Joshua 24:15 (NIV) "But if
serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day
whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River,
or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my
household, we will serve the LORD."
Salvation
I have good news for you, people. The past couple of weeks
I’ve written about the renewal of your spirit, I talked about serving the Lord,
the commandments of the Lord, praise and worship of the Lord and so many other
richly rewarding posts, but today I bring great news, Salvation! It is free,
not earned, nor bought or achieved by any works that your physical body can do,
it is FREE, given with the blood of the cross.
I may come off a little crass in saying serve, praise,
worship and be a part of a church. I think I make it sound like that’s your
only way into heaven. It is not so, all these posts are for the committed
Christian who understands what it means to serve our great and mighty God. We
don’t serve because it will BRING us closer to God; we serve because it helps us
FEEL closer to God.
Jesus calls us to be more than a mere Christian in word. If
you call yourself a Christian you need to know what it means to be Christlike
ie. a Christian. But if you’re a non-believer and searching for the peace
within your body and feel that there is a higher power governing you, you need
to meet my friend Jesus Christ.
I’ve have a few friends who say they won’t serve such a
cruel God, who maims and kills and destroys but they see all His blessed
goodness and would rather call the goodness by another name. Can I ask you
something? When you were a kid and you defied your mother and she disciplined
you, did you hate her? Did you turn away from her? Stop loving her? No, not
often.
God is like that. When we sin, sure He disciplines us but by
His saving grace we are forgiven. That is not to say that once you become a
Christian you carry on like nothing has happened spiritually to you. You don’t
drink booze, lay around reading and believing, sin and keep on sinning some
more because God will save you.
I know a few people who will believe in God and all the
testimony in the Old Testament but won’t believe Jesus is the Son of God.
They’ll believe God parted the sea, they’ll believe he wiped out humans on the
earth and saved the animals via Noah, they’ll believe a man resided in the
belly of a whale, but they won’t believe in the Immaculate Conception?
“Since no man is excluded from calling upon God the gate of
salvation is open to all. There is nothing else to hinder us from entering, but
our own unbelief.” ~ John Calvin
To be Christian, you believe that the blood of Christ was
shed for you, a sinner among men. You’re not going to become a Christian just
because it is a phase you’re going through. You’re going to become a Christian
because you feel empty inside; you feel like something is missing and you sense
that there IS a power out there that can fill the emptiness. Salvation! You
become saved by grace from carnal sin by the hanging on the cross of God’s Son.
Christians are called to serve the Lord. We feel a need to
do good, help others, attend church, praise and worship; it is part of our
spiritual Christian growth. But to others who don’t know Him who want to know
Him, salvation is yours for the asking and receiving. God extends His hand out
to you, sends a comforter by way of the Holy Spirit, and washes you in the
Blood of Christ so you too feel changed spiritually.
When this happens to you, you no longer hang onto just
reading and believing. You want to take ACTION, not because it brings you
closer to heaven, or brings you closer to God, but because you can sense the
power of God in you and this new spiritual growth calls out to you and propels
you into action. You crave being closer to God! All the reading and believing
in the world will not bring you into a closer relationship with God, action FOR
and TOWARDS God, will.
Through salvation, the will of God becomes evident. You
won’t miraculously stop sinning, but you have a clean slate FROM your sin to
begin anew. You will STRIVE to be Christ-like meaning you recognize any and all
of your sin and bring it to Jesus. Only He can wash away the unclean sin.
Yes, we are all sinners and fall short of the Glory of God
but salvation is the saving grace, through Jesus Christ. Read and believe this,
you CAN taste heaven and see what awaits you. You CAN drink from the cup of
salvation and walk eternally with Christ himself. You can take this to the
heavenly bank and cash it; God awaits YOU!
“If you have to be reasoned into Christianity, some wise
fellow can reason you out of it! If you come to Christ by a flash of the Holy
Spirit so that by intuition you know that you are God’s child, you know it by
the text but you also know it by the inner light, the inner illumination of the
Spirit, and no one can ever reason you out of it.” A.W. Tozer
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