In regard to God, we must say a decisive Yes! — or we’ll not like where we end up. As I heard someone say, “God lives upstream from us, and we’re not going to get to where He is by just drifting.” The most disastrous thing we can do is “not decide.”
Confessing Christ goes beyond saying the words “I believe that Jesus is the Son of God.” Truly believing it, that truth must be confessed in our deeds as well as our words. We can’t have Jesus as our “Savior” without obeying Him as our “Lord.”
Our motivation today needs to like Paul’s. My own prayer is that I obeyed the gospel in order “that I may gain Christ and be found in him . . . becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
What Jesus showed His disciples from the Hebrew Scriptures is that (a) the Messiah would suffer, (b) He would rise from the dead, and (c) repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in His name to all the world, beginning from Jerusalem.
There is not one of us who won’t have to account for himself or herself before Christ at the judgment. That accounting will be an absolutely accurate assessment of our life-choices. There will be no favoritism and no miscarriage of justice.
It takes faith to accept whatever the Lord commands in cases where what He requires goes against our preferences. But if we don’t trust the Lord enough to comply with His instructions, it’s vain for us to think that He will save us anyway.
There is nothing about our broken relationship with God that Jesus Christ cannot repair, no void in our hearts He cannot fill. He is God, who came from heaven to save us. And the rest of our lives would not be time enough to praise Him sufficiently.
God, our Creator, loved us and saved us, not from a distance but by becoming one of us. Jesus, as God in the flesh, is our Lord, but He is also our Brother and Friend. We worship and adore Him knowing that He knows what it is like to be “us.”
When we study Jesus, is it not His combination of passion and purity that is so powerful? As with all His other characteristics, the blend of these two in such a harmonious way is what allowed Him to have the influence that He did.
Christ is even more fair than the creation which He has made. And the grandest truth of all is that the One who created all this beauty is able to fix our broken hearts and create a beauty within us — one that is nothing less than His own beauty.
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