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Gleanings From The Word

Tag: gospel

  • Safe in the arms of God.

    Safe in the arms of God.

    Baseball umpire indicating "safe"

    Safe!

    Safe! What a wonderful call for any baseball base runner to hear an umpire call. It’s also good for the rest of us to know we are safe in a tumultuous world that seems to have lost its mind. Christians are safe in the arms of God.

    Don’t misunderstand. We are not exempt from trials, tribulations, illness, crime, poor choices, physical harm, economic downturns, or natural disasters. We’re not safe from persecution, or temptation, or relational ills. All of those are part and parcel of living in a fallen, son-filled world.

    What are we safe from? In the words of the hymn “Before the Throne of God Above” …

    Before the throne of God above. I have a strong and perfect plea. A great High Priest whose name is love, who ever lives and pleads for me. My name is graven on his hands, my name is written on his heart. I know that while in Heav’n he stands no tongue can bid me thence depart.

    Every element of our salvation is our God. He calls us and gives us the faith and courage to receive Him. He dies to pay the cost of our sin, and He dwells within us to make us more like him.

    Once we are His, we are His forever. Safe in the arms of God. We can’t mess up so badly that we fall completely from Grace. We may face consequences and discipline, but never rejection. Nothing can tear us away from him, or as the song says, “none can bid me hence depart”.

    I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. John 10:28 ESV

    For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39 ESV

    Some will say that gives us freedom to sin. Paul clearly tells us that isn’t the case.

     For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means Romans 6:14-15 ESV

    We need to understand that we are secure in Christ. That knowledge should help us understand how deep His love and mercy for us is. That understanding leads us to love Him more and to desire to please Him. That desire makes it harder for us to sin and easier to repent. 

    My friends, as believers, you are safe in the arms of God. Now live in that wonderful news.

    Be blessed

    Kevin

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  • What Do You See? Opening our spiritual eyes.

    What Do You See? Opening our spiritual eyes.

    stylized Adam and Eve hiding in the garden

    We aren’t very far into the Bible when things go terribly wrong. You know the story.

    Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.  For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Genesis 3:1-8 esv

    Now, prior to this, both Adam and Eve walked in the garden in a close personal relationship. They knew the Lord as intimately and personally as it is possible for a person to know Him. They understood His love, compassion and mercy.

    What changed? The obvious answer is they sinned. Yet, what moved them from joy to fear?

    With sin-filled eyes, we cannot see God as He truly is. They now saw God through distorted lenses and created a harsh God of their own imaginings. It’s what we do.

    Some see God as a Monty Python-like foot ready to stomp on us for any sin. Others see Him as a cosmic genie there to grant our every wish and desire. For some people, he’s a doddering old man who either cannot see our sins or, if he does, is unable or unwilling to do anything about them.

    There are those who pretend that He doesn’t exist. The great civilizations of the past imagined Him as a pantheon of very flawed human-like capricious gods.

    The truth is that the God revealed to us in the Bible is none of those things. He is benevolent, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. He loves us so much that Jesus came and died so that we could be restored into a right relationship with Him and be adopted into His family.

    He is too beautiful and wonderful for us to understand with our sin-filled minds. Even as believers whose sins have been atoned for do not yet see him clearly, but the day will come when we will. He will open our spiritual eyes to see the truth.

    For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 1 Corinthians 13:32

    I can hardly wait. What about you?

    Be blessed

    Kevin

    Gleanings From The Word – Experience an extraordinary God in ordinary life. 

    On a similar theme

    Do you see things through the eyes of faith?