More than Just Words

 What we believe matters. Our beliefs have the ability to shape our thoughts, world views, and behaviors. This is why we need to make sure what we believe is true.

With that being said, we have to recognize that understanding certain doctrines doesn’t mean we have faith in God. We can intellectually affirm that God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, but that doesn’t mean that we actually have faith in God.

What is also true is that we can understand what those words mean, but still not understand God's character. If our relationship with God is based purely on definitions and doctrines, then we will miss experiencing God for who He truly is.

To gain a better understanding of God requires moving away from the intellectual pursuit of knowing about God to the pursuit of actually knowing God. That can only happen as we trust our lives to Him.

It is one thing to say that God is the great provider, but it is another thing to experience God providing for our needs. 

We can say that God is the Great Physician, but it is another thing to experience God’s healing power in our lives.

Our ideas of God fall short of who God is.

Hebrews 11:29-31 (NLT)

It was by faith that the people of Israel went right through the Red Sea as though they were on dry ground. But when the Egyptians tried to follow, they were all drowned.

It was by faith that the people of Israel marched around Jericho for seven days, and the walls came crashing down.

It was by faith that Rahab the prostitute was not destroyed with the people in her city who refused to obey God. For she had given a friendly welcome to the spies.

Each of these examples mentioned in Hebrews 11 remind us what made the difference was the response of faith that allowed people to experience God’s power. Because of faith God parted the Red Sea, because of faith God tore down the walls of Jericho, and because of faith Rahab was rescued from Jericho.

All these people had an incomplete understanding of God, but because of their faithful actions they experienced God in a real way. This allowed them to see God in a more true sense then a careful study of Scripture is able to do.

Living by faith adds a real dimension to our understanding of God that our academic and devotional study are not able to provide.

God's Promise of Life

{Isaiah 1:18-20; ESV}

“Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient,

you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

One of the wonderful promises God has made to us is that He will remove our sin and make us new. Let me put it another way: God will redeem our lives!

God will take all the junk, the sin, the pain, and the tragedies and exchange them for eternal life. This promise speaks to the heart of many people because we want our lives to have weight to them.  We want our lives to matter!

At this moment many of us feel like our lives are being wasted. The consequences of sin hold us in bondage and the addictive nature of sin has turned us into people we don’t want to be. Our hearts come alive when we discover that God promises to change this reality.

There is another side to this coin. God has promised to help us, to re-create us, and to take away our sins, but He also expects us to accept the help and redemption that He offers. The key to receiving God’s help is faith. Faith is not just about having a belief in God, but it is trusting God. I like to say that belief + action = faith.

See more at Paul's Ponderings: Experiencing God's Promise of Life 

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Living the Best Life

Life rarely lives up to our expectations. I suspect even if we were able to live the life of our dreams it would still leave us unsatisfied. The reason is true life is only found in Jesus.

Each one of us has an image of what life should be like. Some might picture the best life to be a mansion on a hill and millions of dollars in the bank. Others might define life as a two-story house with a white picket fence and a loving family. Still others might think the ideal life is the party scene with lots of friends.No matter what our image of life might be, we have all had those moments when we have thought, “Now this is the life!”

Outside those momentary glimpses of the life we desire, how many of us are living the life of our dreams?

I can say that I am content with my life, but there are still areas that I long to change. I still have dreams I want to accomplish, places I want to visit, and events I want to experience. On top of that reality I continue to desire to grow in my relationship with God and become the person He created me to be.

Finish reading Living the Best Life » Paul's Ponderings

 

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Our Humble God

{John 13:12-17; NLT}

When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, "Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them."

To me one of the most amazing qualities about God is humility.  Think about the reality of the Creator of the universe is humble.  The One who deserves our worship is humble enough to serve us, His creation.  It is unbelievable.

I know humility is not the first quality that comes to mind when we think about God, but it is one nonetheless.  This quality surprises us because we know how we act when we have a little bit success or a little bit of authority.  Humility is rarely what is on our mind.  What is on our mind are the praise, congratulations, and the admiration of people.  It is hard for us to be humble.

In the text we discover Jesus, who is the exact representation of God, humbly washing the feet of his disciples. This humble service extended to Judas, his betrayer, as well.  The Creator of the Universe humbly stooped to wash the dirt off the feet of his rebellious creation.  What an act of love and humility that was!

May that image of God stick with us as we go about our daily lives.  If our God can be humble, then you and I need to be humble as well.

God is Self-Existent

Daily Thought: The Ground and Source of Goodness

By contrast God is a natural stopping point as a foundation for objective moral values and duties. For unless we are moral nihilists, we have to recognize some stopping point, and God as the ultimate reality is the natural place to stop. Moreover, God is by definition worthy of worship, so that He must be the embodiment of perfect moral goodness. Again, God, by definition is the greatest conceivable being, and a being that is the ground and source of goodness is greater than one that merely shares in goodness.

William Lane Craig, On Guard, David C. Cook (2010), p. 139

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Daily Thought: Strive to Learn from God

He [Paul] insists that this special teaching is not the product of the intellectual activity of men; it is the gift of God and it came into the world with Jesus Christ.  All our discoveries are not so much what our minds have found out as what God has told us.  This by no means frees us from the responsibility of human effort.  Only the student who works can make himself fit to receive the real riches of the mind of a great teacher.  It is so with us and God.  The more we strive to understand, the more God will tells us; and there is no limit to this process, because the riches of God are unsearchable.

William Barclay, DSB: The Letters to the Corinthians, The Westminster Press (1975), p. 27

Daily Thought: God is Bigger

Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep–dependent lives.

Chan, Francis (2010-01-01). Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God (pp. 29-30). David C Cook. Kindle Edition.

Daily Thought: Without God There is No Meaning

The point is this: If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning.  But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

William Lane Craig, On Guard, David C. Cook (2010), p. 41

Daily Thought: Bringing Clarity to Life

A great many arguments about God—God's existence, God's nature, God's actions in the world—run the risk of being like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.  It is all too easy to make the mistake of speaking and thinking as though God (if there is a God) might be a being, an entity, within our world, accessible to our interested study in the same sort of way we might study music or mathematics, open to our investigation by the same sort of techniques we use for objects and entities within our world...The difficulty is that speaking of God in anything like the Christian sense is like staring into the sun.  It's dazzling. It's easier, actually, to look away from the sun itself and enjoy the fact that, once it's well and truly risen, you can see everything else clearly.

N. T. Wright, Simply Christian, HarperOne (2006), p. 56

Daily Thought: Over the Horizon

"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond.  One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke.  Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light.  But they do not call it goodness.  They do not call it anything.  They are not thinking of it.  They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.  But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world.  No one's eyes can see very far beyond that." ~ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Daily Thought: God Must Fight Evil

"Evil is not simply something that happens within the (otherwise pristine) cosmos; it is rather is a force that corrupts the cosmos itself!  There is something hostile to God that has affected creation to the core, and God must fight it” ~ Gregory Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil, p. 48

Daily Thought: It is Important to Learn About God

"Worship is at the very center of all Christian living.  One of the main reasons that theology (trying to think straight about who God is) matters is that we are called to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.  It matters that we learn more about who God is so that we can praise him more appropriately." ~ N. T. Wright, Simply Christian, pp. 148-49

Daily Thought: Look to the Lord

"Every time we set our eyes on the size of the battle we will shrink from the task.  Every time we look to Him, we leave in peace with the assurance that the battle is the Lord's.  It is so easy to be discouraged with the failures and duplicities of politicians and power mongers around the world.  We see millions living under tyrannies and despotism nicely dressed up in ideological reasons.  We witness incredibly harsh rhetoric against things sacred.  We are troubled by trends in the arts and particularly by the way television has trivialized the sacred and glorified the profane.  Our heroes are more possessed by fame and adulation than they are with things that matter.  Nations that once realized that God is God and is worthy of our worship now treat religion as a vestige of primitive thinking.  It seem that a mighty army is closing in upon the church.  Is God still in control?  He who is and was, will ever by the sovereign Lord of the universe." ~ Ravi Zacharias, Cries from the Heart, pp. 27-28

Daily Thought: God Feels

"Knowing that our heavenly Father has spoken to us, it is imperative that we understand what He has to say to us about our feelings of joy and pain.  The first thing we notice is that He describes Himself as a God who feels.  This all-transcending mystery, which we cannot fully grasp, is time and again reiterated in His Word." ~ Ravi Zacharias, Cries of the Heart, p. 45

Daily Thought: God Knows Who We Are

"Each of us, to some degree, fools our friends and family about who we really are.  But it's impossible to do that with God.  He knows each of us deeply and specifically.  He knows our thoughts before we think them, our actions before we commit them, whether we are lying down or sitting or walking around.  He know who we are and what we are about.  We cannot escape Him, not even if we want to." ~ Francis Chan, Crazy Love, p. 32

Daily Thought: God Gives Himself

"But when God, the infinite Being, in whom everything is life and power, spirit and truth, in the very deepest meaning of the words,--when God speaks forth Himself in His words, He does indeed give HIMSELF, His Love and His Life, His Will and His Power, to those who receive these words, in a reality passing comprehension. In every promise He puts Himself in our power to lay hold of and possess; in every command He puts Himself in our power for us to share with Him His Will, His Holiness, His Perfection. In God's Word God gives us HIMSELF; His Word is nothing less than the Eternal Son, Christ Jesus. And so all Christ's words are God's words, full of a Divine quickening life and power. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.'" ~ Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer

Daily Thought: Father and Priest

"How privileged and exalted a thing it is to be a father—it images God himself. If children do not have a good image of their earthly father to start from, it will be much harder for them to come to know God as a loving heavenly Father. Saint Augustine had a very bad relationship with his father, and he could not bring himself to address God as Father for a long time. Every father is a priest, like it or not, a good one or a bad one, mediating an image of God to his children." ~ Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics, p. 125

Daily Thought: God is the Only Solution

"Paradoxically, then, even though the problem of evil is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day God is the only solution to the problem of evil. If God does not exist, then we are lost without hope in a life filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering. God is the final answer to the problem of evil, for He redeems us from evil and takes us into the everlasting joy of an incommensurable good: fellowship with Him." ~ William Lane Craig; Hard Question, Real Answers; p. 112

Daily Thought: A Great Mystery

"God--eternal, boundless, and of infinite power--does great things in heaven and on earth that are a complete mystery to us. There is no searching out his wondrous works. If God's works were such that human reason could easily figure them out, they could not be said to be wonderful, nor would they be far marvelous for words to express." ~ Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ