Through Jesus' Love

Before we receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit at our salvation, Satan does not have to work at tempting us.  Our sins are sufficient to separate us from God.  We are already in line with Satan’s plans to keep us from our eternal destiny with Our Lord.

Once we receive the living spirit of God within us, then Satan goes to work.  His temptations become relentless.  He is obsessed with destroying our lives.  Thank God that He promises to perfect His strength in our weakness when we are under attack.  He gives us the Holy Spirit to fulfill this promise.

All men and women on earth are tempted regularly.  Satan attempts to separate each of us from God through our sin.  Satan knows that God will never stop loving us, but we will draw away from Our Heavenly Father when we sin.  

We must understand that the temptation is never a sin.  Jesus, the only man without sin, was tempted by Satan.  Jesus overcame each temptation to keep Himself sinless.  Jesus was able to overcome the temptations through the power of the Word of God.  This is our weapon against Satan as well to defeat him in his relentless strategy to separate us from Our Lord.

What parent’s heart doesn’t melt when their child comes to them and just wants to be held or to rest in the comfort of the parent’s lap.  At that point, the child is asking for nothing except to feel the love and comfort and strength of the parent.

This is exactly what Our Heavenly Father longs for.  He wants His children to come to Him to find the love, comfort and peace that can be found nowhere else.  

There seems to be a thread of jealousy in each of us.  For some it is a monster that devours them.  For most of us, it is the slight murmur of discontent when someone else has something that we do not have – fame, success, recognition, money, etc.  The murmur will never go away until we surrender our lives to Jesus Christ.  He alone is our sufficiency.

There is no joy on earth that can compare with the joy we will experience when we finally have full union with Jesus Christ.  We will not experience the fullness of this relationship until we meet Our Savior in heaven.  At that glorious time, the joy of being fully united with Jesus will exceed any expectation that we might be able to imagine.  

In the meantime, it is possible to experience a portion of Our Savior’s joy here on earth – a portion larger than anything this earth can offer us.  We can do so by relying on the power of the Holy Spirit to help us overcome the enemy’s efforts to keep us from our joy filled destiny.

God gave us parenthood so that we could better understand our relationship with Him.  We can use the experiences of our relationship with our children and our parents to help us when God is taking us by a way that we do not understand.

When God seems at a distance from us, we can call on the memories of the times that we stood away from our children so that they could learn on their own and grow from the experience.   Although our children did not realize it, we were always there for them if they needed us.  So it is with our Heavenly Father.

When God is calling us to be obedient is some area of our lives, we can call on the memories of the times that we were given specific instructions by our parents.  It was not easy for them.  They felt the pain of our anger as we were sure that their directives were way out of line with what was being done in the world of our friends.  Our parents loved us through our anger.  They knew that we were better off following their instruction than going our own way.  So it is with our Heavenly Father.

As we draw in closer to the Lord, His light will reveal every iniquity in us and His fire will begin to burn away that which offends Him.  As we grow in our walk with Him, the time in the purification process will become more intense.

The Lord will test us to see how close we are willing to walk near Him.  The level of our comfort as we approach Him will be determined by our level of preparation to reach Him.  Unless we are fully submitted to the rule and reign of Jesus in our lives, we will not feel comfortable at all.

In today’s workplace, our daily work environments are likely to be stress filled pits.  To make matters worse, many of us will experience a mental carryover into our personal lives.  Without a doubt, our workplaces can take a grueling toll on us.  Can we avoid it?

Changing jobs may be a solution in some cases.  In most cases, the new job is likely to bring as much or more stress.  So avoiding stress on the job is probably unavoidable for most of us.  Avoiding the affects of stress on the job is within the reach of all of us.  It will require that we build up our mental fitness.

We build our mental fitness by building our spiritual fitness.  Throughout the day we should include intermittent times of prayer and worship.  These times of prayer and worship can be a matter of seconds.  They will serve the purpose of directing our focus away from our problems and onto our solution – Our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Not surprisingly, when we learn to rely on Our Lord for our strength during the day, He will become our greater strength when the work day is over.  As a result, we will find more time for deeper prayer and worship.  We will begin to take our mental and spiritual fitness to an all new level.

Satan loves to keep us tied up in activities that we take on without even looking for God’s perspective. Under Satan’s trickery, we take on tasks, jobs and even ministries that we know we are capable of handling and that we know will likely bring us success.  And often, we will be successful by the world’s standards.

But God is looking for the opportunity to have His glory, and not our capabilities, reflected in the things that we do.  He is looking for a renewal of our minds so that we make choices by seeking His counsel through prayer, the reading of His Word and the advice of spirit-filled men and women.  Making choices in this transformed way will take us beyond our capabilities and our imagination.  Our accomplishments will then be for His glory and our success will be measured by the standards of His kingdom.

The guaranteed formula for our personal defeat is to cast ourselves against Satan, against sin or against our own flesh. Carnal man will lose this battle every time.

The guaranteed formula for personal victory is to cast all of our cares upon the Lord.  Through Him, we have victory in everything.  The process of sanctification, which will signify our ultimate victory, comes as a result of us giving up our own ability to compete and placing the battle in the hands of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.