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When we are troubled, we cannot see the light that shines brightly in the middle of darkness. Jesus must east your mind.

Matthew 11:28-30 is a well-known scripture passage where Jesus says to us: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

People were troubled.  Jesus knew that.  He knows it is the same today.  Many of us are constantly troubled and burdened. We are weary as the waters all around us are swift and troubled. In times past, people were troubled mostly by their adversaries. But today we are troubled by our adversaries and more so by those close to us.

The times are difficult for us. Often, we can see no safe way to keep moving forward even with those we know and love.  We are troubled by waters that should be calmed by those around and over us, but they do not calm them. Sometimes we see so much trouble that we fail to see the trouble God wants to bring to the troubles we face.

The Lord is our bridge over the troubled waters we face. God is a master at troubling what troubles us. When things all around you seem to be about to take you under, remember that God has control of you and He has control of the waters around you too. Don’t be troubled; He will ease your mind.

When Moses brought the Israelites out of Egypt and they stood at the edge of the Red Sea, he commanded them to “stand still and get ready to see the salvation of the Lord.”  They had the sea in front of them and Pharoah and His army behind them. They did not see a way to safety. But God did.

God had Moses to tell the people to settle down and see what was about to happen. God had to first ease their minds of fear before they would see the bridge He had prepared for them. The path to safety was across the Red Sea; without boats they would cross the sea on dry land by the hand of God.

God always starts helping us by getting us to a place where He can ease our minds about the burdens and troubles we face. He did it with Noah in the way people lived before the flood.  He did it with Job when he lost all he had.  He did it with David when he was chased by those who wanted to kill him.

It doesn’t matter what is your situation, the Lord is always saying “let me ease your mind” of what is troubling you so you can walk through what is before you.  If you are weary and feeling heavy ladened, take Him at His word. Go to Him and ask for rest from your troubles and He will ease your mind.

When the things you face won’t change, the Lord will ease your mind so He can change you. He does this best by helping to ease our minds about what we see.  When your mind is eased about what is before you, then you can see clearly what is waiting for you. When you cannot stop the rain, He eases your mind by changing how you dress for the weather.

You cannot see the bridge He is ready to build over the troubled waters of your life until you allow Him to ease your mind of the troubles you see. A troubled mind cannot see the light that shines in the middle of darkness.

Things are really tough in the world today. Things are backwards. Our leaders should be smarter than us but often they are not.  They make things worse for us because they are not what is best for us. We are troubled at home; at school; at work; at church and almost in every place we go.  It seems we cannot find a place where we can relax and feel safe from others or from the things others do.

But like a bridge over troubled waters, learn to take your troubles to the Lord and leave them there. Look for the bridge to take your health, your child, your spouse, your job, whatever it is, take it to Him and leave it with Him. Seeing and knowing that He is your bridge is what should ease your mind of what troubles you.

No matter how weary or tired you may be, learn to walk on His life.  It is the bridge that will take you through the things that challenge your life. The call to “Come unto Me” is a call to have your mind eased of the burdens you face daily. Don’t allow the size of your troubles to attack your mind and make you feel small and weary. Picture this.  It is ok to feel small when you know you are in the Lord’s hands.

Answer His call by realizing He is the bridge over all your troubles. Walk on Him and your troubles will learn you are going to live at peace no matter what you face. Let Him ease your mind so that your troubles are pained by trying to bring pain to you.

Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

My beliefs and my words do not change Who the Lord is or What God does.

Romans 10:9-10 says, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Paul writes from Rome, first to the Jews and then to the gentiles.  He is reminding the Jews how many of them lived a believing life but not a confessing life.

At the time he wrote this, Paul was saying that many Jews believed that Jesus was Lord but just as many would not confess that God had raised Jesus from the dead. They valued what man might think of them more than the value they placed on being saved. What man thought of them bothered them more than what God thought of them.

But the Word in Romans is not limited to the Jews.  It is also written for the gentiles (non-Jewish people or people who are not of Jewish religion).  I imagine many of us reading my messages are gentiles – believers Yes – but gentiles, nevertheless. Paul has a warning for us.  Pay attention to how the Jewish leaders lived and you live differently. While the salvation of the Lord is a free gift to us, having the gift it will cost you something just like it cost the Jewish leaders of old.  If you have the gift of salvation, it will cost you to give up on what you want to think of yourself and on what you want man to think of you.

As I have watched my life, it came to me to look at Romans 10:9 this way.  I will confess to God and to others that Jesus Christ is exactly Who He says He is in the scripture.  And I will believe in my heart that God raised Him from the dead. Note that I am not saying I will live a life free of sin.  Sin is sin.  It means we come short of living the way the Lord us to live.  But sin does not change who the Lord is or what God has done and will do for us.

What I now know is that Romans 10:9 says to me that while I am a sinful man, I should never confess something about the Lord that is not of the scripture.  And I should never believe God has done or will do anything different from what He has said.  I should value the Lord more than I value myself or man.

You see, my desire to be valued by man could cause me to confess what I do not believe or to believe what I do not live out. My desires and my beliefs do not change Who the Lord is or Who God is. Who God is and what Jesus did for us is not wrong, but I could be.  I want to live a confessing and believing life. And I want that life to be before God alone.  Man can catch a glimpse of my life, but my life is not lived for the glory of what man says or for the glory of what I want.

So, confessing with my mouth that the Lord Jesus is the Christ means to me that I know He is more than the Son of God. He is the Son of God and everything else scripture says.  I’m not just intellectually saying I believe He is Christ. I am saying He is all that He says He is. I am saying, I will try to live life based on all that He says He is.

Believing in my heart that God raised Jesus from the dead means to me that I know God raised Jesus from death just as He said He would. Jesus did not stay dead.  He is alive just as He was before He came to earth.  And because He is alive, we have salvation through our belief in Him.

Believing in my heart means that I believe everything God said about Jesus.  Confessing with my mouth means that I speak everything Jesus and God has told me about Jesus. I want to live the way the Jewish leaders of old could not live.  I want to use their poor example to move me to a place where I value living before God and Jesus more than I value living before man.

Check your own life.  Ask yourself if you are living a confessing and believing life.  Ask yourself if your praise of the Lord is meant to mean more than for the Lord than for man.  Ask yourself if your belief is more to set you apart among man than to establish a place for you with the Lord. Ask yourself if you value what others think of you as much as you value what you hope the Lord will think of you.  Ask yourself if your presence means more about how you look and feel before man and others or how you believe the Lord and God would look upon and feel about you carry yourself.

Confessing and believing. What life are we living? Learn to live a confessing and believing life. You will have something of value that man cannot understand.

Live a Delivered life. Love you

God is always looking to help the many by helping the one

When evil looks like it is good.

Genesis 50:19-20 shares the conversation Joseph had with his brothers after their father died.  The brothers had sold Joseph into slavery years earlier and now they were all in Egypt where Joseph had risen from slave to second in command to Pharoah of all Egypt.

In the scripture, Joseph says this to his brothers about what they had done to him and how he felt about it then. “do not be afraid, for am I in the place of God?  But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”

Joseph was saying to his brothers, “do not worry about what I might do to you now that our dad is dead.  I do not hold any grudge against you.  What you did to me years ago was evil, but God used that as an opportunity to do good for you today.”  Joseph was saying you did evil, but God used it to bring about His good.

If you remove the letter “d” from the word devil you will have the word “evil.”  The devil can do nothing but evil because it is who he is, and it is his name. Selling your brother into slavery was wrong.  That’s easy to see.  It’s easy for us to understand that God can use anything for our good.  But it is difficult for us to see the subtle evil that is all around us daily looking like it is good for us.

This deception all started in the garden of Eden when the serpent tricked Eve into believing God’s command to them was not good for them because it kept them from something better.  Remember, the devil can do no good so when you believe anything the devil says or does, no matter how good it may seem, you believe a lie.

Joseph probably didn’t realize at the time things were happening that God would use the evil his brothers did for Good. Joseph probably didn’t go to bed in prison saying God has a plan for him in all that he was facing. All Joseph could do was to continue to be faithful to God.

When we don’t understand why and what is happening around us, we will generally say “God has a plan.”  But this is really just an unbelieving way of saying since I cannot change things, I have to believe God can and He will. God does not always tell us He has a plan for all the things that happen with us. We would spoil His plans just as Eve did.

We do not get cancer so that God can use it as an opportunity to bring us to a saving faith.  Cancer is evil. It happens to many of us. The devil orchestrates evil against us, but God can use that evil to bring good to us. I know some of you may think that God does cause sickness so we can learn to value health.

I won’t argue that He does or does not cause sickness. But if and when God brings a sickness upon us, it is not evil but good.  Everything God does towards us is good just as everything the devil does towards us is evil.  God’s good can never be mistaken as evil but the evil the devil does can sometimes look like it is good for us.

How then do we learn to recognize evil when it looks like it is good? Well, the answer is simple.  The devil uses evil to appeal to something for yourself.  The devil wants to destroy you and those around you by making you make choices that seem like they are good for you.  You cannot see evil in what is before you because you want to see the good that can happen to you.

God is never just after satisfying your selfish desires.  He is after those around you, and He will use you to get to others.  You can recognize His good more easily when you start seeing the impact your decisions will have on those around you that God loves. God’s good is always looking for ways to help the mass never just the individual.

The devil destroyed Eve, then Adam and then many more because each person chose not to sacrifice something they had for something greater that they could not see. God used the sacrifice of His One and Only Son to save all who will believe on Him.

If you are not willing to sacrifice what you have for the unknown God may have planned, you may never be able to recognize the evil that looks good.  Bring your good to all the evil around you and many will have good in their lives they could not have had before.

Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

People will not speak to you when they know you will not listen to anything they have to say.

John 9:27 says,” I told you already and you did not listen.  Why do you want to hear it again?”

Jesus had restored sight to a blind man.  The religious leaders asked him who had restored his sight.  He told them it was a man called Jesus.  They didn’t want to believe this, so they kept asking him the same question.

Instead of asking the man the same question over and again, perhaps they should have asked themselves why they did not listen to the man.  In a way the man was saying to the religious leaders, “you people are so harsh in heart that no one can speak to you. You don’t listen so why should I talk.”

Long before this, we see this very thing in 1 Samuel 25:3 when scripture describes a man named Nabal in this way.  It says, “But the man (Nabal) was harsh and evil in his doings.  And in 1 Samuel 25:17 it says, “For he is such a scoundrel that one cannot speak to him.”

Nabal had disrespected King David and his men, but he rejected this when his people told him what he had done. David was going to kill Nabal and his family for his disrespect. Describing Nabal as a scoundrel seems to be a harsh, but God wants us to understand how being harsh of heart keeps us from listening to wisdom and insight.

A scoundrel is a dishonorable person, a person who is mean and unprincipled and who lacks morale integrity.  This person will often act badly towards others, and they will not care about that.  They will act harmful towards the harmless and with evil towards the good.

This was an accurate description of the religious leaders of Jesus time.  They did not care about others or the condition of others.  They were mean and evil and hateful toward those who were the least among people.  They sought respect but they did not give respect.

They wanted others to listen to them, but it was hard for others to speak to them. They were the smartest and most intelligent of people, yet they acted with stupidity and without reason. This is why they could not listen to anyone. They could not speak about themselves, only about others.

Because they had position and status they believed this meant they had knowledge and understanding superior to others. Unfortunately, today we have many people around us like this and we are forced to live with the decisions they make.

The Lord wants us to know that having good understanding and wisdom does not come to us because of the position or status we have in life. And likewise, having position and status does not mean we have good understanding and wisdom and intelligence.

We are all just a short distance from being like and walking in the steps of Nabal. When it is hard for others to hear us, it will be hard for them to speak to us.  If the Lord cannot speak to us, we will not be able to hear Him.  The Lord is always trying to answer the questions we would never ask ourselves.

Today, perhaps He is saying to us, the reason we do not get the answers we want in life is because we are asking the wrong questions.  Perhaps we want Him to listen to us more than we want to listen to Him.

Perhaps the reason we do not make wise decisions is because we do not listen to someone who makes better decisions than us. If we never ask if we are the reason things are going bad, we will likely never accept when others tell us we are the reason things are bad. If things are not going well for you, it may be because you do not hear when you are told you are not acting well towards others.

Nabal acted with disrespect toward David.  He didn’t think much of David.  Nabal was stupid for behaving the way he did.  Unfortunately, today we have a lot more people like Nabal around us. We could be one of those.

It doesn’t matter that you are successful, educated or highly placed in society, when you do not ask yourself if you are the problem you always see with others, you will likely say things that make no sense to those looking for you to make sense in what you say.

If you want people to listen to you, you must be someone people can speak to. The Lord is our example. We can always speak to Him. He will always be there waiting to hear us. When all we want is for people to hear us and go away, they will hear, they will go away and they will never return.

Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

When you uncover the reasons you disbelieve, you can learn to believe what you didn’t believe before.

Uncover it! That’s my message today.

1 John 4:6 Says this:  We are of God.  He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us.

Matthew 28:19 says this: Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Believers know God so they can hear what other believers say about God.  People who do not know God cannot hear what is said about Him. They hear but they cannot understand. This sounds contrary to the call to go and make disciples. How can we do that if the nonbeliever cannot hear what is said about God?

Learning to become a believer means uncovering what keeps you in a state of disbelieving.  A believer is someone who has simply learned to believe things about the Lord what they once disbelieved.  A believer has learned to uncover and overcome the thing that made them disbelieve.

The Lord wants the believer to help the nonbeliever to learn about what they are missing. Our work is to help them learn to uncover the knowledge they are missing about the Lord.  When you cannot uncover what keeps you from believing, you cannot hear what you should believe.

Many people don’t see an issue with not believing in the Lord because they cannot see a benefit to believing while they are living.  Also, they cannot see a consequence of not believing because to them death is the end of life. People like this choose to live in a way that is comfortable for them. They never uncover what keeps them from becoming believers because their belief is to disbelieve.

The believer knows nonbelief is a problem.  While the nonbeliever looks for proof that God is real, the believer has uncovered enough insight about God to know that there is nothing that can disprove that God is not Who He says He is.

The nonbeliever tries to validate the truth of why they disbelieve.  But the believer, by uncovering and learning, lives to validate why they cannot disbelieve. Uncovering what keeps you from disbelieving will make you a more effective disciple for the nonbeliever.

The Holy Spirit will help you learn to uncover the things that would make you disbelieve. He will help you to:

Uncover and know what makes you disbelieve the Lord and to and never allow it to go hidden.

He will help you to own that you are the reason you believe as you do or that you disbelieve.  No one else can keep you from either believing or not believing.  The Holy Spirit will help you personalize your problem.  It is yours to own.

He will help you to attack the problem of disbelief with belief. Yes, I mean attack it. He will help you to challenge your attitude, behavior, conduct or whatever it is.  He will help you change what you must change so that you believe what you must believe about the Lord.

He will help you to overcome what keeps you where you are before what keeps you where you are overcomes you. When you uncover what keeps you back, move forward so it cannot come back to you. Disbelief wants you to stay where you are believing just as you do.

Uncover the things that hinder your belief, then you will be a better help and witness to those who are held by their own disbelief.

When God uncovers for you things about your belief that no man could know, you should believe more of the things that only God can uncover about you.

Live a Delivered Life. Love you

He is Risen! He did not stay dead!!

Resurrection Sunday 2025!

Matthew 28:1-8

“Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, came to see the tomb.  And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat on it.

His countenance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow.  And the guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. But the angel answered and said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus Who was crucified.  He is not here; for He is risen, as He said.

Come, see the place where the Lord lay.  And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead, and indeed He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him.  Behold, I have told you. So, they went out quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to bring His disciple’s word.”

Until then, the disciples and many believers had known Jesus as Christ, the Son of God.  But on this day, they will come to know Him as Christ, their Lord and Savior.  Today is the day we acknowledge that Jesus the Son of God was raised from the dead and became Jesus, Son of God, and Savior to all those who believe on Him.

On a day like today, with the resurrection of Christ from the dead, the relationship with the Lord of every believer and of every person who wants to believe, becomes personal. Christ was crucified. The Son of God was buried in a tomb.  But Christ the Son of God and now savior of the world was raised from the dead.

To those who believe, now at the dawning of every day we do not have to go to a tomb to see Him.  He lives in our lives.  We simply need to never allow the stone of unbelief to be rolled across our hearts.

To those who believe, the Lord can still send His angel to us, but we have the privilege to have the Lord Himself come to us and encourage our faith and our belief.  His life in us is His proof to us that we do not need to be afraid He may be a dead Savior. He lives in us.

To those who believe, because of a day like today, we can go tell the world of the place where the living Lord now wants to go. Much like He went before His believers to Galilee, today He is now going to the hearts of every believer.

Believers don’t need to go before Him to any place.  He is coming to you.  To those who believe, their heart is the place where He will see them.  Their heart is the place in which He will show Himself in all the fullness of His life.

So, as we acknowledge His resurrection from the dead, His risen life, and His new life in us, lets go out quickly today and every day from the tombs of our old lives.  Let’s allow Him to bring to life a new life in us, a life that He shares with us.

And let’s run with joy among all peoples and bring them word that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, is indeed risen from death and alive in heaven with God and in the hearts of all those who believe on Him.

Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

The devil cannot claim the person the Lord has claimed for Himself.

James 4:7 tells us this.  “Submit yourselves therefore to God.  Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”  There have been times in my life where I have gotten this backwards.  Because I can be stubborn, I have on occasion resisted what God wanted me to be and to submit to what the devil offered me.  What about you?

When the Holy Spirit uses the word “therefore” when speaking to us, He is saying there is a good reason for you to hear and understand what I am about to say.  Therefore, James makes it clear that because of the power of our sin nature, we should submit to God and resist the devil.

The devil is always on the prowl, lurking about to draw away from God those of us who are slow to submit to the Lord. Many believers would like to resist the evil of the world, but they simply do not know that to resist the devil they must resist themselves.

Listen, the devil wants you to get things backwards. The devil wants you to submit to yourself which sounds naturally right and to resist anything what would keep you from having the things you want in life. He wants to confuse you about what it means to submit to God.

If you are a child of God, then you can be certain the devil wants to entice you to submit to yourself. The devil knows he cannot be successful with his enticements when he goes up against someone fully submitted to God. Therefore, you should be quick to submit to God in everything you are.

Don’t believe that you are fighting to resist the devil only; your fight is to resist that part of you that can be drawn to the ways of the devil.  To resist you must submit. Submission is more than simply hearing and doing what God tells you to do at the moment.  Submission is saying to yourself you will look to be guided by the Lord in all that you are.

To submit means you wake up every day with a heart that is purposed to search diligently for more ways to submit to the Lord’s way while you resist having your own way. To submit to God is to say yes to all you know He wants of you and to be ready to say yes to all that you know He would like of you.

The devil would like you to believe you have many choices in life that you can make on your own because God gave you the ability to reason and to discern and to understand. Indeed, we have all this. Therefore, we must be even more willing to submit to the Lord the very things He has given to us so that we do not fall to our own ways.

Our submission will keep us looking toward and never away from the perfect way of God. Christ gives us but one choice about all things – that being to live for Him in submission to Him and guided by Him.  The devil cannot stand before the man who stands for God.

A man who submits finds the way to resist.  This man learns that the real issues of life are not the things concerning the world but whether that man sees life’s issues through the heart of the Lord. When we do not submit to the Lord, we may fall to the temptation to choose wrong over right.  We may fall to the temptation to choose selfishness over selflessness.  We may fall to the temptation of living in pride over living humbly.

If we do not submit to the Lord, we do not have what it takes to resist the devil. When we do not submit, we are like sheep without a shepherd. God’s promise today is as good as it was 2000 years ago and forever.  Submit to God and He will lay claim to you.  The devil cannot claim that which God claims for Himself.

The devil wants you to try to resist him without submission to the Lord.  But you must know that to submit to the Lord means you are strengthened to resist the devil. Do not let him fool you on this. If you learn to submit to the Lord, you will get to see the devil run from you and all that you know and love.

Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

When you rob yourself of the things others want to steal from you, things will go your way even if you don’t get your way.

Philippians 2:5 says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, Who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.”

Two young boys wanted a pony for Christmas.  On Christmas morning they went downstairs and found only a bunch of hay and manure under the Christmas tree.  The older boy cried “look at this mess, Christmas is ruined.”

The younger boy ran to the barn and came back with a shovel and started cleaning up the mess.  He said, “with all this manure around, there must be a pony here someplace.”  How is it that two people could have such different responses to the same thing?

Their thinking was different and because their thinking was different, they developed different attitudes that guided how they lived. The older boy thought about what he wanted but the younger boy thought about what he could find. 

Jesus didn’t think it was robbery for Him to be stripped of His place beside God and to come to earth to live as a mere man.  In a way, Jesus robbed Himself of His rightful place so that He could find some valuable things here on earth. He knew that with God in control, things would be ok even if they didn’t seem to go His way.

In much that way, the younger boy robbed himself of his disappointment.  He knew that happiness and joy cannot live where disappointment dwells.  So, he chose to think about what he could find more than about what he did not get.  In a way he was saying to himself “things will be ok even if I don’t get my way.”

Unfortunately, many of us today are like the older boy. We focus on reacting to who is robbing us of the things that are ours. Perhaps we should consider it a blessing sometimes when we don’t get all the things we want.  Having all that we desire would likely lead us to being selfish. Selfish people are not our favorite people.

So, we are encouraged today to let this mind that was in Christ be in each of us.  And although we are encouraged to want the whole mind of Christ, the Word today is talking about a specific mind and way of thinking that Christ demonstrated toward His life. What mind is this you ask?

Well, it is the mind to know this is who I am, but I want to live the way God wants me to live. Jesus knew that people could not take from Him what was not theirs to take.  People could not rob Him of what could not be stolen. People could not take from Him anything He treasured more than what He wanted to give them.

So, today why don’t you start a life of having this mind of Christ for yourself.  Learn to rob yourself of the things that others would want to take from you.  Rob yourself of the thinking that you have a rightful place anyplace but in the presence of the Lord.

Rob yourself of the thinking that you have a right to anything but the thing that God gives you.  Rob yourself of the need to be accepted by anyone or anything save that God accepts you.

When you learn to let this mind to be in you as it is in Christ, you will develop an attitude of being like Christ. Your attitude is the way you react and respond to the things that happen with and around you daily.  Your attitude will ultimately influence how you live and the behaviors you demonstrate and more importantly the way you are received in the world.  Attitude is a choice.  It is not set in stone.  Rob yourself of the thinking that will keep you from having the mind of Christ, and the heart of Christ and the attitude of Christ.

Much of the good in life is found in how you think about what life is doing to you. You cannot have a pony without having some hay and some manure.  If you react to the mess in your life in a way that is a mess, life will likely always be a mess for you.

Your life follows your thinking.  Your life may be a mess not because of what is happening to you but because of the way you think about what is happening around you and the attitude by which you choose to respond to life.

Start robbing yourself of your way of thinking.  With the Lord, things will be ok, even if you do not get your way.  Let this too be your mind.

Live a Delivered Life. Love you.

Don’t be so stuck in your ways that you miss the target of living the Way of the Lord

We don’t learn because we won’t change.

Luke 22:67: “If You are the Christ, tell us.”

I’m sure some of you have heard the saying “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” There are many instances in the Word where Jesus says this or something similar to this. Typically, He directs this comment at people whom He know will never believe what He says.

In some ways I think of people like this as those who itch to know something they can deny so they can believe more strongly what they want to believe. People like this don’t really look to direct their belief toward what is the truth; they look to make the truth contrary to what they believe.

In their minds, the thing that is contrary cannot be the thing that is true.  I know this will make no sense to us, but it is the case today more often than not.  We reject the truth because people make it contrary to the thing they want to believe.

Jesus responded to their request by saying “If I tell you, you will by no means believe.”  Yea, this sounds a lot like saying, if I tell you, you won’t believe.  Instead of rejecting what we believe because it is contrary to the truth, we want to stay the same as we are, so we reject what is contrary to who we are.

Jesus knows that those of us like this are just itching for an opportunity to prove what we believe more than to accept what we should believe.  He won’t give us the chance to do this with His Word.

One of the reasons we don’t have a closer relationship with the Lord is because we won’t give up a close relationship with what we believe now and with who we are now.  We cannot fit the Lord into our beliefs; we must change our beliefs to fit with who the Lord is.

And if we do not have a closer relationship with the Lord because we won’t change, could it be that we don’t have closer relationships with others because we don’t change?  I think so.  Some of us are so resistant to being told the truth that we will say we are fine with being who we are just as we are.

This is just another way of rejecting what should be for your life so you can hang onto what should change about your life. Jesus knew this about the people in His time and He knew that we would be this way today, so He specifically tells us we won’t believe.

So, what will you do now?  Ask yourself, what things do I want to believe and to be and to do that keep me from growing in the way the Lord wants me to grow?  What things do I hang onto that keep me from falling into the freedom to be something greater?

Jeremiah 10:24 says, “O Lord, correct me, but with justice; Not in Your anger, lest you bring me to nothing.” Don’t be so set in your ways that you are stuck in ways that are not of the Lord. We can work really hard at staying the same, as many of us do.  Or we can make staying the same really hard for us because we accept the truths the Lord shares with us daily.

Lord, correct me when I am wrong.  Lord temper me when I am right.  And Lord, even correct me when I am right and lead me gently in your Truth always.  Don’t fight to stay the same; fight to be careful to change so you can stay with the Lord.

Live a Delivered Life. Love you.

The Lord does not want us to fear Him. Perhaps more than that, He is fearful we may not know Him like we should.

Proverbs 1:7 says “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

I have often wondered why there is no little instruction book for life.  Some of us would say that would be the Bible.  But I don’t think so.  If you want to assemble a new bicycle, you must follow the assembly instructions. We don’t have anything like that for life.

Perhaps we don’t have an instruction book for life because what we need more is knowledge and wisdom to guide the decisions we make in life.  Unlike a bicycle which can be assembled over and again following the same instructions, life is dynamic. There is no instruction manual to follow for the dynamic things we face daily.

So, I went to looking for the Lord to give me once and for all, the instructions I needed to learn how to live a faithful life that He would be happy with. As I looked into my thoughts, it came to me that I should consider what it is about my life that I feared the most.  I wondered what fear had to do with anything.

The Lord made me see that to have the knowledge I wanted for my life; I needed to deal effectively with the fears I had that kept me from the things I wanted.

The Lord helped me to understand how to have fear but never to be afraid of fear. I believe this is the same for us all.  If you want to know the Lord, you must learn to fear not knowing the Lord.

I know this may sound crazy, but the fear the Lord speaks of is the type of fear that brings us to love. It is the type of fear that causes us to seek what we are afraid to seek. It is the type of fear that causes us to be fearful but never to be afraid of being fearful.

The Lord does not permit us to fear to keep us under control; He permits us to fear so that we can be free from the control of fear.  We fear so that we can be brought to a place of understanding about Him. And understanding leads us to knowledge.  And knowledge leads us to see the Lord as He really is.

The fear of the Lord is a fear that leads to curiosity.  Curiosity then leads to search and respect.  Respect leads to Love.  Love leads us to learn how to live wisely.  This Love is what helps us to live our lives the way the Lord wants us to live just as if He gave us a step-by-step instruction book.

The Lord permits us all to be challenged by a fear that does not make us fearful.  It instead causes us to draw closer to Him so that we are wiser and more knowledgeable about Him and about life.

Ecclesiastes 12:13 says this: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all.” This is not fearing what God can do to us; it is fearing what you do not know about God. The Lord does not want you to be afraid of Him. Perhaps He is afraid you do not know Him like you should.

Live a Delivered Life. Love you.