For His Honor

“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.

“But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,” 1 Peter 3:15 NIV

Peter, in this letter, is encouraging the followers of Jesus who are being persecuted. The followers were having to answer about their new beliefs to their families, neighbors and communities who were steeped in tradition of Mosaic Law. What Jesus taught was removed enough from the ways of old that His teachings were not widely or easily accepted by elders within the communities where He taught them. Therefore after His ascension, the early Christians were persecuted for their beliefs. That is if they didn’t keep it a secret.

We are not to keep our belief in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior a secret. We are to be telling others the wonderful news of forgiveness, grace, mercy and love that comes from God. Paul is saying in this verse that the early Christians were to always be prepared to give an answer to someone who asked them about their faith. That is good advice for us today as well.

At this time of year there is a lot of focus on the secular way of celebrating Christmas and the secular reason for celebrating Christmas. It is wonderful to be generous and give each other presents to show our affections for each other. It is wonderful to get together with family and celebrate each other and our relationships. However, as Christians, we have an additional reason to celebrate Christmas and that is the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We have additional ways of celebrating that event as well. This additional reason and way of celebrating sometimes brings questions from others within our families and from some of our friends about why we are doing things the way we do them.

The enemy is sneaky and will place people in our lives who will ask us questions, especially at this time of year, that may begin to make us question our faith and the reason that we believe what we believe. By being grounded in the Bible, reading and studying God’s Word, we can have the answers to the questions we are asked about the faith we have, the hope we have, the reason we celebrate Jesus.

I encourage everyone to pray and ask God to help them have an answer ready for those who ask about our faith. We never know if the answer we give may lead someone to follow Jesus.

“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.

“For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him” Romans 10:12 NIV

Paul informs the church in Roman that there is no difference to God if a person was a Jew or Gentile, if they called on Him, He blessed them. That is wonderful to hear, that our Lord does not discriminate. He loves everyone no matter what our nationality is, what our skin color is, what our political views are, what our age is, what our gender is, what our physical or mental disabilities are.

It does not matter to Him, if we call on Him, He is there. What matters is what is in our heart towards Him. If we love Him, seek Him, He blesses us and if we listen to Him, follow His lead, He blesses us. This was difficult for some of the followers of Jesus to understand and accept because they had been taught for so long the laws and rituals that needed to occur to be accepted by God. This idea of loving Him and seeking Him and being able to communicate with Him even if they were not a certain nationality or religion took some time to be accepted.

Do you know that God loves you no matter who you are, where you come from, how old you are, what your physical condition is, what your language is or what your religious background is? He loves each and every one of us, you included.

Call on Him today and start a relationship with the Creator of the universe because He loves you and He wants a relationship with you.

“The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:31 NIV

I have written on verse 30 from Mark chapter 12 before, which is where Jesus gives the commandment to love the Lord your God. Now in this verse Jesus is continuing the commandment by adding that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. That is hard sometimes because we don’t know who all is our neighbor.

I believe Jesus is not being concrete in His statement of ‘neighbor’ as only being the person or family that lives right next to you. I believe that Jesus is talking about our ‘neighbor’ as simply other human beings. We are to love each other and Jesus says in John 13:35 that they, the world, will know that you are my disciples by your love for each other.

We are tasked with showing love to everyone we come in contact with as a follower of Jesus and we are to show the same amount of love as we show ourselves. What does that mean? When we love ourselves, we are taking care of ourselves, feeding ourselves, clothing ourselves, sheltering ourselves. We are commanded to be humble and not think so highly of ourselves that we think that we are above others and at the same time we are to think enough of ourselves to not let ourselves be used and abused.

It is that same mindset that we are to use in approaching the idea of loving our neighbor. We are not to think that they are above us or think they are beneath us. We are to show our love by helping them when they need help, forgiving them when they need forgiving and be there when they simply need someone to be with them. We are to do for them what we would want done for us.

I encourage everyone to approach others as our neighbor in all that we do each day, whether we know the person or not. This is how others will know that we are followers of Jesus Christ, by showing the world the love He has shown us.

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.

“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.

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 NIV

In this verse, Paul is telling the church in Galatia that they are all in this together. There were people with a lot of money, people with a little amount of money, families, people who had never been married, people who were married, widows and widowers, Jewish background and Gentile background now together in the church. These individuals would not normally have associated with each other outside of business according to their culture, so the idea of all of them now worshipping God together was a hurdle that they had to overcome. Paul wanted them to understand, that as far as God was concerned they were all one in Christ. There was no distinction among them to determine if one person was “more worthy” than another of being forgiven and a follower of Christ.

Unfortunately, the idea of some people being “more worthy” of God’s love and forgiveness is a false teaching that we still deal with today. There are individuals who believe that if you do not have the ‘correct’ clothing or drive the ‘right’ kind of car, that you should not be worshipping God in their building. It is sad to me that there are people who want to keep the amazing gift of God’s love from others based on how they look or what they possess.

God makes no distinction between people, He simply loves us ALL.

So my challenge to everyone today – If you have accepted God’s love and forgiveness, I encourage you to spread it like wild flowers, sharing the gift with everyone you know. If you have not accepted God’s love and forgiveness, I encourage you to reconsider. God wants all people to be with Him, not just the ones who look a certain way or have certain possessions.

“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.

“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.