Category: Interior Life

father and child

I Am A Child Of God And An Heir

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God actually adopts us into His family as His child when we believe in Christ (Rom. 8:15)! It seems too good to be true, but you are a child of God. This is our new core identity and we need to remind ourselves of this daily. When we remember who we are, we will find strength to become more like Christ. When people adopt a child they often go to great expense and effort. God did the same thing for us: the Son came to earth as a human and endured opposition and execution just so that God could adopt us as a child of God. And once He adopted us, we became one of His heirs (Rom. 8:16). In fact, Scripture says that Jesus is our brother (Mt. 12:49-50 (Mk. 3:34-35); Heb. 2:11, 17) and just as He receives an inheritance from the Father so too we are fellow Continue Reading →

cross forgiveness

Do You Have A Forgiveness Mindset For Your Faults?

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In my early 30s I had gone through over a year of excruciating physical and emotional pain. One day I was standing in the yard looking out over the sea and reflecting on what I was feeling, and I realized that I was angry at God. This was not welcome news, but I accepted it and started to tell God why I was angry at him. Even though I was afraid to express anger at God I pressed on because I trusted his forgiveness. When I was done there was no sense of rejection from him, on the contrary it was a big release and birthed a deeper relationship with God. It was okay to have my bad and tell him all about it because I had a forgiveness mindset. It’s interesting how a forgiveness mindset changes our view of ourselves and others. Without a forgiveness mindset our natural attitude Continue Reading →

maturity

Do You Passionately Pursue Maturity?

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Jesus and his Apostles clearly taught us that we should pursue maturity. But why? In this post, we want to focus mostly on the motivation of becoming what God made us to be. If your teenage child stopped growing intellectually and emotionally, would you not consider this a cause for great concern and make an exhaustive search for an answer to the problem? Wouldn’t you realize that unless your child resumes their development, they will not become what they should become? Wouldn’t you make every effort to help them pursue maturity and reach adulthood, along with its benefits? Likewise, if we allow ourselves to become complacent about our growth just because we have reached “teenage” maturity, then are we not choosing to fall far short of what we are meant to be? Are we not making our Father sad? Are we not sabotaging Christ’s efforts to join with us and Continue Reading →

glorious person man

Motivated By Our Future Perfection

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What motivates you to holy living? When you are tempted by something that others think is okay, but you know it is unholy, what do you think about in order to strengthen your will and resist temptation? Scripture mentions several different motivations; one of them is the promise of our future perfection: being thoroughly holy and perfect one day. This might not seem logical at first. If God is going to perfect us anyway, why should we make a lot of sacrifice now in order to be holy? Why would the promise of our future perfection and holiness motivate me to be more holy now? We can learn about this from John: “But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” I Jn. 3:3 (NIV) Here God Continue Reading →

sun, heaven, luminous light

The Trap Of Seeking The Presence Of God

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The greatest blessing in the New Creation will be to see God and be close to Him. Nothing will be better than being in His presence. We long for this and endure sacrifices now so we can present ourselves as pure when Jesus returns and we see God. So, shouldn’t we also be seeking the presence of God (the felt presence of God) in this mortal life? Shouldn’t we desire as much of God as He is willing to give now? Shouldn’t we always be seeking the presence of God? Of course we should. But there is a question as to priority. How high should we prioritize seeking the presence of God? First, we need to ask what we mean when we say the “presence of God.” If someone asks us what this means, we might say we just want whatever He wills. But the reality is that we want Continue Reading →