Did you hear that? Someone's knocking...

Psalm 16:5 (NCV) "the Lord is all I need. He takes care of me."

A few years back I spent a great deal of time thinking about needs vs. wants. What is it I really need? When I identified something, I’d ask, “do I need this or is it just a want?” Have you ever found yourself wrestling with a question like this? As I pondered the difference, I found myself stopping dead in my tracks after reading Psalm 16, verse 5. My mind went back to the first time I visited the church I currently attend. As a child, I was raised in a Christian home and was in church every time the doors were opened…which usually meant Sunday mornings and evenings, and Wednesday nights. By the time I had reached my teens I stopped going to church on a regular basis and became a “C & E” Christian, attending church on Christmas and Easter ONLY.

I can remember the day I visited the church as an adult as if it were yesterday. The night before, my Dad called to invite me to the service. I’m not sure how many times they asked me to come and check it out but this time, I felt I just had to be there. At this time in my life I hadn’t been in or near a church since I had gotten married some years earlier. The relationship that I enjoyed with Christ when I was younger had become very distant. Throughout my childhood and into my early teens, I was very diligent about my relationship with Jesus. Reading my Bible and setting aside time to pray was a normal part of my everyday routine. In fact, it was a family thing. My parents, my sister and I would sit around the kitchen table reading and discussing the Bible. I fell out of the routine through my teens, twenties and into my thirties. The influences of the world caught my attention and led me on a path far away from the closeness I felt with Christ.

By the time I hit my thirties there was a huge God-shaped void in my life. I had tried to fill it with almost EVERYTHING this world had to offer. But I still felt empty, unsatisfied, restless. I knew something was missing. Little did I know it was the gentle knock of Christ calling me to come back to Him. He is what I needed to fill the empty places in my life and make me whole again. That Sunday morning as the worship team sang, I felt a warmth that I hadn't felt in so long. It was Christ wrapping me in His sweet embrace letting me know He was there and that He loved me even though I had ran so far away from Him. Tears began to flow uncontrollably as I continued to listen to the words of the song coming from the praise band. Breaking down a piece of the wall I had built, I allowed those words to wash over me.

“How deeply I need you my Lord…Like the morning needs the sun, I need you. Like the desert needs the rain, I need you. Like the ocean needs the streams, I need you.”

I need Christ PERIOD. He is my friend and confidant. He is the giver of everything good in my life. When I feel I can’t make it another second, He sustains me. When I feel unloved, He loves me with an everlasting love and will not leave me or forsake me.

My relationship with Christ continues to grow to this day. Each day I meet Him in the early morning hours. During that time, he fill the “holes” in my life with His love, mercy and grace.

Do you feel like something is missing in your life? Christ is knocking at the door to your heart. Will you let Him in?

How great is Christ's love for you?

Like the ocean, His love is deep

Lamentations 3:22 – 23 (NCV) The Lord’s love never ends; his mercies never stop. They are new every morning; Lord, your loyalty is great.

Ephesians 3:18 (NCV) And I pray that you and all God’s holy people will have the power to understand the greatness of Christ’s love—how wide and how long and how high and how deep that love is.

God has blessed me on several occasions with little weekend getaways to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my closest girlfriends. These little getaways are always a much needed opportunity to relax, eat way too much, laugh, and stay up way too late. At the end of these weekends I am sleep deprived but that’s okay – we always enjoy ourselves and make the most of the time we have together.

I remember the last weekend we spent together in Kitty Hawk. It was the last morning of our trip, so set an early alarm to watch the sun rise over the ocean. The Master Creator did not disappoint. The sunrise was magnificent. The sun, a deep yellowish-bright orange ball gave increasing light to beautiful pale pinkish-blue sky as it continued to make its bold entrance on the morning. As I watched the incredible display of God’s design, I thanked him for waking us up in time to witness this glimpse of His beautiful creation. In that moment He reminded me of  3 things:
1 - His never-ending love
2 - His mercy (which is new each morning), and
3 - His grace (just one glance at the ocean and I can't begin to imagine how much water it  holds...just think about how much greater the vastness of His grace truly is)

God loved us so much that he sacrificed his one and only Son so that we could be forgiven, free, and spend eternity with him. I was also reminded that morning of the greatness of Christ’s love. Just as the sun reached over the expanse of the ocean, so too did Jesus stretched out his arms on a cross to pay the penalty for every sin we have committed or will ever commit.

For me, sunrises are a reminder of God’s mercy, grace and the deep, deep love Christ has for each one of us. Each time I see a sunrise or sunset, lyrics of two songs pop into my mind as a reminder of this truth and I find myself humming them throughout the day.

 “Mercies New” Nichole Nordeman

Your mercies are new every morning

So let me wake with the dawn

When the music is through or so it seems to be

Then let me sing a new song, old things gone

Every day it's true, You make all Your mercies new

“Your Love is Deep” Jami Smith 

Your love is deep,

Your love is high

Your love is long,

Your love is wide

Your love is deeper than my view of grace

Higher than this worldly place

Longer than this road I've traveled

Wider than the gap You've filled

"How He Love Us" David Crowder
We are His portion and He is our prize 
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes 
If his grace is an ocean, we're all sinking 
So Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss 
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest 
I don't have time to maintain these regrets 
When I think about the way 
He loves us 
Oh how He loves us, 
Oh how He loves us 
Oh, how he loves 

What are you "working" for?

Galatians 2: 19-21 (MSG) “What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that. Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.”

Do you believe you can buy your way into heaven by being good enough, being upright and moral, performing random acts of kindness, or by obeying the law perfectly? Paul clearly indicates this way of thinking would make Christ’s death on the cross unnecessary.

 

Christ’s death is so much more than that. Since the fall of man in the garden of Eden, man has had to "pay" a penalty for his disobedience (his sin). Adam and Eve had to give up the Garden of Eden and the tree of life. Today, if someone commits a crime, justice requires a payment for that crime (a fine, jail time, loss of privilege, etc.) The same was true with the Israelites. Before they could approach God, they had to pay for or "atone" for their sin. Their penalty (sacrifice) cost them something, something they had worked for or something they had grown on their own farm.

Once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Israelites would go to the Tent of Meeting and offer sacrifices (bulls, goats, doves, grain) for their sin. Blood of a perfect animal had to be shed so the person presenting their sacrifice could be cleanses from sin and have fellowship with God. Have you ever thought about this? How can the sacrifice of an animal make things right with God? Is the blood of an animal enough to pay for everything we've done?

Romans 6:23 (MSG) says that sin brings death. "Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master." The other part of that verse says that God has given us the gift of eternal life, through His son Jesus Christ.  God loves us so much, that He sent his son to pay the penalty for us once and for all (John 3:16). After Christ's death on Calvary it was no longer necessary to go to the Temple and offer sacrifices for sin. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice and its only through his shed blood that we can be free from sin's death grip so we can live with Him eternally. No longer do we have to keep each rule perfectly. There is no way we could do that anyway. God poured out his grace through Christ’s death on the cross and it is sufficient for all of us. When we accept him as our savior, Christ takes up residence and lives in each one of us.  It is only by His grace that the sins of our lives are forgiven and erased... not how many people we've helped or how moral a life we've lived. 

But wait just a minute…its important to consider a question. After giving our lives to Christ, did we surrender EVERYTNING to him? Think about that question for just a minute. EVERYTHING. What does that really mean? A quick look at my thesaurus tells me other words for EVERYTHING include: every part of; the entire; the complete; the whole. If there are things in our lives that we are trying to control, we need to LET GO and surrender them to Christ. When we become Christ followers, we can no longer call the shots in our own life. We belong to Christ.

By giving control of my life to the God of the universe – I have to realize that He knows what’s best. After all, He is God. He spoke the entire universe into existence. I think I should be able to trust Him with the details of my life... don't  you? His word assures me He has a plan for my life and it's perfect (Jeremiah 29:11).

So, what about you? Are you just following rules trying to get into God's perfect heaven, or are you allowing the ever cleansing stream of God's grace and mercy to prepare you for entry?

Related scripture: Romans 3:19-24; Ephesians 1:3-14

Pride has got to go for God’s grace to flow

Pride. According to Noah Webster’s definition of the word it means:

Inordinate self-esteem; an unreasonable conceit of one's own superiority in talents, beauty, wealth, accomplishments, rank or elevation in office, which manifests itself in lofty airs, distance, reserve, and often in contempt of others.

Yikes! Sounds like someone with pride is living with a worldly attitude huh?

As I was reading through Jeremiah this morning, two verses in chapters 48 & 49 reminded me of what happens to nations (and people for that matter) who are filled with pride.

Jeremiah 48:29 (NCV) “We have heard that the people of Moab are proud, very proud. They are proud, very proud, and in their hearts they think they are important.”

Jeremiah 49:16 (NCV) “Edom, you frightened other nations, but your pride has fooled you. You live in the hollow places of the cliff and control the high places of the hills. Even if you build your home as high as an eagle’s nest, I will bring you down from there,” says the Lord.”

My mind didn’t get too far away from either one of the verses before the words of James 4:6 (God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble) came rushing to the front of my mind.

In the book of Jeremiah we are told both Moab and Edom were destroyed simply because God could not tolerate their pride. Pride puffs up and would have us believe we are “greater than” anyone…even “greater than” the very One whom created and breathed life into us (gulp). Have you ever thought about pride in that way before? It certainly does make you hesitate for just a moment doesn’t it?

“Pride” has us thinking we can take care of ourselves without even the least bit of help from God. Furthermore, the “I can take care of myself” mentality leads to taking personal credit for what God has done or is currently doing in the circumstances around us.

In Romans 12:3, Paul tells us to “not think of ourselves more highly than we should.” Evaluating ourselves through a “worldly lens” leads us to fall into pride’s trap. However, when we evaluate ourselves based on our identity in Christ, we are given grace through our humility.

I encourage you today to ask God to point out and remove any areas of pride you may be harboring.

Pride has got to go for God’s grace to flow.

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