Thoughts

I sent this in an e-mail to someone I really care about a couple of months ago, and I read it over tonight and it spoke to my heart. I wanted to share it with everyone who gets to read this.

We keep our focus on God by merely doing...nothing. Being saved by grace through faith, we exhibited our willingness to give up our lives for God and devote ourselves to Christ. So, why we always struggle and fight is a mere product of our own humanity. The world burdens us with so much in the form of expectations. We, especially the younger generations, hold the weight of the world right now as everything is falling to pieces around us.

We are the ones expected to fix everything. So stress is natural. But God's answer is not to stress..."Cease striving and know that I am God." I AM GOD. It is the same concept as that verse from Isaiah, "I am God. That is MY name. I will not give my glory to another." But we take that glory due to God and ignore it, in essence, when we stress over the hardships presented before us.

Glory in the highest is due to God. He deserves the praise, for everything. He made us. He made everything. Through His fingertips, He ordained before time that we would both exist at this moment in time and that we would know each other...and that I would write this to you. If God can fine-tune our lives to that microscopic detail, why worry? He already has things worked out to play out in the best manner possible. It becomes hard for us to place our mind and our focus on things above when life consumes us with circumstances that appear to be like a mountain before us.

"To believe actively that our Heavenly Father constantly spreads around us providential circumstances to work for our present good and oure everlasting well-being brings to the soul a veritable benediction."-Tozer

Our belief in God is founded in what we know. Yet what we know is not enough. Head knowledge is completely passive, it is in our head and does not inspire action. Faith is active and in faith we LIVE and LOVE and SHOW what we belief to be true to those around us, and to ourselves. God is reflected in our faith when we live as He designed. Faith breathes Christ in us, the peace He died to bring us and the love His blood poured out for us. Above all else, Christ REIGNS. Lifting our eyes to heaven, we do see through our faith that in Christ, all our answers lie. Gazing upon the wondrous cross, everything else just...fades away. We need to see nothing else but the cross and what it represents to us.

"Our insistence upon seeing ahead is natural enough, but it is a real hindrance to our spiritual progress."-Tozer.

2 Corinthians 5:7 says "for it is by faith we walk, not by sight". Faith in its most pure and perfect form exists without the need for understanding or sight. The heart of the matter is a matter of the heart...our heart are placed in Christ and with that we have all we can possibly need (as I wrote about last time).

If we have everything already given to us, why worry? We have all we can ever need in Christ, the one who lived to die for us. Man, that is cool!

Writings

This is what life is about. Grace. Love. Christ.

These things define us in the best of times, and the worst of times--if we let them do so. The wonderful story of our lives that will one day be completed by Him who made all that we see is His to scrawl out as He sees fit.

In the process of the etching of black ink into parchment, we are refined more to the person we will be on that fateful day when we see Jesus face-to-face. With every hour and passing breath, that moment approaches when we will be completely made into His image.

Until then, this life I live shall be a result of the grace that has been poured into me when I did not, do not, and will not ever deserve it. My life cannot be summed up in any other way but this.

without it I am nothing. with it I am more than I ever could have dreamed. I am a product of His grace and the love of Christ. by this I am defined, and by this I am refined.