Tag: God

What If?

Matthew 6:33 “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.”

To seek the Kingdom of God above all else means to turn to God first for help. What if this entire season was meant to get us to slow down? What if this season was intended to steer us into spending more time with our Lord? God is our Father, our heavenly Father. What is more appealing to a father than to have his children crawl onto his lap, with complete and total trust and faith, and spend time with him?

If you are a parent of a teenager or a young adult, you know how it feels when you want to connect with your kids, but they just don’t have time. They are busy with friends, work, entertainment, fashion, sports, movies, etc. It is not that they are being bad, they are just busy. Is that what we were doing with God? What if God said, “Enough! I want to be with my children. I want to spend time with them and their families.” What if this season is more about HIM than us?

What is really important to you? People, objects, goals? There are so many things that compete for our attention. Any of these things can quickly bump God out of first place if you don’t actively choose to give him first place in every area of your life. In Matthew 22:37, Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” According the Jesus, this is the FIRST and GREATEST commandment. What if that is what this is all about?

Dear heavenly father, thank you for sending your son Jesus to die for us. Please always help us to prioritize our lives so that we put you first. Amen.

Technology and The Bible

Romans 10:17 So faith comes from hearing, that is, hearing the Good News about Christ. (NLT)

Technology.  I don’t understand how an image that is 100, 500, or even 1,000 miles away can reappear on my computer screen in my bedroom.  I don’t understand how it works, but it brings me so much joy.  I am comforted by it.  I can see and hear my Mom and Day and know that they are safe.  I can sing Happy Birthday to my sister and see her excitement. 

I can share technology with other people and they can experience the same range of emotions too.  In that way, technology is like the Word of God.  When I read the Bible, I am comforted by the words I read.  I can share God’s word and I see it bring joy to other people too.  Simple words that individually are just words put together brings happiness and comfort to me every day.  I honestly don’t understand how it happens.  But I still want to share it.  I want other people to feel the same way, have the same experience. 

My soul is filled up.  Don’t you want to feel that way too?  Don’t you want that empty feeling to go away?  The only way to do that is through the Word of God.  Everything else is temporary. The Word of God will fill the empty space permanently.  It will bring you peace, and forgiveness, and a joy that you will want to share with other people too.  Jesus did all the hard work while he was here on earth.  When he left, he left the Holy Spirit here to help us.  Open your heart to hear God’s Word and the Holy Spirit will do the rest.

Don’t have a Bible?  No problem. I’m sure you have a smart phone.  All you have to do is download the YouVersion Bible App (which is FREE) and click on Plans.  Then search for “Gateway”.  In the search results you will see “Fresh Start Bible One-Year Reading Plan”.  Click on that and then click “Start Plan”.  You can read the Bible by yourself or you can read it with friends.  The best thing about the YouVersion Bible App is that you can click a button (it’s at the top of the screen on my phone) that looks like a little speaker with sound coming out of it.  If you click on it, it will read the Bible verses to you.  SA-WEET!

Dear Lord, thank you for the people that created the technology we use everyday to stay connected to our loved ones.  Encourage me daily to use the same technology to dive into your word.  Amen.

Large Family

Exodus 12:37 The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children.

Everyone typically gets together with family for the holidays.  Do you have a large family?  If I add all my aunts, uncles and cousins together on both my mom and dad’s side of the family, we total about 58.  Our family is not huge, but it is still hard to keep up with what everyone is doing.

It says in the Bible that when the Israelites left Egypt, there were 600,000 men.  Scholars believe that the total number of Israelites that left, including women and children, is more like 2.4 million!  Now that is a big family.  Have you ever thought about the logistics of moving 2.4 million people?  It’s not like they could load up in a bunch of cars, buses, planes or even a bunch of trains because they wouldn’t fit, not to mention they didn’t have those back then.  In fact, that many people wouldn’t even fit in AT&T Stadium where the Cowboys play football.  The stadium only holds 100,000 people. 

What about communicating with that many people?  How on earth did Moses connect with 2.4 million people to let them know it was time to go?  Sacrifice a sheep.  Paint your door frame.   Roast the meat.  Eat fully dressed.  There were lots of details that needed to be relayed to the Israelites that night with very little time to spread the news. 

To try to put it in perspective, there are about 2.4 million people that live in the city of Dallas and the city of Fort Worth combined.  Now imagine that there was one man in charge of leading us all out of Texas.  If we started marching together in a single file line, the line would be 450 miles long.  If we started marching in a line that was 100 people wide, the line would still be about 45 miles long.  What I’m trying to do is help you imagine how incredibly large this group of people was.  It was crazy big. 

Over and over again, after the Israelites left Egypt, they started to doubt God.  They complained about the provisions.  They even stopped worshiping God and started worshiping idols.  I wonder if I was on a 40-year camping trip with 2.4 million people, would I start to grumble too?  But then I remember that God showed up.  He was a cloud of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire at night. He parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape the Egyptian army.  He sent manna from the sky so that they were not hungry.  He provided water from a rock so that they were not thirsty.  If I witnessed all these miraculous signs and wonders that God performed in Egypt against Pharaoh and on the journey in the desert, I hope I would have stayed faithful.

What about you?  Do you sometimes find it hard to stay faithful?  Christians still have struggles today, but we should never allow difficulties and unpleasant circumstances turn us away from trusting God.  Proverbs 3:5 says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”  You may not understand why God is taking you on a journey through the desert, but your job is not to understand His plan.  Your job is to trust the Lord.  Lean into God when you have doubts.  Look for Him in your everyday life.  If you seek Him, you will find Him.

Dear Lord, thank you for showing up in my life when I have doubts.  Please help me to stay faithful to you even during the difficult times in my life.  Amen

Believe

Deuteronomy 11:1 & 19 (NIV) 1 “You must love the Lord your God and always obey his requirements, decrees, regulations, and commands.”  19 “Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

Tis the season to be jolly! This time of year is magical for children and adults alike.  Such beautiful decorations in the stores and on homes; the excitement and anticipation of presents and surprises. Have you seen those cute signs in red and green or plaid that say “Believe”?  They are referring to Santa Claus, but I always imagine that they are referring to Jesus.

The story of Santa Claus is told over and over again to children year after year.  They make cartoons about him, movies about him, clothes with his face on them.  You see him in advertisements and hear his “Ho, ho, ho” on radio commercials.  Now imagine if we did the same thing for Jesus.  What if every child knew about Jesus the way every child knows about Santa? 

Maybe you can’t personally reach EVERY child, but you can reach YOUR child.  The Bible says in Deuteronomy 11 that we must love the Lord and obey his commands.  Then it goes on to say that as parents, we need to teach these things to our children.  We should do this at home, when we are traveling, in the morning and in the evening.  Basically, any time and all the time.  If we see a moment to teach our children about Jesus, we should do it.

We should teach them that God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to save us.  But Jesus didn’t come as a man.  He came as a baby.  Jesus has been a toddler, a pre-teen, a teenager and a young adult.  He knows what we are going through every day.  We need to teach our children to talk to Jesus and cultivate a relationship with Him.  Finally, we need to teach our children that Jesus took our place on the cross and died for our sins.  What an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G gift God has given us in Jesus. 

So, next time you see a cute Christmas decoration that says “Believe”, take that moment to teach your child something about Jesus and his love for us.

Heavenly Father, thank you for sending Jesus to save us from our sins. Help us as parents to remember to teach our children about your love and Jesus’s sacrifice for us.  Amen