Posts Tagged ‘ Carry your cross ’
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13, ESV
Love is sacrificing for others. Your time, your energy, your possessions, your dignity, even your life.
For God. For others. Even for those who hate you.
Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:13-14, ESV
We make mistakes. We have sinned against God and others.
But He has redeemed and forgiven us. We are no longer bound to what and who we were. We serve Him to glorify Him. Our past can help, not hinder.
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.
1 Peter 3:12, ESV
What you do matters.
What you think matters.
If you are consistently thinking impure and evil thoughts, if you are doing what you know God does not approve of, do not expect Him to answer your prayers nor rescue you from challenges.
Odds are, you created those challenges.
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.
Galatians 5:16 ESV
You can try being a good person and avoiding sin, and you may even have some success, but to live a truly good life takes relying on the Helper: the Holy Spirit.
Allow wisdom into your life, and open the door by starting at Proverbial Thought!
I spent some time both as a teenager and a young twenty-something, both before and as a Christian, despising this world and even this life.
As a teen, I fully hated this world. It offered almost nothing good to me, and even the good seemed tainted by bad.
It was being introduced to Jesus Christ at a small church that my life and my outlook on it began to change.
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.
Ephesians 4:17-25, ESV
a regular life
i now give
a regular life
filled with the usual
hating the world
but finding it mutual
until God came along
and turned all that around
a brand new life begun
without much resound
but as God was working
through His Son Jesus Christ
this regular boy
was given extraordinary life
now the mission is clear
and the way seems obvious
who am i now
a disciple of Jesus
i will take the news
of the life that He lives
into the rest of the world
my life i now give
Change your mind, and find the wisdom of God through some of the thoughts at Proverbial Thought!
There is no need for a great debate on Calvinism, Arminianism, Molinism, or any other -isms of soteriology (study of salvation) based on the poem today.
We should all agree that we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession”. In fact, this poem is based on that very passage of Scripture:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
1 Peter 2:9-12, ESV
Regardless of how free a choice we had in the process of salvation, it is still true that God chose us as His own, and He has given us the command and the privilege of sharing the Gospel with our fallen world.
chosen
chosen before i knew You
selected for Your purpose
still needing Your Truth revealed
to have any usefulness
when i finally came around
and You got through my thick head
my heart became softened
my life redeemed from the dead
now i seek out Your chosen
finding them still evil
telling them how You changed my life
and resisted the lies of the devil
no longer deceived by lies
now aware of all Your Truth
they can truly live their lives
knowing they are chosen by You
