Tag: Surrender

The Abundant Life That We Have Been Created For

Ephesians 1:10
And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth.

This passage teaches that all that was lost with the fall of man will be restored. Jesus Christ will be the Restorer. He will renew the former state, bringing together under His authority all of heaven and earth.

While Our Father has blessed us with the capacity to enjoy all that He has created, He leaves a void in our hearts that can only be filled by His Son. Only when we fill the void with Our Savior are we able to fully experience the abundant life that we have been created for. When we become one with Christ, we inherit everything in heaven and on earth.

When we become one with Christ, we see His glory in every sunrise, every sunset, every full moon, every star, every mountain, every valley, every ocean, every lake, every river, every stream, every tree, every flower, every blade of grass, every grain of sand, every animal, every bird, every fish and in every man and woman. When we surrender to the authority of Jesus Christ, we are in position to experience the fullness of heaven and earth as God intended it before the fall of man.

Let us prepare ourselves to receive all that has been set aside for us. Let us share our joy so that others will come to live under the glorious rule and reign of Jesus Christ.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for making us a part of Your creation plan. We bless the name of Jesus, through whom we are able to experience the fullness of Your creation. We long for Jesus to make His home in our hearts. We pray that we may have the wisdom to understand the depths of His love. We ask that the Holy Spirit will teach us how to trust in Him completely. We pray for the humility to surrender totally to His authority. May we experience the joy of being one with Christ in heaven and on earth. We pray these things in the name of Our precious Savior and Restorer, Jesus Christ.

Do You Love Me? Prove it!!

John 21:17
He said, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Then feed my sheep”.

If Jesus had asked any of us the same question that He asked Peter, surely our response would have been similar. “Of course, I love You Jesus,” is a refrain that each of us would speak very easily and we would believe fully in our sincerity. Yet aren’t we all a bit like Peter? Our spoken proclamation of love does not necessarily measure up to our proven love.

Peter, believing his love for Jesus was obvious to Jesus, became frustrated. So Peter challenged Jesus, saying, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” Jesus’ response to Peter’s challenge was essentially, “Prove it.”

Jesus challenges each of us as well to feed His sheep. He calls us to provide appropriate nourishment to the young lambs and encouragement to the mature members of the flock. He calls us to go after any that leave the flock until they are found and brought back under the protection of the Good Shepherd.

Jesus calls on each of us who love Him to go out and do the work that He was doing. He tended to all of the needs of the people, all the way to the Cross, because of His love for His Father. Jesus expects us to take up His work, to take up our cross, because of our love for Him.

Let us go out into the world and join Jesus in the work that He would be doing for His Father in heaven if He were still on earth. Let us allow Him to do His work through us. Let us show the world His love as we respond to His question, “Do you love Me?”

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for sending Your Son, Jesus, to tend to our every need, especially our need to be freed from the sin that separates us from You. In response to Your loving kindness, mercy and grace, we surrender our lives to You. We ask that You show us the cross that You have prepared for us. We pray, Lord, that You instruct us in the way that we should go as we join Your Son in His work. May Your Holy Spirit guide us and strengthen us for the journey. Father, we pray that You release Your power through us so that others may discover the Way of the Cross. We ask all these things in the name of the one who went to the Cross and shed His blood for us, Jesus Christ.

Mirroring the Nature and Character of Jesus Christ

2 Corinthians 5:14
Christ’s love controls us. Since we believe that Christ died for all, we also believe that we have all died to our old life.

Had Jesus Christ not died for us, we would be spiritually dead and ruined. We would be slaves to our sin and we would have no power to deliver ourselves from the miserable state that we would be in.

But, indeed, Christ did die for us, so that we could all die to sin and self. As we receive Jesus as Our Savior, we are freed from a spiritually dead life. We are freed to live for Our Redeemer. It is through Christ’s love that we are able to live as Our Redeemer lived in the perfect will of the Father.

It is the love of our beloved, Jesus Christ, that shines forth in us when we submit ourselves to be vessels of His perfect love. The love of Jesus in our lives is what allows us to show the world what living for Christ is all about. With Him and through Him, we will do more for the kingdom of God than we could ever even imagine.

Let us be certain in our faith that Jesus lives inside us today. Let us surrender to Him, giving up our old lives in the flesh and claiming our new lives in the spirit. Let us mirror His nature and His character. Let us live in the fullness of His will and plan for our lives.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for the sacrifice of Your Son who died for our sins. We praise the name of Jesus for accepting Your will and plan for His life all the way to the Cross. We pray, Father, that the world will see the way, the truth and the life of Jesus through us as we leave our old lives behind in exchange for the our new lives in Christ. We ask, Lord, that the fullness of the life of Your Son, Jesus, be perfected in us. May the world know us as His disciples. We ask all these things in the name of the precious Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.

Finding Our Calling As a Servant of Jesus Christ

Romans 1:1
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God,

In one simple statement, Paul points out three revealing things about himself. It is important to understand that these three things apply to all Christians:

1. We are called to be servants of Jesus Christ.
2. We are all called to some specific purpose for which God created us.
3. We are all separated unto the gospel of God.

When studying the original writings, it is suggested that the word that was used for servant was actually quite a bit stronger. It was rendered in the original text as “bond servant” which means someone who is subject to the will and wholly at the disposal of another. Thus, we are called not only as servants to Jesus Christ, but as bond servants to Our King.

As His bond servants, each of us are called to a specific purpose in service to His kingdom. But according to His will, we are also “separated unto the gospel of God.” We must realize that the redemption that we have received through the grace and mercy of Almighty God has separated us from who we were. We are now righteous because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on our behalf. We are proclaimers of the Good News through our spoken words and our living testimony.

Let us strive to find our calling in Christ. Let us ask the Lord to reveal to us how He wishes to use us to proclaim His Gospel and to serve in His kingdom. Let us surrender to His will.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for separating us from the world through the sacrifice of Your Son, Jesus. We bless His name for the blood that He shed so that we could live in the spirit and not in the flesh. We pray, Father, for the grace to abandon our old lives. We ask that You help us to understand the fullness of the redemption that You have provided us through Your Son. We beseech You to give us the courage and the strength to proclaim Your Good News to those that you have placed in our lives. May the world see that we have been separated unto You, Lord, and that we are living as bond servants to You. We ask all these things in the name of our Blessed Hope and Assurance, Jesus Christ.

Accepting Our Calling as Disciples of Jesus Christ

Acts 9:4
He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul! Saul! Why are you persecuting me?”

Saul thought he was doing everything right. He was on fire for his spiritual cause. Unfortunately for Saul, his cause was grounded in his own reasoning without a foundation of faith in Jesus and without the direction of the Holy Spirit. Saul rightfully could claim an “A” for effort. But he was not being accused by Jesus Christ for his efforts, he was being challenged for the self-driven misdirection of his efforts.

Just like Saul, all of us will face a day when the Lord challenges us. As with Saul, Our Lord has grounds to accuse us. While Jesus may not have grounds to challenge us for persecuting His church, He probably will have a strong case for challenging us on the grounds of our obstinacy in following our own will and not fully surrendering to the call of Our Lord on our lives.

While Saul surrendered his old life and became Paul, the apostle, we may have hung closer to our old nature than the new one that Jesus has for us. While we may not have been strongly challenged yet, at some defining point, like Saul, we will all be strongly and directly challenged by Jesus to denounce our old lives and accept our calling as His disciples.

Let us set aside our own plans. Let us seek God’s plan for our lives. Let us submit to God’s plans for our lives with the same fervor that Paul did.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for drawing us to Your Son. We praise You for setting aside a perfect plan for our lives in Your kingdom here on earth and in heaven. We rejoice in knowing that we will serve You for all eternity. We pray, Lord, that we will not be directed by our own ambitions, but be led by Your Holy Spirit. We claim Your promise that through Your Holy Spirit, Your strength will be perfected in our weakness. We beseech You, Father, that You grant us a double portion of Paul’s fervor for proclaiming Your Good News to the world. We pray these things in the name of our Blessed Hope and Assurance, Jesus Christ.

The Inexhaustible Treasure of Grace

John 1:16
And from His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.

There is nothing more complete, more sufficient or more perfect than the fullness of Jesus Christ. To borrow from the teachings of Charles Spurgeon, the fullness of Christ is reflected in His Deity, His manhood, the atoning power of His Blood, His righteousness, His power over death and His endless grace to pardon, to regenerate, to sanctify, to preserve and to perfect.

The fullness of what we have received from God can be summed up in one word grace. It is the great gift that we receive through His Son, Jesus, that we do not deserve and could never earn. It is the unmerited good will of God directed toward us. It is the gift that cannot be received by unrepentant sinners. It can only be received by those that have been washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ. It is all that has been perfectly and completely prepared for all men by Our Savior.

And finally, a perhaps most importantly, God’s grace through Jesus Christ is cumulative and never ending. When we live in the fullness of Savior, we receive goodness upon goodness, joy upon joy and abundance upon abundance. It is the good will of God towards us and the work of God in us.

Let us humble ourselves before Our Savior. Let us surrender to His presence in our lives. Let us prepare ourselves to receive the fullness of His amazing grace.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for the unmerited favor that You bestow on us through Your Son, Jesus. We bless the name of Our Savior for making it possible for us to receive Your unlimited flow of grace in our lives. We pray, Father, that You will open our hearts to receive the fullness of Your Son, Jesus. We ask that You show us how to tap into the inexhaustible treasure that He holds in His hands for us. We ask all these things in the name of the source of all grace, Jesus Christ.

When We Drift from Our Relationship with Jesus

Luke 15:8
Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and search carefully until she finds it?

Where will the woman look for her lost coin? This passage infers that she will look everywhere. How long will she look? She will look carefully and extensively until she finds her coin. How will she look? The passage does not specifically reveal how she will look, but it is likely that she would follow the same process that we follow upon losing something. She will go back to the place where she thinks that she lost the coin. If the coin is not there, she will go back to all the other familiar places that she can think of until she finds the coin.

Aren’t we all just as diligent as this woman whenever we lose something that is of value to us? Do we not employ an exhaustive effort to find anything lost that we consider a personal treasure? Of course, we do.

So why do we delay even a second when we recognize that we have lost even a fraction of our zeal for Christ? We should go back immediately to the place where we lost it. Did we lose it because we cut back on our prayer time? We need to return to our most robust prayer habits. Did we lose it because we stopped studying the Word of God? We should return to our diligent studies. Did we lose it because of the sin in our lives? We need to repent and surrender to Christ.

Jesus Christ is our greatest treasure. When the world works overtime to distract us from Our Treasure and our awareness of the presence of Our Treasure dims one iota, let us run quickly to return to the fullness of His Light. If we practice to stay in the fullness of His light, we guard against losing even a portion of Our Treasure.

Let us be fierce protectors of the treasures that we have been given in Jesus Christ. Let us fight mightily against any distraction that comes to diminish the value of the fullness of Our Savior in our lives. Let us seek the Holy Spirit to heighten our awareness of our ever present Treasure and quicken our resolve in keeping Our Treasure above all things in our lives.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for giving us the most awesome treasure known to mankind, Your Son, Jesus Christ. In our weakness, Father, we find that we have drifted away from our zeal for Your Son. We pray that You will help us return to the place where we lost Him. We ask that You show us how to invigorate the good discipline in our lives that we once had. We beseech You to give us the strength we need to walk away from the torments of our flesh. Lord, bring us back to the fullness of the Light of Our World, Your Son Jesus. We ask all these things in the precious, precious name of Jesus Christ.

Jesus Responds to All Seeking the Truth

John 20:28
Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”

The unbelief of Thomas is well documented in the Bible. He was a skeptic, a true doubter, looking for proof that the Lord was who He said He was.

Thomas’ story is the perfect illustration of the struggle of every believer who is wavering in deciding his or her relationship with Jesus Christ. What sets Thomas apart from those that never fully surrender their lives to Jesus was his sincerity in seeking the Lord. While Thomas was weak in his convictions, he was sincere in seeking the truth. Jesus was gracious in His response to Thomas just as He will be for all that are sincere in seeking Him.

Like Thomas, we are all called to come to the the place where we finally see and believe the total redemptive work of Jesus and fully submit to Him as Our Lord and Savior. Thomas, once seeing the wounds of Jesus, proclaimed both his complete belief and complete submission to his Master when he spoke the words, “My Lord and My God.” All in one burst, Thomas asserts his interest in Jesus as his Lord, espouses his affection for Him and denotes his submission to Him. This is exactly what Jesus Christ is looking for from each of us.

Even though we may have been slow and weak in our commitment to Christ, Our Lord waits on our sincere entreaty. He will respond to each of us just as He responded to Thomas. He will overpower us with His presence so that we may with the same exuberance as Thomas proclaim, “My Lord and my God.”

Let us move at once to surrender everything to Our Savior, Jesus Christ. Let us submit to His lordship over our lives. Let us proclaim that He is who He says He is. Let us rejoice in knowing that His promises will be fulfilled exactly as He said they would be.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for the loving kindness, the mercy and the grace that You extend to us in our slowness and our weakness in surrendering everything to Your Son, Jesus. We pray, Lord, that You will open our eyes so that we can see, fully believe in and seek the precious gift that is available to us in a relationship with Your Son. Father, we ask that You take us to a place where we are overpowered by the presence of Jesus just like Thomas was. May Your Holy Spirit guide us and strengthen us so that there will be nothing left in us that doubts the fullness of the new life in Christ that awaits us. We ask all these things in the name of Our Lord and Our God, Jesus Christ.

Discovering Our Spiritual Assignment

Jeremiah 1:5
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.

As it was with Jeremiah, so it is with each of us. God created us and has a plan for our lives. He has set us apart to serve Him in a way that only we can do because of the unique nature and capabilities that He has given to each of us. God draws each of us into a relationship with Him so that we can understand what He has prepared us to do. We do the things that we are called to do in response to the outpouring of love and forgiveness that we receive from Our Creator.

As we seek our place in God’s kingdom, we must be careful not to think too highly or too lowly of ourselves. We should maintain a keen sense of our weaknesses and our insufficiencies, but we should not let our weaknesses keep us back from our calling. We should fear no man and go about our work humbly as we grow in our relationship with Our Heavenly Father. Our primary focus needs to be on seeking God’s will for our lives and discovering the appointment that Our Creator has set aside for us. Once we confirm our appointment, we need to respond accordingly.

The good news is that we do not have to discover our appointment or respond to it on our own. Our Heavenly Father has given us a Helper to guide us through the process of finding and accepting the calling that He has placed on our lives. As long as we set aside time to be in the presence of Almighty God and surrender to the urgings of the Holy Spirit, we will discover our appointed role in the kingdom and rejoice in our opportunity to serve Our King.

Let us first seek an intimate relationship with Our Savior. Then let us earnestly seek the aid of the Holy Spirit to reveal the calling that Our Lord has set aside for us. Under the guidance of Our Counselor, let us move in faith one step at a time toward our appointment.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for creating each of us to fill a specific need on this earth and in Your eternal kingdom. We thank You for providing the Holy Spirit to help us separate our own carnal desires from the will and plan that You have for our lives. We pray, Lord, that the Holy Spirit will help us to dig deep into our relationship with You. We ask, Father, that the Holy Spirit teach us how to be vessels of Your perfect love and forgiveness. We ask all these things in the name of the One who makes it possible for us to become Your good and faithful servants, Your Most Faithful Son, Jesus Christ.

Gaining Access to Almighty God

2 Chronicles 5:7
Then the priests brought the ark of the covenant of the LORD to its place, into the inner sanctuary of the house, to the holy of holies, under the wings of the cherubim.

The Holy of Holies, also known as the Most Holy Place, was the inner room of the Jewish Temple in which was kept the Ark of the Covenant, the Mercy Seat, the Cherubim, manna, Aaron’s rod and a copy of the 10 Commandments. It was the place where blood was sprinkled on the Mercy Seat (the lid on top of the Ark) as an atonement for the sins of Israel. The single high priest designated for duty on the day of atonement was the only person allowed to enter the Holy of Holies. That was the only time in the entire year that anyone could enter. It was the only path and process that the Jewish people had in order to gain access to Almighty God.

Jesus changed all of that. Upon His death on the Cross, the veil that separated the people from the Most Holy Place was torn in two. In one divine moment access to the throne of God was opened to all people for all time.

As we prepare to enter the new year ahead, let us consider what a wondrous privilege we have been given. We no longer have to wait on anyone to enter into a direct, intimate relationship with Our Father in heaven. Our High Priest, Jesus Christ, permanently opened the way for us to enter the Holy of Holies.

As we take advantage of our blessing, let us remember that it is pleasing to God when we enter His throne room. But let us be sure to learn from the actions of the high priest in approaching the Most Holy Place. As we approach Almighty God, let us enter His presence with awe and reverence. Let us enter His gates with thanksgiving and with praise. Let us seek personal cleansing and forgiveness through the confession of our sins.

Let us pray under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray in accordance with the Holy Word of God. Let us make a personal commitment to surrender to His will for our lives.

Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank You for giving us access to Your throne through Your Son, Jesus Christ. We bless the name of Your Son for providing the pathway for us to have a personal relationship with You. We pray, Lord, that Your Holy Spirit will help us to approach Your throne in the manner that is pleasing to You. We ask that we be given the grace that we need to pay the price necessary to gain the intimacy that we seek with You. We ask all these things in the name of our High Priest and Mediator, Jesus Christ.