Experiencing The Fullness of God's Grace

Psalm 37:5

Commit your way to the LORD;
 trust in him, and he will act.

Jesus tells us to give Him our burdens and He will give us rest.  God promises to give us the desires of our hearts if we delight in Him.  The peace and joy of our Christian life will be determined by the constant application of our belief and faith in God's Holy Word.

If we choose to involve God selectively in our lives, we can expect that the fulfillment of His promises will only be partial.  It is in the full submission to Jesus Christ's lordship in our lives that we experience the fullness of God's grace.  It is by putting God first in all things that we experience the joy that the world cannot provide.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your loving kindness, Your mercy and Your grace in our lives.  We praise You with every breath because each breath is a gift from You.  We seek to turn over every decision in our lives to You.  We seek to leave every trial and concern at Your throne.  We pray that the Holy Spirit will instruct us in the ways of complete surrender to Our Savior, Jesus.  May the world around us be drawn to You by witnessing the joy in our lives.  

Focusing on the Solution

Matthew 6:34

So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

God has a perfect plan and purpose for our lives.  He commands us not to fret or worry about our circumstances.  He promises that He will work out all things for our eternal good if we seek first His kingdom.

We must seek to find hope and joy in our circumstances as we learn to trust in God to fulfill His promises in our lives.  We should avoid seeing ourselves trapped by our worldly trials.  Instead, we should seek the comfort and peace of seeing ourselves gripped firmly in the hand of God - the only secure place in the universe.

Prayer,
Heavenly Father, thank You for being the author and finisher of our lives.  We rejoice in knowing that Your hand is always upon us as long as we abide in You.  Teach us, Father, how to look past our troubles in this world and look to the source of our solutions, Jesus Christ.   We pray that our focus will always be on Our Lord and Our Master, King Jesus and not on our problems.

Living Under the Spotlight of the Holy Spirit

Isaiah 6:5

And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips,

When we go into the presence of God, anything that is not pleasing to Him will come to mind.  We cannot get by with a general sense of sinfulness.  The Holy Spirit will not rest until we have been convicted of our particular sin.

When Isaiah came upon the vision of the Lord and saw His holiness, Isaiah immediately proclaimed that he was a man of unclean lips.  Isaiah knew that he would not be able to serve the Lord without cleansing himself from the sin that he had been shown.

God will work the same way with each of us.  Through His Holy Spirit, He will convict us of a single point of iniquity.  Then He will lead us to deeper revelation of the things in our lives that are displeasing to Him until we are properly prepared to serve Him.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank You for restlessness that the Holy Spirit brings upon us when we are walking in darkness.  We thank You for the absolute focus that You put on our sins, making it impossible for us to take on a vague sense of the sinfulness in our lives.  We pray the Holy Spirit will bring our every iniquity into the light so that we may repent and move forward in obedience to Your calling on our lives.

A Life of Imitation

1 Corinthians 11:1

Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.

In Paul's letters to the Corinthians, he exhorted them to pattern their lives after Jesus Christ.  Paul understood that obedience to a creed simply takes us to a proper and higher level of lifestyle.  Accepting Jesus Christ as Our Savior and patterning our lives after Him will move us toward a level of perfection, holiness and purity that only He could attain and we can begin to approach through Him.

In truth, it is not good enough to be good.  It is not good enough to do great works.  The only thing that we can do that is of any eternal value is to submit our lives to Jesus Christ as Our Savior, to die of self and to take on the spirit of the One who dwells within us.  Anything less than full submission to Our Lord and Master and anything less than becoming imitators of Jesus Christ as His disciples leaves us short of being true Christians.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank You for allowing the Word to become flesh so that we could see the standard to which we are all called.  May we stand before You one day in the image of Your Son, washed clean by His blood and perfected by His presence within us.  Father God, we pray that the Holy Spirit will teach us how to become true disciples of Jesus as we spend our time on earth preparing for the glorious day of coming into Your presence.   

Living According to Kingdom Principles

Matthew 5:25-26

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison.  Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

In Matthew, we are taught that when we have a debt that needs to be paid that we should try to reconcile with the one to whom we owe the debt.  We will always end up suffering the consequences of the unresolved debt if we do not try to come to terms with our accuser.  We should try to come to terms with the accuser prior to going before the judge.

The same perspective can be applied to sin in our lives.  It was necessary for Jesus to redeem us from our sin debt for there is not a space in heaven where the slightest sin is allowed.  It is our responsibility to try to come to terms quickly with the sin in our lives.

Once we received Jesus as Our Savior, we found it generally easy to turn away from obvious and grievous sin.  It is probable that we have found out that there were areas of sin in our lives that had been hardened prior to our renewal in Christ.   It is even more likely that we have found areas in our lives that are not necessarily sinful, but are separating us from the perfection that we will reach in heaven.   It is in these areas that we find that we continue to struggle.  Thank God that He is so merciful for it is through these struggles the He reinforces our dependence on Our Savior and He draws us closer to Himself and to the time that we will spend eternity with Him. 

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank You for sending Your Son to spare us from our sin debt.  We thank You for Your mercy as You see us struggle against sin in our lives.  We thank You for Your grace as You provide Your Holy Spirit to aid us in departing from our errant ways.  May Your countenance shine upon as we turn away from our old lives and learn to live according to Your kingdom principles here on earth.