Things Will Always Go Well

To be one of God’s children means to have an eternal Father bestowed upon you by adoption, through no merit of your own, for the purpose of the Father’s glory. It also means that things will always go well for you for the rest of your life.

Yes – things will always go well for you if you’re a child of God.

How can I say that? Am I getting all “best-life-now” on you guys this morning? Nope. The truthfulness of this statement is not dependent upon semantics, but perspective. God’s perspective is far superior to our own impotent, sin-marred, self-centered perspective. And God has told us something very important about our life’s events: no matter how difficult, how confusing, or how painful things may be, they were allowed by God, and…

We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. –Romans 8:28

No matter how badly things may go, things are going well for us. That’s such a difficult concept for us to grasp, but thankfully God’s wisdom is not squelched by our limited capacities.

We can allow this truth to manifest in our lives and in our hearts and by God’s grace, within the most difficult situations, we can trust our loving Father, knowing that He has an ultimate plan that is perhaps well above our understanding. We can embrace our weaknesses, for as the LORD has told us, “…my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

My prayer for each of us (and for myself) is that our circumstances will not dictate our joy nor our trust in God. Through Christ we have affirmation that God is working things out for our good, for His glory.

May we all be able to join Paul in saying:

For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. –2 Corinthians 12:10

Thank God

One thing that drives me crazy is that no matter what I'm doing, I could always be doing *more*. Do you ever feel that way? It's a pain because it imparts a sense of impotence on one's soul, even in the face of progress.

Thank God that we could never do enough to merit His favor; thank God that Someone has already done that for us.

He Must Do What?

If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it. -Mark 8:34-35

I think I've figured out what Jesus is saying in this verse.

I think He's saying that if we want to be His disciples, we have to deny ourselves and follow Him.

We have to stop acting spoiled, stop insisting on comfort, stop demanding our rights, and stop being consume with *temporal* concerns.

We have to deny ourselves. It flies in the face of our culture and our hard-wiring.

But - as the text says - IF we're to follow Him, we MUST.