Category: Spiritual Growth

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Be on guard

“Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:13-14 NIV

In 1 Corinthians 16:13-14 Paul has a lot to say. He is encouraging the believers in Corinth on several fronts and that areas he is encouraging them about rely on each other. First he is telling them to be on guard, to be watching around them, knowing what is going on in their community, church and family. Sometimes people like to overlook things so that they don’t have to admit them or address them. Paul is telling the church in Corinth and I believe us as well since we are followers of Christ too, to be alert to our surroundings. The believers in Corinth were going against their culture and customs in some areas and knowing what was happening around them enabled them to not return to those ways using the reasoning of ‘not knowing what was going on’.

The second thing is to stand firm in our faith. This means to not give up. The believers in Corinth were very new to the faith and this way of living. Paul was encouraging them to not lose heart but to remember that Christ was there for them, that their faith was worth dealing with hard times. There are going to be times when things get hard for us as well, and we should expect that because being a follower of Jesus does not give us a guarantee of a life without problems. Actually, it sometimes initiates some problems because not everyone else is a follower of Jesus. No matter what, we are to stand firm in our faith, don’t let life’s problems or hard times, shake our faith that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. He didn’t let hard times stop Him from standing in His faith that His father in heaven was with Him.

The third thing is to be courageous. As I said, these areas go together, and being courageous is made stronger by remaining firm in our faith, knowing Who we have on our side. In addition to making hard choices in life, being courageous or brave can also mean keeping our word or promises. When we follow through with what we have said we would do or not do in the face of adversary, we are being brave and courageous. This is especially challenging for new believers, which is what the believers in Corinth were dealing with. It is hard because not everyone around them believed what they did and challenged them, probably daily. We go through this same challenge as we begin to develop our walk with God and become courageous.

The fourth is to be strong. Strong, as Paul is talking about here, is not just physical strength, it is also emotional strength. The male population of Paul’s time were not very good at acknowledging emotional needs or strengths. They were better at exercising self-control than admitting that they couldn’t do something. So for us, when we recognize that we can admit when we are wrong, that we can exercise self-control, we are showing that we are being emotionally strong. Again, this can be built on knowing what is happening around us, being willing to remain in our faith and being courageous. By building those areas up in our lives, we are able to admit a weakness and it not destroy us as a person.

The fifth is to do everything in love. Paul writes in a later chapter of this book, that love is the greatest of 3 things, hope, faith and love. Love truly ties everything together. He was letting them know and letting us know that without love that our awareness of what is happening around us is dulled, our ability to stand firm in our faith is weakened, our willingness to be courageous is challenged and our committed to Christ, overall, is not strong.

Paul is reminding all of us that love is the greatest weapon against evil, against our enemy. Without love we are not as powerful as believers in Christ as we can be. Let’s not let our enemy have any kind of upper hand in our lives. Let’s practice and build, each and every one of these areas, each and every day of our lives so that our enemy has no foothold on us.

Heavenly Father, thank You for being our Lord and Savior. Thank You for always giving us what we need to be able to do Your Will, and be the warriors of our faith that You know we are capable of being. Because of You, Lord, we are able stand strong in our faith and show our enemy everyday that we are Your children. Please be with us as we continue to walk out our faith, growing stronger each day. In Your Son’s most precious name, Amen.

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Changes

As of today, January 1, 2025, I will be posting my blog “For His Honor” a few times a week instead of daily. I am not sure how long this will be for and there may come a time when the blog is posted daily again, but at this time I feel led to cut back on the rate at which I was posting my blog. I am struggling with not having enough time to properly study the verse or verses and then write the devotions.

So, here is the devotion for today…

“But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” Colossians 3:8 NIV

I know that this is an odd verse to start a new year off with, but if you think about a new year as a time when you are able to make changes, begin with a clean slate, then I believe this verse applies. This verse covers many areas, our hearts, our tongues, our minds and our actions. These seem like extreme categories but if we let it sink in for a moment, I believe we can all say that we have some actions that, if not kept under control could begin to fit in these categories. I know we don’t walk around expressing rage or we don’t have malice in our hearts, but we are human and we are not perfect. We may not mean to be saying things about others or using profanity but we all slip at times.

I am talking to myself as much as I am talking to anyone else. I get angry, and in moments of frustration I have said things that I don’t want to say and don’t mean to say, but I have said them. I have asked for forgiveness, and I know that God has forgiven me. However, I don’t want that way of thinking or that way of expressing myself to be how I interact with others. It is not who I am and I don’t want to become that person. I don’t believe I can direct others to Christ acting in that manner, and that is my chief goal, to direct others to Jesus. We can all do that through how we show the love to other people that He has shown us.

As this new year begins, I am going to focus my prayers on making sure I am listening to God’s voice and following His direction in regards to any changes He feels I need to make in my life. I encourage you that if you want to make changes as the new year begins, to take this time, pray and ask God to direct you in any changes He feels need to be made in your life. Then, relying on Him, join me in doing our best to make the changes as this new year begins.

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Where is your hope?

“Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” Psalm 146:5 NIV

Verses 3 and 4 in this chapter are filled with warnings about placing hope and trust in anyone other than God. We are not perfect, we all have sinned, we all break promises at some point in our lives and we all are bound to make mistakes, but God does not. God doesn’t break promises or make mistakes for He is perfect.

The author of this psalm is warning in the verses 3 and 4 about this but then is able to turn this psalm from a psalm of sadness or negativity into one of hope and assurance. Blessed are those whose help is in God. Blessed, not cursed. This is wonderful.

The word ‘blessed’ in the Bible means to find favor with God and to have inner peace. This peace is a peace that no one else can offer or anything else can produce, it only comes from God. When we place our hope and source of help in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, we are placing it in the only place that is guaranteed.

When we look to God for our help and place our hope there as well, we are favored by God because He wants us to come to Him for help. He wants us to place our hope in Him because He is our creator and wants to be close to us. He will not force Himself on us because being loved by us when we have no choice is not truly being loved. Love comes as a freewill choice of the person giving it. God made it that way so when we choose to love Him, it would be because we want to love Him not because we have to love Him.

Where do you place your hope?

Where do you go for help?

I pray both of your answers are…God, but if they are not then I invite you to change where you place your hope and where you go for help. I invite you to choose to place your hope in the One True God. Lord over everything, in heaven and on earth, our Creator. Ask God to be your Lord and Savior, accept Him into your heart. Know that the place you can go to for help is the only true place where you are guaranteed to be heard. God hears you and wants you to willingly come to Him for help. God wants to help His children.

Where do you want to place your hope?

Where do you want to go to for help?

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Building others up

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” Ephesians 4:29 NIV

Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, addressed several things. Again they were a church body that was very diverse and struggled with unity due to customs that were centuries old. Apparently one area that they struggled with was controlling their tongues. This is a battle for everyone, some people have honed this better than others, but we all struggle with it just like the people in Ephesus. Paul wanted the members of the church in Ephesus to be united in Christ and to help each other grow in their faith, not tear each other down.

As members of the body of Christ, we are to love each other, forgive each other and encourage each other. Jesus taught love, forgiveness mercy, and as His followers, we should be living in that manner as well. This is not only for us, who give love and then receive love, who give forgiveness and then receive forgiveness, but also for anyone who is not a follower of Jesus because they are witnesses to what the love of God can look like.

At Christmas time, we are more inclined to be kinder to each other, we tend to say nicer things to each other than we do at other times of the year. Whatever the reason for this behavior change, I believe that if we can do this during the Christmas season, then we should be able to do it throughout the rest of the year.

I encourage everyone in your prayer time with God to ask for clarity to see if this is an area you can grow in. Even as much as I think that I build others up no matter what time of year it is, I believe I can grow in this area. My challenge to us all is to live our lives so that those around us who are not followers of Jesus are able to see what the love of God can look like.

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Choices

“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done. “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” Ezekiel 16:48-50 NIV

In this chapter of Ezekiel, God is addressing the Jewish nation and how they have been treating Him. In these verses He is comparing them to the city of Sodom, where sin and disregard for God were plenty. The Jewish nation had done worse things than the occupants of Sodom and God rained down fire on the city of Sodom as punishment.

In the city of Sodom, the ground was fertile and this resulted in the residents being very successful in the area of agriculture. They residents of the city who were involved in the wealth of the agricultural business had an abundance of everything, the city was an independent city, not needing assistance from other areas. However, there were some among them that had little and those who could share their abundance, did not. The people of Sodom did not worship to the One True God, they worshipped many idols.

The Jewish nation is being accused of worse things than not providing for their poor and needy, which God takes very seriously. As the chosen people of God, the Jewish people knew God and what He expected, the laws that they were to keep. The crime that they committed was to see what the citizens of Sodom were doing, know it was wrong, but do it as well.

God counted this against them, essentially twice. First, when they committed the same wrong acts as the citizens of Sodom. Second, that they knew what was right and what was wrong and chose to follow their fleshly desires and go down the wrong path anyway.

As we draw closer to Christmas and then to the beginning of a new year, I encourage everyone to take some time today and think about the choices you have made over the past week, month and year. Are they the choices you wish to continue making or are they choices you wish you could go back and change? Either way, I pray that you would allow God to be part of your decision making process because He wants to be there with you each step of the way. Have a great day.

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Reconciliation

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. ” 2 Corinthians 5:18 & 19 NIV

This is a wonderful reminder for us during this Christmas season, that God wanted to reconcile us to Him and sent His Son, Jesus, to accomplish that. The definition of reconcile is to restore friendly relations between 2 parties or to coexist in harmony. God wanted to restore our relations with Him, He wanted to coexist in harmony with us and He still wants that closeness with us.

Part of the reconciliation idea is to not only coexist but it also means to not hold things against each other. When we become follower’s of Jesus Christ and ask for forgiveness, God doesn’t hold our sins against us any longer. I believe that is important for all of us to remember especially during the Christmas season because we are celebrating the way that God chose to make reconciliation happen, sending Jesus as a baby to this world.

The beginning of the verses for today says ‘All this is from God’, and we need to remember that our new creation that we have become has come from God, not anything we have done. That there is a choice of where we will spend eternal is a gift from God. That choice has been given to us to make and the choice was given to us by God.

If we continue to choose to live in the way of the world, not accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior and continue to live in sin, we are separated from God. God doesn’t want this and has given us the way to correct that so we can be close to Him and live with Him for all of eternity. He did that, not us. We were not and are still not able to reconcile ourselves to God, so thankfully, God is willing to do it for us.

We simply need to make the choice.

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Faith and Hope

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1 NIV

During this time of year, we tend to become more invested in the magic or wonder of Christmas. We try to open our hearts a little more than before and make visiting with family we haven’t seen in a while more of a priority than it was before. Children get their hopes up that they will get what they want for Christmas.

Christmas is a wonderful time of year and in the secular world, it is filled with mystery and magic about how things happen. For Christians, Christmas isn’t about mystery or magic of a man in a red suit, it is about celebrating a King who freely gave up His throne in Heaven to become a fragile human baby. We celebrate because we believe that Jesus came down from Heaven and became that baby so He could grow up and save us.

Our belief in Jesus as a human baby and all that it entails, leads us to faith that there is also a Heavenly Father that we cannot see. We are not able to see Jesus, but the people in that time got to see Him. None of us have ever seen God the Father, but the life of Jesus takes our hope that He is there and builds it into an assurance and confidence that God the Father exists.

In this temporal world, our eyes provide the evidence that things exist, such as seeing a tree, a pet, or a loved one but they do not provide evidence for everything. Our eyes do not see things like gravity or air. We can see things drop to the ground and we feel that we can breath the air, so we know they exist even though we can’t see them. We have faith that they are present. The same is true for followers of Jesus, just because we can’t see God the Father doesn’t mean He isn’t real or doesn’t exist, we have faith that He is present.

So, during this season when the world is trying to be more believing of a man in a red suit, I encourage everyone to hope for, have assurance of, and build your faith in God the Father, who exists in Heaven.

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Reap what we sow

“Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” Galatians 6:7-8 NIV

Paul is talking to the Church at large in South Galatia in this letter and he was very familiar with them. He helped to form these churches and the members are not matured followers at this point. This letter has a stern tone to it because he is concerned that the members of the church are moving away from Jesus. In these verses, he tells them to not be deceived. False teachers were leading them to believe that they could deceive God and do what they wanted in their flesh and not have to deal with the consequences.

Paul makes it clear that just as a farmer who plants a seed of corn cannot expect wheat to grow, that what a man sows in his heart, he will reap. He also wanted them to understand, as they had before the false teachers were influencing them, that with sowing fleshly desires comes destruction. It is with sowing the desires of the Spirit that they reap eternal life.

As we go about our day, would you please look at what you what you end up reaping from what you are sowing in this life.

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Not because of us

“He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,” 2 Timothy 1:9 NIV

Paul is writing this letter to Timothy, his second letter to him, to encourage him. Timothy is a pastor who has worked alongside Paul for years. He is now in Ephesus ministering by himself and Paul is sending encouragement. Timothy is facing continuing the Church after Paul’s death, which Paul believes to be in the near future.

Timothy, as any pastor, has the responsibility of shepherding the new believers into a different way of living, a life of serving Jesus and at the same time, helping the Christians who have been walking in faith with Jesus, continue on the same path of following sound doctrine. This was all very challenging as the Church was not very old in it’s existence and the ‘mature’ Christians had not been walking in faith very long themselves.

Paul is reminding Timothy here in this verse that God Himself, had a plan for each and everyone of us long before we were born, long before He created time. That plan had nothing to do with how great we were or were going to be or what great deeds we were going to do, but everything to do with what God had in mind for humanity.

Clearly, God does not force us into following His plan, we have to choose to believe in Him and follow His plan. However, even if we don’t choose it, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to begin with. Paul is encouraging Timothy to continue to follow the plan God has laid out for Timothy in ministering to God’s sheep.

Have you ever thought about what plan God has for you?

If you have, are you searching for what it is so you can follow it or are you already following it?

If you haven’t, please think about how much God loves you and wants what is best for you. Wanting what is best for us, would lead me to believe that the plan He has for our lives is going to be more than we could ever dream of.

The choice is yours.

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Growth during trials

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” James 1:2-4 NIV

Paul is telling his brothers and sisters in Christ that it is not if they face trials but when they face trials. Keeping this in mind, he is encouraging them to understand that trials do not produce faith, but tests our faith. The testing is to help us see how much faith we already have. Faith is very important to our walk, just as our heart is very important to our bodies. The devil targets our faith as any enemy would target our heart in battle.

Paul then talks about trials that test our faith producing patience. However, this only happens if we approach the trial with the right attitude because otherwise it will produce bitterness and resentment. Bitterness and resentment do not help us grow in our walk with God, they hinder it.

So as we face trials that test our faith, I pray that we embrace them so that bitterness and resentment do not creep in but that patience is able to be developed. Have a wonderful day.