Understanding
the Christian Life
Part 1
Here are some things all practicing Christians need to know when trying to understand the Christian life. You’ll always have hurdles to overcome in life, but when they do show up, it’s your perspective on those things which is really paramount. Remember, in life, no matter what happens to you, it is by no means more important that what you tell your self about it. If you break a leg, and it’s the end of everything, then it REALLY IS! However, if you break a leg, and you decide that it is not forever and just for now, and you’ll be back on your feet in no time, then that is REALLY HOW IT IS! Just keep in mind the young girl who is a surfer, who lost her arm to a shark while surfing. She is back doing it again today, with one arm. Think of those hurdles in life as a privilege to grow, to reach. Faith is often put to the test to produce patience, and that in itself has practical results for making you a more fully developed person and Christian in Christ.
If you are someone who has a hard time understanding the trials that we all go through, the answers are readily available from Jesus. You need only to ask, but you must ask knowing you will receive an answer. How that answer will come is sometimes a mystery, for it is often tailored just to you and not for anyone else. God often works in this way, that is why he never gets the front page. All too often he is quietly working in the lives of those around us, sometimes with amazing results, yet we never hear about it. But if you just can’t settle things inside your own heart, whether or not you will hear from God, then for sure, you will not. All arguments about God begin and end with his existence. They all lead down the same road. If God does exist, then there are millions of points of logic that follow, but if he does not exist, then those points are replaced by another group of points of logic. Settle this inside your own heart and mind and rely on the fact that we never need to question the love of Christ for us as his children, and you will receive an answer if you are not clogging the connection between you and God with the wrong things, things that don’t belong, in your life.
What can we truly depend upon in this life? As we have seen, in both government and the public eye, money comes and goes like the wind. Fame and stature also can be whisked away or otherwise perverted and the rest of our lives can take a nasty turn down a dark alley. Someone can own a business today, and go to work on her every day for five years, then the government crashes and the business is gone overnight, or else the person dies suddenly and his business is turned over to others, sometimes it is merely closed and the assets sold off. And what has it gotten the owner?
Plant your root firmly in the ground and refuse to budge when those trials come to your life. We learn in these trails whom God really is, and this will not only please God, but it is a lesson we will carry with us forever, a lesson we could have not gotten any other way. For if Jesus was here with us in a temple somewhere, a place we could easily see him with our own eyes, would not you and I be constantly entreating him for assistance, and when that assistance was not in our best interest, we, as typical humans, would then convince ourselves that God could be manipulated our way. How blessed are you who have not seen but hold fast to the knowledge of who God is.
God cannot be manipulated by man, or any other for that matter. So, therefore, when you are tempted to go against God’s word, never ascribe that temptation to God himself. It is our own fallen and wrong desires that bring about the results to sin, and then once we have gone against the reality of God, we have broken the tie that should be binding us, our life line, and this break leads to death.
Keep in mind that we, as his children, are given every good and perfect thing directly from the throne of God, and this goodness has no sun up or sun down, no bad hair days, no sense of time as we have. What came from God to mankind as good 500 years ago is still the same goodness we today can receive. Not only has God never changed from the beginning, but there is very little within mankind that has changed in all of recorded history. Any student of history knows this and even our fairy tails and stories from long ago still apply and make sense to us today. How God has put up with it all this time, is a mystery to me, except that I know as a part of who he is, he understands the deepest parts of mankind, and his mercy and justice is always meted out with that understanding in mind.
Self control is a big linchpin of knowing God. Putting the tongue under submission is a huge part of doing the right thing, being quicker to listen and less purposed to say what we have on our minds. The same can be said of anger, which serves no one, not man or God’s purposes. If this is God’s universe and his reality, and not ours, then it is in our best interest to listen to what God has to say on everything, for there will come a time when there is no buffer zone between us and the immediate perception of God’s presence, and what will you do then? There will be no tantrums, no insisting on our own way, no crying and complaining, for those things are adverse to fitting into God’s universe. We people only seem to get away with it right now, but actually, we benefit from a rich storehouse of grace.
Our happiness with God has much to do with “programming” ourselves to follow his ways. To understand who he is and listen to his word, then turn around and insist upon what feels right to us, or what we have always done, when it directly conflicts with what God would have us do, and how he would have us live, is to deny the reality that we know, as children of God, that is really around us. A reality we accept by faith based upon who God is, and what he says to us and about us. Our existence here on the Earth is an anomaly in the universe, created for us to learn, by reliance on who God is, to ensure that those who choose to be on God’s side of things while not being able to see him, or figure him out, or know what his next move may be in our lives, will one day be cemented in our future positions in eternity knowing as we do what lives we had before, and what havoc and trials separation from the creator of the universe brings about. There will be no blind spot. There will be no doubt, for the horrors of mankind’s life here on Earth will be fresh in the minds of everyone who ever lived for ever an ever. The great thing though, is that we then will never have to fear that this life will ever be repeated, for eternity will be so far above our current existence that deviation from the presence of God will be anathema for us.
Keeping this reality of God in mind, despite what we see, we must then make sure we do not ignore the things we are called to such as care for the needy, whomever they may be, those usually who have no assistance and have fallen on hard times. To ignore the homeless, for instance, is to mock the one who created them. Even worse to arrogantly mistreat them as though they were worthless. If we could see who God is most pleased with today, by being present suddenly in the future, we would surely be shocked by the great crowd of unknown people who would be honored as God’s children, for his ways are not our ways, and his requirements for being pleased have little to do with the way in which we live, and the things we value.
If you are someone who has a hard time understanding the trials that we all go through, the answers are readily available from Jesus. You need only to ask, but you must ask knowing you will receive an answer. How that answer will come is sometimes a mystery, for it is often tailored just to you and not for anyone else. God often works in this way, that is why he never gets the front page. All too often he is quietly working in the lives of those around us, sometimes with amazing results, yet we never hear about it. But if you just can’t settle things inside your own heart, whether or not you will hear from God, then for sure, you will not. All arguments about God begin and end with his existence. They all lead down the same road. If God does exist, then there are millions of points of logic that follow, but if he does not exist, then those points are replaced by another group of points of logic. Settle this inside your own heart and mind and rely on the fact that we never need to question the love of Christ for us as his children, and you will receive an answer if you are not clogging the connection between you and God with the wrong things, things that don’t belong, in your life.
What can we truly depend upon in this life? As we have seen, in both government and the public eye, money comes and goes like the wind. Fame and stature also can be whisked away or otherwise perverted and the rest of our lives can take a nasty turn down a dark alley. Someone can own a business today, and go to work on her every day for five years, then the government crashes and the business is gone overnight, or else the person dies suddenly and his business is turned over to others, sometimes it is merely closed and the assets sold off. And what has it gotten the owner?
Plant your root firmly in the ground and refuse to budge when those trials come to your life. We learn in these trails whom God really is, and this will not only please God, but it is a lesson we will carry with us forever, a lesson we could have not gotten any other way. For if Jesus was here with us in a temple somewhere, a place we could easily see him with our own eyes, would not you and I be constantly entreating him for assistance, and when that assistance was not in our best interest, we, as typical humans, would then convince ourselves that God could be manipulated our way. How blessed are you who have not seen but hold fast to the knowledge of who God is.
God cannot be manipulated by man, or any other for that matter. So, therefore, when you are tempted to go against God’s word, never ascribe that temptation to God himself. It is our own fallen and wrong desires that bring about the results to sin, and then once we have gone against the reality of God, we have broken the tie that should be binding us, our life line, and this break leads to death.
Keep in mind that we, as his children, are given every good and perfect thing directly from the throne of God, and this goodness has no sun up or sun down, no bad hair days, no sense of time as we have. What came from God to mankind as good 500 years ago is still the same goodness we today can receive. Not only has God never changed from the beginning, but there is very little within mankind that has changed in all of recorded history. Any student of history knows this and even our fairy tails and stories from long ago still apply and make sense to us today. How God has put up with it all this time, is a mystery to me, except that I know as a part of who he is, he understands the deepest parts of mankind, and his mercy and justice is always meted out with that understanding in mind.
Self control is a big linchpin of knowing God. Putting the tongue under submission is a huge part of doing the right thing, being quicker to listen and less purposed to say what we have on our minds. The same can be said of anger, which serves no one, not man or God’s purposes. If this is God’s universe and his reality, and not ours, then it is in our best interest to listen to what God has to say on everything, for there will come a time when there is no buffer zone between us and the immediate perception of God’s presence, and what will you do then? There will be no tantrums, no insisting on our own way, no crying and complaining, for those things are adverse to fitting into God’s universe. We people only seem to get away with it right now, but actually, we benefit from a rich storehouse of grace.
Our happiness with God has much to do with “programming” ourselves to follow his ways. To understand who he is and listen to his word, then turn around and insist upon what feels right to us, or what we have always done, when it directly conflicts with what God would have us do, and how he would have us live, is to deny the reality that we know, as children of God, that is really around us. A reality we accept by faith based upon who God is, and what he says to us and about us. Our existence here on the Earth is an anomaly in the universe, created for us to learn, by reliance on who God is, to ensure that those who choose to be on God’s side of things while not being able to see him, or figure him out, or know what his next move may be in our lives, will one day be cemented in our future positions in eternity knowing as we do what lives we had before, and what havoc and trials separation from the creator of the universe brings about. There will be no blind spot. There will be no doubt, for the horrors of mankind’s life here on Earth will be fresh in the minds of everyone who ever lived for ever an ever. The great thing though, is that we then will never have to fear that this life will ever be repeated, for eternity will be so far above our current existence that deviation from the presence of God will be anathema for us.
Keeping this reality of God in mind, despite what we see, we must then make sure we do not ignore the things we are called to such as care for the needy, whomever they may be, those usually who have no assistance and have fallen on hard times. To ignore the homeless, for instance, is to mock the one who created them. Even worse to arrogantly mistreat them as though they were worthless. If we could see who God is most pleased with today, by being present suddenly in the future, we would surely be shocked by the great crowd of unknown people who would be honored as God’s children, for his ways are not our ways, and his requirements for being pleased have little to do with the way in which we live, and the things we value.
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