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.

In assessing our character, all anyone ever needs to know is the answer to this question: how deep is our love for our Creator? When that question has been answered accurately, the very root of our personal being will have been discovered.

We must not only desire to know the truth; we must actually intend to obey it. If we’re honestly looking for information that will help us improve our own obedience, then we have God’s assurance that we’ll get the information we need.

We can improve our ability to discern the Lord’s will, and if we’re at all serious about seeking God, then we’ll surely set that as a high priority. Indeed, the only higher priority would be improving our doing of the Lord’s will after we discern it!

“Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,'” Jesus asked, “and do not do the things which I say?” There is more to Christianity than simply listing it as our religious preference. Jesus Christ is not really our Lord if we don’t do the things He says.

Neglect is responsible for some of the most awful suffering in the human race. The damage that is done by simply failing to act may grow so slowly that we don’t see it increasing, but in the end, the cumulative effect is devastating.

The law of sowing and reaping applies to us. The same laws that have always governed the universe will govern the declaration of our final destiny. There is no successful way to defy these laws. Not even God Himself is at liberty to set them aside.

The hardness of our sojourn encourages us to repent of our sins. For most of us, repentance is not a one-time occurrence; it is a process. By a sequence of events, God is teaching us repentance, and the process can’t be rushed.

Paul spoke of the Thessalonians’ work of faith, labor of love, and patience of hope. When our work is based on our trust in God’s faithfulness and our labor grows out of a love that is pure and strong, our hope will produce an amazing steadfastness.

Despair doesn’t have to lead to defeat. If we choose, we can stay the course. Indeed, there is no finer courage than that of the soldier who sees no hope of getting off the battlefield alive but fights on because the cause is just.

Paul urged Timothy to preach the word “in season and out of season.” The same goes for discipleship in general. We need to be faithful all of the time. After all, if the Lord can count on us only when His work is easy, what kind of service is that?

Who among us has not passed through something like Job’s darkness, a time when God is silent and not even one other person is willing to say anything but a discouraging word? The dead of the night is a hard time to endure.

A difficulty that is a problem to one person, another person thinks of as just an annoyance. It depends on what else you’re dealing with. That ache in your leg won’t seem like much of a problem if a day comes when you don’t have any legs at all.