INTRODUCTION, FOR THOSE WHO ARE NEW TO THIS SERIES, AND SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS BEFORE THIS SUMMER SERIES COMES TO AN END AND BEGINS AGAIN NEXT JULY –LORD WILLING
Because there seems to be such a lack of emphasis on God’s Word these days, I wanted to start a new series that will simply focus on God’s Word. So, Lord willing, at the beginning of each and every day I will just be sharing a picture with a Bible verse or a short passage from God’s Word with you, to help you start your day off right by helping to turn you focus off of the problems in your life and on to God, who desires for you to come to Him with all of your burdens and to surrender them to Him.
Maybe some of you are going through a trial right now and you need some hope and encouragement. I am at that place right now. Reading and reflecting on the truth of God’s Word always has a way of making us realize that God is truly aware of what we are going through. He knows our thoughts and sees every tear that we may cry.
Dear Christian, we must stay in God’s Word to keep us connected to Him so that His strength will be made perfect when we are weak, and so that He can give us His grace which is always sufficient to see us through the hard times in life. I know that you know this, but when we are in the valley, so to speak, when the circumstances are so overwhelming that we just feel as if we can’t make it through another day, God’s living Word breathes new life into our weary souls and enables us to carry on in His strength.
There were times when things were so hard in my life that I felt like God had abandoned me. But those of us who truly belong to Him (because we have place our trust in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross as being fully sufficient to pay for all of our sins and guilt, and know that He was also buried and that He gloriously arose from the dead for our justification), know that simply isn’t true! Jesus promised that He would never leave or forsake us! Therefore, we must live by faith and trust Him in the midst of our heartbreaking trials and difficult situations, regardless of our feelings of hurt and confusion.
After going through a very hard time in my life and realizing that I was beginning to have bitterness towards God and was starting to turn away from Him because He wasn’t doing what I had prayed, believed, and trusted that He would do, I was struck with the overwhelming reality of what a horrible thing I was doing and asked God to forgive me! I came to clearly realize that as Christians we are to love God for who He is; our love for Him should not be based on what He does or doesn’t do in our lives. We must love Him for what He has already done by providing salvation for us through the sacrifice of His one and only Son, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, who willingly died in our place and took upon Himself the full wrath that was intended for all of us because of our sins! What amazing love!
Sometimes we forget just how encouraging and living and active God’s Word really is and how it can address exactly what we are going through at the moment our lives start falling apart. But we must choose to trust Him and not become bitter and angry. We must cast our cares on Him and never forget that He is in control and aware of everything that is happening. We must also keep in mind that because sin entered the world when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, therefore sickness, death, and the evil, hurtful choices that people make by the acts of their own free will, are the consequences of that one sin. So, we must not blame God for the evil that befalls us at the hands of others. He is there waiting to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and to renew our minds with the truth of His Word, and to comfort us and heal us emotionally –IF we choose to turn to Him.
If someone has wronged you, express your hurt and anger that is within your broken and shattered heart to God. Make the choice to forgive the person before Him with your will and not based on your feelings, even if the time never comes for that person to express any sorrow to you for hurting you. Sadly, for some of us that day may never come when we hear the words, “I’m sorry.” Therefore, we are only hurting ourselves if we choose to store up bitterness and anger within our hearts.
Maybe you have been passed over time and time again for that much deserved promotion. Or maybe you have unjustly lost your job. Or it could be that you have taken a stand for what is Biblical and your warnings have been ignored and you have been made to feel as if you have no idea what you are talking about. Whatever you are going through, God’s Word will always bring you comfort, peace, encouragement and direction.
God’s Word also brings conviction, as well, which may be hard to receive at first, but if we are truly a child of God we should appreciate His loving discipline. If we choose to submit to His discipline, we will see how He will give us His strength to overcome sinful habits and cleanse us in order to use us for His glory. One day we will then be able to look back and appreciate how He intervened in our lives in order to prevent us from the consequences of the sin that we once clung to and refused to turn from.
And, oh, the many warnings in Scripture that God has given us to warn us about how spiritual deception and the many false teachers that will arise in the last days, and the importance of knowing His Word and testing the teachings of everyone we listen to so that we will not be deceived! These verses will also be presented to you in this daily series.
All of these important topics that I briefly mentioned to you in this post will be addressed through these daily verses to help keep you focused on the KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS – Jesus Christ — and to guide you along life’s way.
For those of you who have yet to place your trust in Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and glorious resurrection from the dead as providing the only way to reconcile sinful man with a thrice Holy God, and are instead continuing to wrongly believe that your good works will earn God’s acceptance, I pray that you will choose to place your trust in Jesus Christ alone, very soon! Tomorrow is promised to no one, and your eternal destiny depends upon the choice that you make concerning Jesus Christ:
“He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” (John 3:36)
Please consider reading the gospel of John or the book of Romans, and pray for God to reveal His truth to you. Instead of guilt, regret, fear and sorrow, you can be forgiven for your sins — no matter what you may have done! If you choose to place your trust in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, He will free you from condemnation, remove the heavy burden of sorrow and regret, and fill you with His peace that surpasses all human understanding. He will transform your thinking and your life as you spend time reading the truth of His Word, and He will use all that you have been through for His glory to reach those who are still in bondage to their sins, because they have not yet heard the good news of the Biblical gospel and made that choice to believe the truth about who Jesus Christ is and all that He accomplished for us through His sinless life, His death in our place, and His glorious resurrection from the dead,and all that His Word, the Bible, has to say.
During the first week of July I prayerfully chose Scriptures that would be encouraging for you. Then we looked at Scriptures concerning what Jesus Christ said about Himself as He spoke figuratively — not literally — to present spiritual truths about Himself, and then we continued with verses focusing on the theme of I AM the Alpha and Omega verses which gives evidence to the fact that Jesus Christ truly is God!
Then we focused on verses that shows the love, strength, and peace that awaits you if you will choose to turn to Him in the midst of your trials and moments of despair. If you have placed your trust in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation you have the assurance that He will never leave or forsake you! If you have not yet come to the point of realizing that your good works can never earn your way into heaven and that you are a sinner in the eyes of a thrice Holy God, turn to Him now. If you believe that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, that He lived the perfect, sinless life that you and I could never live, and that He died in your place for your sins and arose from the dead for your justification, then reach out and receive His forgiveness and His love that awaits you. If you do, you will find real hope and true peace that surpasses all human understanding, and you will find that His grace will be sufficient to carry you through the very darkest moments of your life that we all face in one way or another. Turn to Him now.♥
Due to changes in my schedule, instead of this series continuing to be a daily one, I decided to turn this into a Summer series, which will come to an end, today, July 31st, and, Lord willing, this series will begin again next July.
I decided to end this series with one final warning from God’s Word that needs to be brought to your attention in order to stress the extreme importance of the truths presented in these two final verses to further emphasize the importance of reading, studying, and treasuring God’s Word that He has given to us.
Though this post may not be coming to you at the beginning of your day, depending upon where you live, here are your final verses to bring this series to an end until next Summer, Lord willing, followed with some important closing comments concerning the truths presented in these extremely important verses. Please pay careful attention to what God is telling us in these verses:
Did you notice that it is the LORD who is the one who brings the famine of hearing His Word? Could it be that we are presently living at the time of the fulfillment of God’s Word revealed in these verses from Amos? I am sure that many of you will agree that it is getting extremely difficult to find a church where the pastor preaches the truth of God’s Word without compromise. Sadly, I am churchless because of that very reason! I would rather stay home and spend time in God’s Word, pray for my family and other loved ones, and listen to an online sermon like I am presently doing on a Sunday, instead of starting to attend the first church that seems to be Biblical to me without thoroughly checking it out before making it my new church home!
So why is it that many of us are without a church home, or that many of us are on the verge of leaving our church because of compromises that are being made by our pastor? Why is it that so many pastors are seeking to grow their churches through marketing strategies and worldly ways to appeal to the culture instead of simply preaching God’s Word and trusting that God will grow the church as He did in the book of Acts? Are we now witnessing the judgment of God because mankind, for the most part, has rejected God and His Word?
Not only have unbelievers rejected God and His Word, but also many professing Christians are rejecting the truths presented in Scripture and are desiring to have their ears tickled by searching for pastors and teachers who present messages that satisfy their sensual desires. In 2 Timothy 4:3 it says the following:
“For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
Is God now allowing mankind to have their desires satisfied, and at the same time making His Word so scarce that they are spiritually starving because this famine of hearing the Word of God has finally come?
No matter what man may do in an attempt to pervert or to destroy God’s Word, we can be assured that God will preserve His Word forever! (Psalm 119:89, Mathew 5:18, 1 Peter 1:24,25) However, sometimes God may allow us to receive what we thought would satisfy us spiritually, so that we will finally come to realize just how wrong we were and hopefully come to treasure and to cherish His Word!
When I first saw this picture on Photobucket around seven years ago, the verses in Amos Chapter 8 immediately came to mind, so I added them to a copy of the picture on my Photobucket account. To me this picture clearly portrays the spiritual condition of many Christians due to the fact that they go to churches where the Word of God is not accurately being preached, they run off to conferences that feature their favorite pastors and teachers who distort the Word of God, and they read books by their favorite Christian authors who write books that mix a lot of error with truth, all the while neglecting the reading and the studying of God’s living Word, the Bible, and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide them in all truth. These Christians fail to realize that they are starving themselves spiritually as they run off to one spiritually empty place and then on to yet another of the same.
Please don’t let this be you!
Instead, humble yourself before the Lord; cry out to Him and return to Him with all of your heart and ask Him to forgive you for your wanderings and to revive you with the life giving truth of His Word.
Thank you very much for stopping by and taking time out of your busy day to read some of my posts and poems.
God Bless You
~Mary/Living4HisGlory