell apart I blamed Him, was mad and neglected my relationship with Him. I felt like I was drowning, life had become to overwhelming and very hard to manage. It was hard to come home to my wife and kids, go to church, have any kind of relationship because I was lacking so much spiritually. I became mad easily, and could not focus on anything.

      I began to realize what my problem was. I had not been keeping up my relationship with God, it was suffering because I was not tending to it. God was giving me love but I was giving Him nothing in return, our relationship had become one sided. After realizing this I spent some time in good solid worship, it had been a long time since I had just put on my head phones, turned on my music and tuned out the rest of the world. (Side note, if you have a lot of music on your ipod, mp3 player put it on random, God can really speak to you through it)

      That is when God said to me "Fish out of water." 

      I was like what?! What are you talking about? 

      "Fish out of water." And that was it. Nothing more, nothing less. Okay, I thought, that is odd but He is obviously revealing something to me. So I began to think about it, pray about, till it was revealed to me what He meant.

      I was a fish out of water. When I neglected my relationship with God, I had stumbled onto dry land. I was flopping about gasping for air, struggling to survive and make sense of what was going on.

      "37.On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.

38. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

39. By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified."

John 7:38

      Living water, I was missing my living water. Just like a fish out of water, I was a Christian out God's living water. 

      It became apparent to me that I was the one to blame for all that was going wrong in my life, I had decided to walk on dry barren land, to step out from the waters edge and take life into my own hands, to say that it was better on land than it was in the water and that I could survive just fine there.

      Obviously I can't though. No one can, not well anyway. 

      So, I let God pull me back in, back into His living water and I can begin to breath again. I feel peace and assurance that everything is going to be okay.

      Are you struggling right now? Is life to hard to bear, do you feel like you can't breathe? Return to the living water, ask God for forgiveness and let Him pull you back into His living water.

Forgive, forget, and let God's will reign in your life!

You can now follow me on twitter @guyfromchurch or find my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ThatGuyFromChurch

Denial leads to Destruction

Denial leads to Desctruction

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 

25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

26 What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul? Or what can you give in exchange for your soul?

27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward everyone according to what they have done.

28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Matthew 16: 24-28

      Pride comes before a fall, and denial will lead to your destruction. Sounds bad doesn’t it, and I will agree that the first part does sound really bad, but it is true, and I know because I have come face to face with my own pride and it has caused me to fall numerous times.

      The second part sound bad only if you take it that way, only if you see it as the way it has been written and not what it actually means scripturally. Carefully read through Matthew 16: 24-28, it is so important that Jesus mentions it twice, and it is mentioned in 2 other books in the Bible, Luke and John also mention this phrase. In Matthew 10: 38 Jesus says “Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. “

      So now why do I combine denial and destruction?

      It is simple really. When you deny yourself you deny that you are important, you deny that you have it all figured out, you completely wreck your thought process and your outlook on life. You are destroyed, but here is the good thing, now you are ready for God to make you new. Now that you have realized that you don’t have it all figured out, and the whole universe does not revolve around you, God can truly start to work in your life. I can tell you honestly that when God moves in to your life, anything is left that you haven’t destroyed, or that is not of Him will be destroyed.

      When you deny yourself you allow God to move in and when he moves in He will destroy everything that is not meant to be. Denial leads to your destruction, and there could be nothing better than that.

      You have to be wrecked to be made new and sometimes that means you take down the very foundation that the building was on, you tear it all down and let God build a new foundation. And that can be really hard, because when you think about it, most foundations are pretty sound, and they take a lot of work to break down, and a lot of blood sweat and tears will go into it. But it is so worth it because his foundation is always stronger, and more steadfast. You have to start a new way of thinking, and your life will be better for it.

      When you deny yourself you will find it easier to love your neighbor, to forgive those who do wrong against you, to trust God with your finances, your family and your life. The negatives seem a lot easier to deal with (they are not gone, and don’t ever tell anyone that I said they were gone).

      I will tell you one more thing though, that denial of self is a daily thing, you have to make a conscious decision to do it each and every day, you must choose to die daily, to take up your cross deny yourself and follow Him. You have to wake up in the morning and say to yourself that you are not living for yourself and ask God to continue to work on your foundation, to make you new, and to let him rule your day. Every single step of the way. 

Forgive, forget, and let God's will reign in your life!

By the way, you can now follow me on twitter @guyfromchurch :)

What do you do when it all goes wrong?

What do you do when it all goes wrong?

      An interesting question, and one that does not have an easy answer. In fact the answer can be so hard to bear that it can break you, it will test your foundation, your faith, and question your purpose in life. Your values and your future rely on it though because at some point it will happen to you, at some point something will go wrong and you will find your heart filled with doubt, at some point things will get hard and you feel alone and the burden of life will become to much to carry.

      I know there are those of you who have gone through these things, or are going through them right now like me. You came to a crossroad in your life and you had to chose one path or the other. Both paths seemed great, both paths would make you happy and both had negative things about them that you didn't like. You know that only one path is what God want's you to chose, one is His perfect will and the other His permissive will. So you chose, without thinking about twice you chose and you wish you had never gone down that path, you wish you had taken the other path and you would do anything to take it all back again.

      I am going through this right now, I wish I had never made the decision that I did, I wish that I had taken the other path, or that I would have at least thought about the current one a lot more than I had. I had unfortunately chosen God's permissive will, because I did not seek Him in it, I never even asked Him which one was the right path, I never prayed to Him, sought Him in scripture or listened to the advise of others because I was so sure that I was right. Now, I have to deal with the consequences of my actions.

      So what do you do when you realize all of this? Do you roll over and call it quits because you made that mistake, do you push on and push through in perseverance, do you yell scream and blame others for something that was your fault? Or do you kneel, repent and ask God for forgiveness for not following His will for your life. This is why I said that it can make or break you,  unfortunately we are human, and our pride tends to get in the way and will not let us kneel at His feet, our humanity blocks us from admitting we were wrong, our fear refuses to let us turn back, and our anger does not let us move forward. If you do not chose to kneel though it can tear you apart, you and those around you. Doubt in yourself and doubt in God can destroy you, and it is a powerful tool that Satan loves to use because it is so easy for us to become doubtful.

     Repentance is hard, and I mean extremely hard. You have to admit that you were wrong, you messed up and that you want forgiveness for it. Sometimes it is easier to give forgiveness than it is to ask for it.

     Not only that is it puts you at a crossroads once again, you will face 2 choices once again, and they are a lot harder to chose from because instead of seeing positives all you can see are the negatives, all you can see is that the choice you made has made things more difficult than you thought when you first decided. 

      Look past the negatives though, and don;t forget you have someone to turn to in all of this. It may be hard, even harder this time because you did not turn to Him the first time, but remember He loves you and: 

"26. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 

27. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
28. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."  

Romans 8: 26-28

      He is your strength in the weakest of times, He can erase all of your doubt and insecurities, but only if you turn to Him, repent of what you did, ask for Him to forgive you, forgive yourself and move forward. Don't let you bad decision break you, don't let the devil use what you fear as a weapon against you. 

4. You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.

1 John 4:4 

       Forgive, forget, and let God's will reign in your life!

Forgiveness

Forgiveness

      I have talked about many things over the last year, grace, mercy, faith, righteousness and joy to name a few, but I neglected to include one thing. It is this one thing that I want to start my year out with, it is what I want have in my heart every moment of every day and it is an attitude that I want to develop throughout the course of this year.

      And it is forgiveness.

      Not a new concept, by far, but I am going to take a different approach to it. I love throwing out little twists when God reveals them to me. This one was a real challenge to me, and I had to reflect on it a lot. I looked back over the last year, and the years before that. I am sure all of you think that you know where I am going with this, and if after you are finished reading this you were right, I am happy that you realized it sooner than I did.

      What I had to look back on was not about forgiving others and what they had done to me, yes this is still important, and something to write about later on, God told me to look back at all the times that I refused to forgive myself.

      

      Some people may not think this is important, but I believe it is a key concept in our Christian walk.

      If you cannot forgive yourself, how can you be fully forgiven?

      Let me explain a little bit because I can see the perplexed looks on some of your faces.

I heard this story once about a man, who was sentenced to hang, and the President offered him a pardon but the man refused and was hanged. The courts deemed that in order for a pardon to be valid it must be accepted.

      The same works with us, I believe. Yes God forgives us if we ask it of Him, but if you do not mean it, and you do not accept the forgiveness that is given to you, you do not have full forgiveness. And I say full forgiveness with a cause, God will always forgive you so long as you bring it to Him and lay it at His feet, but your forgiveness will only be full once you validate it with yourself. If you do not forgive yourself for what you have done wrong, you will walk around life with a chip on your shoulder, and a cloud looming over you. The worst part is, is that you only have yourself to blame.

      Look back at your life at all the times where you asked for forgiveness, either from God, a friend, or a loved one, and then figure out if you ever forgave yourself for what you did wrong in that situation. It is a weight that will weigh you down until you LET IT GO!

      Don’t withhold that awesome blessing that God has given to you, and that He gives you each and every day. God forgave you, He loves you and always will, accept the forgiveness that has been given to you and forgive yourself. 

      And with a new year I offer a new blessing:

      Forgive, forget, and let God's will reign in your life!