A concept that I struggle to grasp and understand is grace. It sucks because this concept is one of the most integral parts of the gospel. That Christ loves us and we don’t deserve it, and that we should take joy in that. The problem with me not being able to understand this leads to me not living a life where I accept grace.
I am constantly judging my relationship with Jesus and worth off of performance. If I’m doing the Christian thing, having my daily quiet times, avoiding sin, etc. Yes, those things have a correlation to my relationship with Jesus, but they do not affect how Christ views me and the fact that he loves me. That blows my mind. I feel that I have to do things to earn that. I have such a problem with the concept of free grace.
The problem is that I don’t really know how to correct this. I mean prayer is important, but a lot of times I use prayer as a reason to not go all out on/for something, and I want to make sure that I’m not just copping out on this.
My brain knows that Jesus is giving me (with joy) things that I don’t deserve. But my heart wants to fight to deserve them and rejects them when I feel I don’t. So you can see the problem. Any suggestions?
Every once in a while something will click in my head, and I’ll feel like an idiot for it not clicking before. The latest time this happened when I have been thinking (often late at night) about surrender and what that looks like. Then the lightbulb went off. Surrender isn’t a one time thing. It is a continual (daily) thing that I (we) have to do to follow Jesus and give Him control.
I don’t know how I thought that if I surrendered something once that I was good for all time. I’m fully capable of Indian-giving control of my life, and am guilty of doing so. I don’t know exactly how daily surrendering looks like exactly, but I plan on finding out. Because I know that God’s plan is better than mine, so I should give up control because I will find my purpose and joy in what God has in store for me.
So if you feel like praying, I’d appreciate it if you would throw this in for me. That I would continually give up control to the Christ.
It is beyond my understanding how God puts up with me. A lot of time I find myself taking everything for granted. Including Him. I ignore Him, and just expect Him to help me out with stuff. I put my plans first without even consulting what He wants for me and don’t sit to hear Him talk.
I think it has a lot to with me being lazy and impatient. It is so hard for me to daily get in the Word because I don’t have diligence. I don’t have the patience to wait for God at His feet, to feel His presence and to bask in His glow. I read a chapter or two from Scripture then think on something, pray for God to change my heart (this needs to happen in more ways than I even know) and move on to whatever I’d rather be doing with my time.
At the end of the day this is unfulfilling. I think it is part of the reason I’m in such a rut in my life right now. In every aspect. I’ve lost joy. I’ve lost hope for my future. I’m just existing right now and that’s all. I’m not looking forward, and in all honesty I’m probably not moving forward. I need to change. I need God to change me. I want to feel His presence wash over me. I want to bask in it. I never want to leave it.
I need to figure out how to get back. I need to ask for forgiveness for leaving and surrender. I have so much I need to surrender. Why am I holding on?
I feel bad for Michael Phelps because if he gets 7 Gold Medals and 1 Silver Medal he will feel like a failure. That’s ridiculous.
If you just look around the world around you it is evident that people have innate desire within themselves for community. There are major cities that have multimillions of people living together hoping for people to accept them for who they are.
Even from the onset of civilization God knew it was not good for man to be alone, so he created another human for community to be realized. But sin has locked the door on our hearts to real authentic community, we hide who we really are and portray an image of who we think people want us to be, so that we can be accepted.
Knowing Christ changes all of this. We accept the fact that we have faults, but put no weight in them at all because Christ has victory. We are free. We can be who we are, we can be real with other people who will love us as we are, and push us to become the people that God desires us to be.
We are commanded to die. I have no idea what that looks like. When I was a child I became very conscious and afraid of death when I was introduced to the concept following the death of my Grandma. But now I’ve become afraid of a different kind of death. I am afraid to die with Christ. I am afraid to die to myself.
I think part of the reason that I am afraid is because I don’t know what dying to myself looks like. I don’t know how to go about it. I guess I’m afraid because I don’t have control. I have to give it up, and not even just this one time, from here on out, for all time.
I know in my head (a big difference from knowing in my heart and trusting) that God is way smarter than me, and has a way better plan for me than I do for myself. A perfect plan. But I like my plan. I want a wife, kids, a dog. I want to live in Seattle. I want to write. I’m scared that my plan doesn’t match up with God’s, really, that God’s plan doesn’t match up with mine. It very well could, but I’m afraid to jump into the deep end.
I’ve been content for the past to just splash around in the shallow end of Christianity pretending to be in the deep end just because I’m all well. I’ve faked it. Admitting I’ve faked giving everything to Christ, sadly, doesn’t help me give Him everything though. I’m scared what it will take. “Whoever keeps his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will gain it.” I don’t understand the backwards concepts that Christ portrays.
I need help. I want to trust. I want to die. I want to live the life that Christ has called me to. I’m just so worried about the dying part. Pray for me.
Why should we fear God? Deuteronomy 6:13 says, “It is the Lord your God you shall fear.” The first reason we should fear god is because God tells us to fear him. Psalm 2:11 says, “Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.” This verse should make us think about what it means to fear, because it doesn’t have a negative connotation here. We rejoice with trembling? That is counterintuitive.
Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” Later in Proverbs the author says, “The fear of the Lord leads to life, and whoever has it shall rest satisfied.” Fearing God leads us to knowledge and life.
In Luke 12:5 Jesus says, “But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who after he has killed has all authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!” Here Jesus warns us that not only does God hold all our lives in his hands (after he has killed), that he has the authority to cast people into hell, and fear of that end, would drive us towards Jesus, the cross, and to God himself.
The fear of God is something that has held me in curiosity and confusion for years, and in the next few days I’m going to try to talk on different ways (some good, some bad) to fear God, and what that means to us.
I think that most people would define gluttony by a correlation with obesity. Gluttons are people who love food so much that they eat as much of it as they can and end up weighing six thousand pounds. Maybe, but I recently had a thought that redefined the term glutton for me and I fear we all my fall under it’s new perimeter.
The New Oxford Dictionary defines a glutton as “an excessively greedy eater.” The word “greedy” is defined as, “having or showing an intense selfish desire for something,” so in a glutton is someone who shows an intense selfish desire for food and eating.
If you hold to the Biblical view of money as belonging to God that he gives us for our needs and for the advance of his Kingdom, then you might need to think about whether or not you are a glutton. It hit me recently how much I eat out. Eating out is part of the college student culture. It is eat out, or eat Ramen noodles. But if I could plan my meals (and follow the plan) and go grocery shopping, I would save a lot of money because I wouldn’t eat out at least once a day. I would be free to use that money for the advancing of the Kingdom.
Eating out could directly get in the way of me using the money God has given me effectively for his Kingdom. My intense selfish desire for eating out, would therefore put me, under my newly thought definition, as a glutton, and in sin.