NO ESCAPE

There are days I feel like this diver.  She is deep under water with only a limited amount of oxygen in the tank to sustain her until she can come back up for air.

Life feels that way.  I'm sure I am not the only one who knows the feeling.  When there is turmoil and evil all around, sometimes the pressure is too strong that you feel closed in with only so much air to survive, until being fully engulfed.

But then there is that knowledge that we can take in as much air as we want.  It is free to everyone to breathe in and out as much as we wanted.

So with the awareness of being able to take in as much oxygen as  you can, why do some people choose to stay underwater with limited amount of air?  Some people are so ignorant of the fact that relief is just beyond that surface that they stubbornly stay underwater until the could breathe no more.

God is a God of wisdom.  What He teaches in between the front cover and the back cover of the Bible is how to get to the surface.  We need not look farther than Jesus, our Lord.

No lie, as simple as requesting Jesus to help me find something I have misplaced and He does it for me, there can never be a request or a prayer that is too small or too large for Him to grant.

The water around this driver represents life.  More specifically, life's bashing from the devil who runs amok on this earthly existence that chokes the life out of each and every one of us.  The closer you are to evil, the easier your life is.  After all, why would the devil spend any time on taking your soul when he already owns it halfway?  The closer you get to God, the more trials you seem to have.

But you ask, "If God loves me, why would He allow bad things to happen to me?"  Well, the answer is simple.  God is a God of mercy.  But He doesn't dole out favors or pardons willy nilly.  He is a God of Love.  He loves you enough to allow the bad experiences to happen just like a good parent does, so one, we learn from it, and two, we call on Him and get closer to Him and love Him as much as He loves us.  Sometimes God will allow bad things to happen because when He grants the solution to that bad experience, we will be able to appreciate Him more.  He also allows bad things to happen to pave the way to the good tidings He has in store for you.

So instead of wasting your time breathing in the limited amount of air, why not come up for a bottomless amount of air.  God's air.  

Until my next rant... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

AS FAR AS EAST IS FROM THE WEST

So you've confessed your sin to God and you were forgiven.  However, a few days later, you start feeling guilty about it again.  You have let satan dredge up that sordid sin again even though you have been previously forgiven.  The joy of forgiveness received from God is that God doesn't remember the sin once He has pardoned you for it.    However, because we are humans, very erroneous ones i.e., we, not God, falter and just can't believe that He forgives us just like that!

Guilt destroys our confidence.  We feel insecure and carry around this awful feeling.  Guilt damages our relationships.  We feel inadequate and focused on such inadequacy that we fail to focus on our loved ones.  Guilt keeps us stuck in the past.  We cannot move on or try to make things better because of that burden of guilt we carry around.  

But this is the exact reason why God is such a loving Father that He forgives us of EVERYTHING!  Everything that bogs us down, everything that satan lied to us about.  God said "I, yes, I alone --- am the one who blots out you sins for my own sake and will never think of them again." Isaiah 43:25

"Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool." Isaiah 1:18

Furthermore, God forgets!  Psalm 103:12 says "As far as east is from the west, so far ha he removed our transgressions from us." 

The best advise I can give anyone who is guilt stricken, and we are all guilty of this, is to let that burden go.  Ask God to forgive you for whatever it is that is still eating you up, know that He WILL forgive you, and once forgiven, lock it up in the forget closet and throw away the key, because God did.  Release and free yourself from it and move on.  You will feel so much better, I guarantee it.  Keep it locked up, don't try to get it back out!  That would be so silly!

Until my next rant... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

THE GREAT PROTECTOR

One of my most favorite Bible verses is Romans 8:31.  What shall we say about such wonderful things as these?  If God is for us, who can ever be against us?

No matter where we are in life, there lurks strife.  Problems are often accompanied by stress.  We can always battle it on our own but it costs us something, whether it be money, time, headaches, sleepless nights, the list goes on and on.  

When we are faced with such life trials, the human in us thinks about the worst possible outcome, because as humans, we are not created nor wired to handle problems on our own.  Believe it or not, God is the master problem solver.  Yes, He will allow these things to enter into our lives but just because He does, it doesn't mean He will leave us on our own to fix it.  He wants us to experience the negative influences of being human so that we would lean on Him for guidance, assistance and protection.  As young and inexperienced children make mistakes and their parents fix their messes, so does God.  He is our Father.  NO ONE can handle the biggest, baddest problem we could ever face but God Himself.

I remember a story once told.  In an Indian tribe, boys are put through a test of endurance by leaving them in a remote spot for 24 hours by themselves inside this circle.  The child must stay inside that circle for the allotted time to become initiated into becoming a warrior.  This boy was taken to the spot by his father and left there all day and all night exposed to the wild animals.  The boy was terrified as he endured the darkness of the night, hearing the howling and the growling of the danger around him.  He is hunched over curled up in a ball crying and trembling in the darkness.  Little does he know that a few feet away, his father is standing by him with a bow and arrow ready to fire at anything that comes close to his son.

That is how much God loves us.  He is our protector, He is present in our time of need and He has His bow and arrow pulled, ready to destroy anything that could harm us.  We need to keep this thought in our hearts because God would not let us carry a cross too heavy for us to bear even though He allowed His only Son Jesus Christ to die for us. Now if you don't feel special after knowing this truth, I don't know what will.

If God be for us, who could be against us?

Until my next rant.... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

FREEDOM

What is freedom?  Does it mean that we are free to do anything and everything we want to do in our own home or our own country?  Does freedom mean the same to you as someone from a totally different culture?  Do you feel free or enslaved?  From what?  

Most of us experience conditions in life that make us feel enslaved.  True freedom comes from a mature mind, acceptance of life in general and all of its imperfections.  I believe that freedom is achieved mentally, emotionally and spiritually.  You are what you think.

However, I'd like to go even farther with the word freedom and it is the most important one for me.  Spiritual freedom, that is.  There is no denying that our material existence in this world is temporary, but we are not just made up of matter.  We are moved by our spirit.  Our spirits thirsts for a deeper and divine love.  Turning away that love only leaves us yearning for it even more.  We sometimes lose our way and replace that divine love with something that feeds the "matter" in the form of food, drugs, sexual addictions, etc. but we all know that no matter how much the physical body is fed, it doesn't penetrate into the spiritual.  Some people will get that.  However, again, because they refuse the divine love, they seek a peek at a fictional future from astrological signs and psychic readings.  This type of search is a very dangerous one.

Enter, Jesus.  God loved us from the gate, that is a non-argument.  But then, He wanted us to understand who He is and how he works.  In the old testament, the way to atonement is through animal sacrifice. The fattest cow, sheep or whatever they owned was killed as offering to God in atonement.  But humanity didn't really get that.  It was so easy to offer atonement to God, after all, whomever had the animals to offer could easily atone with God but loses the essence of the repentance of the sin.  God forgave but He also wanted us to learn from it so that we can have a stronger relationship with Him, and the stronger our relationship with Him, the less we tend to succumb to the temptations of the devil.

He then sent Jesus, who was up in heaven with Him.  But not only did He send His Son to us, He also wanted to feel what it was like to be us.  He took the greatest pain that humans can muster up.   He found out what it was like to be crushed, despised, rejected and in deep emotional pain.  He knows the quiet desperation we endure when faced with mounting bills, job loss, marital discord, parenting challenges, etc. which if we were wise, sends us to our knees.  Jesus became one of us who can relate to our struggles and hardships.  Jesus kneels next to us to revitalize our energy, provide relief from our stresses, set us free from sin and enable us to endure life's discrepancies.  Through the Holy Spirit, again, God in Spirit, we are freed from all of life's storms and offers us a fresh start.

Our God is an awesome God!  Until my next rant... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

RUTHLESS TRUST

Now that you are a Christian do you ask yourself if faith has tiers?  What I mean is that are there different levels of trust in God?  

So you start out as a baby Christian, so coined by seasoned ones.  You have many, many questions.  You try to follow the teachings of the Bible and you wonder if others falter in their walk every now and then.  The answer is yes.  Since this is an established fact, how do you climb the ladder of faith?

The answer is the closer your relationship is with Jesus, the more seasoned Christian you become.  When nothing else matters in this world, when you are being persecuted because you choose to become a Jesus freak, when you have more enemies who cast you out of their circles because of the paradigm shift they see in you, you may just have climb up that ladder to a higher level.  

But by no means are you out of the woods when it comes to sin.  As a matter of fact, the closer your relationship is with God, the more the devil works in you, laying out your faults, telling you lies because we, as humans, are still vulnerable to the devil's wiles, until our earthly bodies transition into our heavenly perfected bodies.  But again, it doesn't mean we give in to sin.  We are glorified by God when we turn away from it.  In my walk with the Lord, when I do turn away from sin, it seems He rewards me with something better than the choice I would've made.  That's just how God works.  If you honor Him, He will honor you.

Ruthless trust is the courageous confidence that despite suffering and evil, terrorism and domestic conflict, God's plan in Jesus Christ cannot fail.  All of us will progress slowly into the final plans of God wherein we will all see each other as equal in His eyes without looking at each other's shortcomings and we will all rejoice in the Holy Spirit who makes us one with the Lord.  

Ruthless trust is what we should give God.  Just sayin'.

Until my next rant... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

GREEN WITH HOPE AND LIFE

We often associate the color green with the word envy.  When I painted this woman green, I was going to talk about envy.  But I felt it was a negative subject so instead, I decided that a more positive green color association equals life and hope.  

We are often impressed when we see and hear about some act of courage when people die for others and give their lives up for the common good.  We tear up when bravery is shown by mere humans and we sing their praises.  The reason is because we see that there is hope in life in this world.  Those courageous people mirror what Jesus Christ our Lord and our Father God had to give up.  But what Jesus gave up was a life of a deity, a divine life and He showed us how much He suffered and the trek to His physical death was a slow and painful one.  I often wondered why He wasn't just stabbed by a sword and been given a quick death?  Why did it drag on?  In my humble opinion, I can only surmise that it was because God wants us to understand that at the end of pain and suffering in our own life, there is hope.  Just as Jesus rose from the dead, in all His glory, we can see how hope transforms our lives of suffering in the flesh into a glorious state in the eternal.  God, in Jesus' expense showed us just how enormous His love for us is.  It is so enormous that He gave it a new name, Agape.  It is a kind of love that could not be fathomed, could not be explained.  It is the kind of love that can only be felt through the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit was given to us by God, through Jesus' death so that His love could be felt in our hearts always so that we can always be reminded that there is hope.

When spring comes, the whole world turns green.  God never ceases to give us reminders even in our surroundings, He always sends a message that after the cold frost and misery of the dead of winter, we can all pretty much be certain that everything will come back to life again.  We feel the transition of things start to come back to life.  We know we will feel the heat of the sun again, crops will bear fresh food again.  That is how God wants us to be reminded so we won't ever forget Him.  

Read Romans 5:1-11

UNTIL MY NEXT RANT... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!

REPENTANCE

Here's the breakdown.  When God created us, someone messed up.  We could've been sitting pretty, perfect in ourselves just like the God who created us.  Those people were Adam and Eve.  That's water under the bridge, though.  At this point, we are individuals and as individuals, we have individual relationships with God which is sacred between us and God.  However, because we cannot save ourselves from the screw up of Adam and Eve, God His only Son,  who gave  up His life as a sacrifice so that the old Adam is cancelled out by the new Adam, Jesus Christ.  He could have just as easily fell for satan's tricks while in human flesh and failed just as Adam did but He gained victory over the devil's wiles.

God extends the life eternal in paradise to us on Jesus' account.  Why is He doing that for us when we are such sinners and quite frankly, don't deserve it.  That's because He loves us and the only way we can escape judgment is to repent. There is only one way, and repentance is it.  

To its very core, repentance is a paradigm shift.  It is resetting your brain, your mind and your heart from that which you have grown to believe, whether it is from parental influences or environmental influences.  It is not easy to do this.  We have to surrender everything we've ever known to God, God then injects faith that Jesus Christ, His Son, died on the cross to forgive our sins, providing us with somewhat of a blanket forgiveness, no matter what the sin is, and then and only then can He absolve us from our sins and allow us to start anew.  

But even in that circumstance, we are but mere humans.  Humans are not immune to keep sinning, but because of that change of heart, we now, on our own recognizance, will refuse to sin or try our might not to become repeat offenders.  Even when we slip, God is always there for us ready to forgive.  

But most of us are confused with the meaning of repentance.  The word alone is often resisted because old habits are hard to ditch.  Understandably so, since we are human and it comes full circle.  However, the closer our relationship is with God, the less likely we are to fall for sin.  We will never ever be perfect, but when we become mindful of the goodness of the Lord, the less we are inclined to sin.  It's just how it works.  We start to understand within our hearts that sinning is no longer okay.  We begin to see the things of the flesh for what it is and realize that a moment of pleasure from the commitment of a sin is no longer worth the pain we cause God, the only one person who truly has our back.  We can no longer see people as reliable, or material things for completeness, nor politicians  or government to make us hopeful.

The more tenured we become in God's will for us, the more we strive to make a contribution to the kingdom of God.  The reward in this life is a fruitful one until we transition to heaven and the reward in heaven, well, as it was pointed out in the Bible, is beyond what we can even expect or imagine.  I don't know about you, but I am excited to find out what it is.  Ergo, my blog posts to you along with an artistic creation I share with you being obedient to the task God has assigned to me.

Out with the old way of thinking, sacrificing the enjoyment of what the world has to offer, in with the enjoyment of what heaven has to offer.  

We need to repent the old life, because repentance is more than just turning from the wrong ways; it is embracing the right ways.

To begin your trek to repentance you have to build relationships with your family by discipling to them, your friends, co-workers, etc.  Taking every chance to call them to faith.

Jesus already did all the work, all we have to do is embrace salvation by making that paradigm shift from worldly to heavenly.

Until my next rant.... LOVE ONE ANOTHER!