THE PIECE BY PIECE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION
Greetings in the name of Jesus:
In spite of the thoughts of many who are in the church today there is a real difference in giving lip service to the Lordship of Christ in our lives, and then actually living out that Lordship in our day to day life. Then cord difference is found in the way we give to God who we are right now in life. What I mean is that we cannot correct the problems we have within our lives before we come to Christ. We must first of all be able to accept the fact that we are flawed, and that Christ is the only way that we can be a complete person.
The one thing that we can say in our relationship with Christ is that he accepts us for who it is we are at the time we come to him. We need to recognize however, that that is only the beginning of our journey with him. Salvation is not in my mind and instant thing, it takes on a journey and a personality of its own. You see our relationship with Christ is now and always has been one of developing trust between us and God. The issue of trust is actually on God's side more than it should be on ours. The reason for that has to do with our own trustworthiness. God has asked us to test his word every day of our lives to make sure that we can believe while our situation is somewhat different in that God finds that he cannot trust our word. That's why it begins to be very important for God to read our hearts intent instead of what we say. Then in itself tends to take on a very different kind of relationship than any of the ones we have with people all around us. God does not lie to us, and is not fooled by our lies to him.
This difference in our relationship with God has a lot to do with what Paul described as working out our salvation with fear and trembling. We can believe everything that God tells us about calling upon his name and about asking for forgiveness to receive salvation, and yet God also does not leave out the fine print when he says IF YOU BELIEVE WITH ALL OF YOUR HEART! I cannot tell what it takes for you to believe with all of your heart that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God. I cannot and will not judge others based upon my own experiences with God because my experiences are unique to my life as are your experiences to your own life. What I have found is that in this process of working out our relationship with the father is that as he reads our hearts intent he must be able to have full confidence in what he sees there.
This is the reason that we go through a piece by piece process. We start out by telling God that we believe in what he tells us, and then there is a period of time where we are required to live what we say we believe out in our lives. For a very long time now people have been taking for granted that all they have to do is to say that they believe in Jesus, and that somehow that automatically changes everything. We have to somehow get back to the real need of having our lives changed by our relationship with God, and that change will only come as we become committed to God. I have not yet seen anyone able to give their lives completely to God on the first try; what I have him seen as people struggle to believe is that they only change by giving pieces of themselves away to God to be transformed. The change in our life, after God has transformed the pieces we have given to him and place them back within us. It is only when we get to the point where our lives are filled more so with those pieces we have given to God and received back clean and changed that we can say that we are truly of God. I can tell you without any doubt that there are a lot of people out there today who will disagree with me because it makes them uncomfortable to think that our relationship with God requires us to work harder, dig deeper, and be more honest in our hearts intent than we ever have thought it had to be to please God. It is my job however, to tell you the truth, and that is that we need to find a reason within our lives for God to trust that what we tell him is true as well. We will talk more about this in our next discussion. May you richly bless God through your life in him.
THE UNWORTHY SERVANT
In spite of the thoughts of many who are in the church today there is a real difference in giving lip service to the Lordship of Christ in our lives, and then actually living out that Lordship in our day to day life. Then cord difference is found in the way we give to God who we are right now in life. What I mean is that we cannot correct the problems we have within our lives before we come to Christ. We must first of all be able to accept the fact that we are flawed, and that Christ is the only way that we can be a complete person.
The one thing that we can say in our relationship with Christ is that he accepts us for who it is we are at the time we come to him. We need to recognize however, that that is only the beginning of our journey with him. Salvation is not in my mind and instant thing, it takes on a journey and a personality of its own. You see our relationship with Christ is now and always has been one of developing trust between us and God. The issue of trust is actually on God's side more than it should be on ours. The reason for that has to do with our own trustworthiness. God has asked us to test his word every day of our lives to make sure that we can believe while our situation is somewhat different in that God finds that he cannot trust our word. That's why it begins to be very important for God to read our hearts intent instead of what we say. Then in itself tends to take on a very different kind of relationship than any of the ones we have with people all around us. God does not lie to us, and is not fooled by our lies to him.
This difference in our relationship with God has a lot to do with what Paul described as working out our salvation with fear and trembling. We can believe everything that God tells us about calling upon his name and about asking for forgiveness to receive salvation, and yet God also does not leave out the fine print when he says IF YOU BELIEVE WITH ALL OF YOUR HEART! I cannot tell what it takes for you to believe with all of your heart that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God. I cannot and will not judge others based upon my own experiences with God because my experiences are unique to my life as are your experiences to your own life. What I have found is that in this process of working out our relationship with the father is that as he reads our hearts intent he must be able to have full confidence in what he sees there.
This is the reason that we go through a piece by piece process. We start out by telling God that we believe in what he tells us, and then there is a period of time where we are required to live what we say we believe out in our lives. For a very long time now people have been taking for granted that all they have to do is to say that they believe in Jesus, and that somehow that automatically changes everything. We have to somehow get back to the real need of having our lives changed by our relationship with God, and that change will only come as we become committed to God. I have not yet seen anyone able to give their lives completely to God on the first try; what I have him seen as people struggle to believe is that they only change by giving pieces of themselves away to God to be transformed. The change in our life, after God has transformed the pieces we have given to him and place them back within us. It is only when we get to the point where our lives are filled more so with those pieces we have given to God and received back clean and changed that we can say that we are truly of God. I can tell you without any doubt that there are a lot of people out there today who will disagree with me because it makes them uncomfortable to think that our relationship with God requires us to work harder, dig deeper, and be more honest in our hearts intent than we ever have thought it had to be to please God. It is my job however, to tell you the truth, and that is that we need to find a reason within our lives for God to trust that what we tell him is true as well. We will talk more about this in our next discussion. May you richly bless God through your life in him.
THE UNWORTHY SERVANT
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