Author: Charlie Brignac

I am forever a student of the Word and a disciple of Jesus Christ, finding life applications in Scripture. I write about Christian themes, including bringing others to Christ, the matchless name of Jesus and various spiritual concepts like a penitent heart and overcoming darkness. I focus on Christian teachings, personal faith and reliance on the Holy Spirit. I invite you to read through my daily writings. Think them out for yourself through your study of God's Holy Word. Pray on the meaning of the message. Then let the message come alive in your life.

Kingdom Living

Matthew 6:33
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

We have been raised in a world where performance/results are everything.  We feel measured by the things we have and the things that we have accomplished.  We have been trained to be independent and self-reliant.  This is absolutely upside down from the kingdom of God.

God promises us that He will provide all that we need and all the desires of our hearts.  We must realize that these promises are conditional.  We must seek His kingdom first and we must seek the righteousness that living in His kingdom requires.  Then all of these things will be given to us.

Our great efforts in life should be directed toward putting our relationship with God first.  Everything else should be second.  The truly abundant life awaits.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for the abundant life that awaits us when we seek You first.  We bring You all the honor and glory for being Our Provider.  We ask Your forgiveness for seeking the things of the world before You.  Teach us, Lord, how to prioritize our lives according to the principles of Your kingdom.  May the Holy Spirit enlighten us so that we may live in Christ and not in the world.


Finding Joy in All Things

2 Corinthians 12:10
For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

When we are weak and near defeat, perhaps even near death, we run to Jesus.  He promises to be our strength in every one of our times of weakness or trial.  It is during these times that we feel His presence so clearly.  It is during these times of pain that we experience the fullness of His love.  It becomes a blessing to have tribulation in our lives. 

Unfortunately without trial, we tend to lean away from God.  We tend to move out of His presence.  We tend to let the joy of life overshadow the true and perfect joy that is available to us.

Prayer,
Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your promise to perfect Your strength in our weakness.  We thank you for the comfort of knowing that You are always there.  We praise You for providing Your Son, Jesus, so that through Him and in Him we can experience the fullness of Your love.  Help us, Father, to find contentment in all things as we seek to live in Your shadow and not under the influence of the world.
  

Our Lives Proclaim His Handiwork

Psalm 19:1
The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky aboveproclaims his handiwork.

Just as the Lord declares His glory through the display of His handiwork in the heavens, He also declares His glory through His children.  He seeks to show His Holy Spirit to the world through every single child that He has created.  

The Lord uses powerful men of God to deliver His messages, but He does not use them alone.  He chooses to use everyone of His children – of every age and every time – to declare His perfect love and forgiveness.

He does not need any of us to accomplish anything, but He loves to use all of us to reveal Himself to those who are in our everyday lives.  We are the instruments of God’s perfect love.

Prayer,
Heavenly Father, we thank You and praise You for the magnificent universe that You have created.  We proclaim Your glory in all that we see before us.  Father, we pray that You will use us as instruments of Your good work.  May the world see the magnificence of who You are through our living testimony.  May we be daily expressions of Your perfect love and forgiveness.

The Ascension of Our High Priest

Luke 24:51
While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.

In the old testament, each person needed a priest to represent him or her before the throne of God.  Through their high priest and the accompanying sacrifices, each person’s sins were atoned for.  Without the intercession of the high priest, the individual person had no hope for salvation nor for their prayers to be answered.

Jesus changed it all.  Each one of us can receive our salvation through Jesus and can go directly to the throne of God with our prayers because His shed blood cleansed us and because He stands at the right hand of the Father in intercession for us.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You that You allowed Your Son to return to earth after His resurrection to confirm the victory over sin and death that we, who have received Him as Our Savior, partake in.  We thank You that you allowed Your Son to ascend back into heaven to sit at Your right side and stand in intercession for all of us that call Him Lord.  May we receive the fullness of His blessings as Our High Priest.  May we share those blessings with those people who You place around us.

Partakers of the Divine Nature

2 Peter 1:3-4
By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence. And because of his glory and excellence, he has given us great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.

Whether our faith be weak or strong right now, we can find hope in claiming what has already been granted to us.  Through Our Savior, Jesus Christ, we have been granted all things that pertain to life and godliness.  And just in case that is not enough to store hope within us, we have been granted His precious and very great promises that allow us to become partakers of the divine nature.

What does it matter if times are tough?  We know the tough times will end.  We know the King of the Universe dwells within us, preparing us to spend the rest of eternity with Him, partaking in His divine nature.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for providing Our Blessed Hope and Assurance, Jesus Christ.  We praise You, worship You and exalt Your Name for all that You have set aside for us.  We pray that You teach us how to submit to Our Lord, Our Master and Our King, Jesus so that we may be fully prepared to receive our eternal inheritance.  May Your majesty, Your grace and Your power be manifested in us here on earth as it is in heaven.  May it all be for Your glory and the gain of the kingdom.

Lampposts of the Light

2 Corinthians 4:6
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

One of the greatest beauties in all of nature is the full moon.  Yet the moon does nothing by itself.  It is a worthless body of dirt.  It only reflects the light of the sun as it moves into its proper position in concert with the earth.

We share similarities with the moon.  We are worthless collections of dirt without the light of the Son in our lives.  Yet if we keep ourselves in proper position with the Son of God, the light of the Son will shine through us for the world to see.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for providing light at the beginning of creation so that we could see.  We thank You for providing the light of the world, Your Son Jesus, so that we could see and accept the way to our eternal glory with You.  We pray, Father God, that You will shield us from the enemy who tries to take the Light out of our lives.  We ask, Lord, that You cleanse us and purify us so that we may be lampposts of Christ for all to see.

Knock, Knock, Knock

2 Samuel 7:22
Therefore you are great, O LORD God. For there is none like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears.

What if a man appeared at your door, a man of immense power and wealth, a man who everyone around the world recognized and praised, how would you greet him?   Would you welcome him in?  What if he said, “I know you.  I have been watching you.  I have a plan for you.  I want to make you the inheritor of all the riches of my estate.”  How would you respond?

This man has knocked on all of our doors.  His name is Jesus.  He exceeds beyond our imagination any man that walks on this earth.  There is no one like Him.  He is the way, the truth and the life.  There is no other way to the riches of our eternal inheritance except through Him.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we praise You and exalt You.  We thank You for providing Your Son as Our Redeemer.  We humbly receive the riches that He has set aside for us through His sacrifice.  May we fully submit to Jesus as Our Savior and Lord over our lives.  May we become living testimony to His presence in our lives so that others may know Him.

Accused of Being a Christ Follower!

Acts 24:16
So I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.

Paul spoke these words when he was giving an account of himself to his followers.  He was under attack from his enemies at the time.  He wanted his followers to know that he was under attack because he was leading a life that conflicted with how his attackers wanted to live their lives.  Paul may have been the first to warn us about living our lives according to political correctness and not according to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

How many of us would feel more comfortable being accused of any weakness rather than be accused of being a fervent believer in Jesus Christ, devoted to His service?  Unfortunately, this is exactly where the world wants us.  Everything we see, hear and read that comes from the world is designed to desensitize us to evil and to move us away from the holy life style that Jesus Christ call us to.

In the flesh, we are destined to fall for the tricks of the enemy.  We must call on the Holy Spirit to help us to live in the spirit of the one who dwells within us.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for providing the Holy Spirit to keep us mindful of the truths that You have revealed to us through the life of Your Son, Jesus, and through the writings in Your Holy Word.  Strengthen us, Lord, to stand up to the ridicule and hatred of the world.  May it be the passion of our hearts to please You and not the world.

The Power of the Spoken Word

Proverbs 15:4
The soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit.
God spoke the world into existence.  Jesus cast out demons and healed the sick with His spoken words. There is great power in our words as well. Words cast out from our mouths have the power to build up and the power to crush.  We must be conscious of the power of every word that we speak.
“You will never amount to anything,” lives on in the life of a child forever.  So does, “You are wonderfully made by the hand of God.  He has a special plan for your life.”   We must be careful in choosing the words that we speak to our loved ones and to all the people that we encounter in life.  We truly have the power to plant life or death into those around us.
Satan will stay in our ears all day long, feeding us with destructive words to be spoken against those that we care for.  We must keep our armor up against the urgings to hurt others with our words.  We must continually ask the Holy Spirit to help us to be mindful of our words so that we comfort and build up those around us instead of crushing their spirits.
Prayer,
Heavenly Father, we thank You for the gift of speaking.  We rejoice in praising you with our words and our songs.  We take comfort in coming to You with our words of solicitation.  We pray, Father, that You will fill our hearts with words that speak life into those around us.  We pray that You will shield us from the urgings of the enemy to speak words of conflict and destruction.  Build us up, Lord, so that we may build up others in Your Precious Name.

Stepping Into Kingdom Living

Deuteronomy 11:11-12
But the land that you are going over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water by the rain from heaven, a land that the LORD your God cares for. The eyes of the LORD your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

The Lord is our provider.  He provides everything.  He gave us life.  He sustains us.  He grants us eternal life through His Son, Jesus.  He endows us with the riches of His Kingdom for all eternity.

All we have to do is receive His Son as Our Savior and, through our faith in His promises, step out of the land in which we are living and into the land that God has set aside for us.  It will mean that we will look past those things that we think are unsurmountable. We will seek the promise and not get overwhelmed by the problem.  We will rely on God and not ourselves to be the source of our needs.

Once we turn our lives over to God and surrender to the reign of His Son in our lives, all of our needs will be met.  Provision may come from our own hands as God favors us with productive ideas and capabilities.   Provision may come from the hands of others or may even come from our enemies, if so directed by the Lord.  But rest assured, provision will come directly from the hand of God and it will be according to His perfect timing for our lives. 

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for the countless blessings that You shower us with each day.  From breath to breath, You sustain us.  We praise You and bless You for Your eyes never leave us.  You are our constant comfort and provision.

Teach us, Lord, to rest in Your promises.  Strengthen us, Lord, so that we may step out of the world of the flesh into kingdom living.