THE LORD OUR GOD IS GOOD

The Lord Jesus, out of His Love for His friends, gave up His life to save us from our condemnation. As Jesus said in the book of John 15, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

This is the love that Jesus had for us and He did lay down His life for us which paid the penalty for our sins and covered our charges and redeemed us.

 He is wondrous and gracious towards us and worthy of all praise and honor for His unwavering goodness to us.

Believe in Him.

Amen.

OUR LORD THE VICTOR

Our Lord Jesus lived a life of absolute purity. For His entire life, He did not contravene any of the laws even once. Further to that, He not have any guilt of sinful thoughts or intentions. He did not commit any sin of presumption nor did He commit any sin of omission. His entire life was carefully centered around the perfect exemplification of the law of God.

He then willfully gave Himself over the Roman authorities who subjected Him to a trial. They could not find any wrongdoing by Him but the political expediency of the time worked to ensure that Jesus was abandoned to face death on a cross.

This perfect sinless man whose life of teaching others and healing the sick, was condemned to the death normally metted out to the most evil criminals.

Once He died, He descended into darkness and was subjected to a trial.

The sinless man who had maintained moral  perfection throughout the brutality of His execution, was now in the confines of the stronghold of the powers of darkness.

If the princes of darkness had known what was in store for them, they would not have killed the Son of God.

The infinite injustice of Jesus' subjection to hell reached its apex and the blinding perfection of His glory exploded like a neutron bomb scattering the princes of darkness in a naked panicked frenzy of terror.

Jesus made a universal spectacle of them all humiliating them before all of existence. Arrayed in blistering illumination, Jesus strode into the holding cells and those who sat in darkness saw a great light. He proclaimed the gospel to them and the first fruits of His mighty kingdom were emancipated from their prison and led out into the kingdom of light.

The great and staggeringly perfect Son of God was victorious for all eternity.

Honor the King.

Amen.

 

OUR MIGHTY AND HUMBLE GOD

The Lord God is mighty.

His vast strength and power are impossible to comprehend. If you look at the massive universe we live in and try to quantify the power of the one who called it into existence, you would be terribly undercounting the actual power of the most high God.

The Lord says of Himself that He is meek and lowly of heart. He means that He is gentle and down-to-earth in  a manner of speaking.

This does not correspond at all to the actually power and majesty and authority that belongs to our Lord. 

In our common experience in this world, when people are given authority and power over us, they often act hautily, arrogantly and rashly. Among us humans, most often,  the greater the stature, the greater the pride.

However, the God of heaven demonstrates the exact opposite. His ungraspable power over all things and His unreachable stature is accompanied by His gentle and humble Spirit.

He models the perfect stance we humans should have. In a specific instance, Jesus washed the feet of His disciples at the last supper. To clarify this, he once said that if we are to be great, we must become servants of all. We must always prefer other people over ourselves. 

This is the example set by the mighty God. 

Pray for strength to follow it.

Amen.

THE LOVE AND KINDNESS OF GOD

Our Lord created us in His image. In fact, if you take a human being and extrapolate all his creativity, knowledge, power and dexterity to an  infinite degree, you end up with a being that is almost the same as God. In fact, the only real difference would be that God is eternal while the extrapolated person would be temporal. 

We have God's attributes in us that make us look like God and operate like God.

However, God's attributions are shaped in a way that our attributions are not.   God is perfectly righteous and just and loving and kind and patient and forgiving.

We, on the other hand, practice unrighteousness, injustice, lovelessness, unkindness, impatience and unforgiveness. We actually go much further than this. We behave wickedly towards others and we act carelessly with other people. We sometime scheme to harm others and even rally other people to bring harm to innocent and defenceless people.

This vast gulf between God's attributes and our attributes is what separates us from God. As long as we are participants in the practices of the kingdom of darkness, we are never able to perceive God or His kingdom. As long as we remain in our default state, we find ourselves desperately seeking for the meaning of our lives.

As we search, we feel that we are in a meaningless world in which we have no purpose and we sense that our lives will  have amounted to nothing  when we die.

Many people try to gin up meaning from decisions we make in our lives. Some of us pursue pleasure or perhaps we commit to social or political causes to try to get a sense of purpose but in the end, we feel as empty as when we started. 

We are doomed to continue the fruitless search for meaning unless we encounter the God who personally created us.

Our creator has provided the remedy for our unbridgable distance from Him. He provided the Son of God as a sacrifice to atone for our sinful lives. The perfectly righteous, just, loving, kind, patient and forgiving God died on a cross for us so that the guilt of our sins could be taken off of us and placed on the Son of God.

By hearing this new and believing it to be true and accepting that we need the salvation of God by the removal of our sins, we are returned to right standing with God. The chasm that existed between God and those who believe in His sacrifice, is removed.

We find ourselves born anew. We discover that God is not far off and unknowable but rather that He is near and approachable when we are brought to Him by the Lord Jesus who suffered and died for us.

Jesus our Lord, having risen from the dead and being alive forever is proof that the sacrifice of His life for all our sins was accepted and that we are believing in a true hope.

Instead of yearning for God and wondering if He exists, we are suddenly in free contact with Him and learning that we can hear His voice and that the meaning of our lives can only be derived from Him.

Bless the Lord. 

Amen.

THE JOY OF THE LORD

The Lord our Father rejoices over us. An example of this joy is illustrated in the story of the prodigal son who returns to his father's house after a long absence. 

Whereas the son has already accepted that he will be relegated to servitude and scorn,  his father, seeing his son approaching from a distance, is filled with mercy and joy and calls for a great feast to celebrate his son's arrival. The father gladly restores the son to sonship and gives him a signet ring of authority in His house.

Such is our Lord's joy over us. The bible says that God sings and dances over us. When we are made alive in God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ who had died to redeem us, we come into contact with the Joy that our father has for us and by induction, find our spirit filled with great joy.

This joy is our strength in the natural world but especially in the spiritual realm. When we walk in the spirit, the joy of the the Lord is our source of energy and vitality.

Waiting on the Lord and then reaching Him by His grace is a sure way to be infused with the joy of the Lord. We will find that we can move easily and fluidly in the spirit and we can remain in the spirit for extended periods.

The joy that we then emit is part of the fruit of the spirit in our lives,

Amen.

WORD OF TODAY

OUR GOD OF MERCY

The Lord  loved us while we were yet sinners.  He gave His life for us while we were in rebellion  against Him.

If He was so gracious to  us while we were sinners, how much more will His grace abound towards us while we are His.

Our God provides mercy to give His children a passageway to His sanctification and His perfection.

Praise His Holy Name.

Amen.

THE LORD IS OUR SHEPHERD 

The Lord is our shepherd. We shall not want. 

The Lord looks after His sheep. He said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you." This means that we who follow Him and hear His voice need only to follow His leading and He will attend to the concerns of the availability of green grass and still water and rest. In other words, whatever our requirements for life are, He will attend to those while we attend to the matters of His leading in His kingdom.

He is attentive to each of us to the degree that He knows what we have need of  even  before we ask. 

For the salvation He has freely offered us (for which a great price was paid), it would be our reasonable service to Him to gladly be His servants who do His bidding.

But our Lord goes far beyond that. He asks us to serve in His Kingdom willingly and further to that, offers to attend to our corporeal needs while we heed His voice in matters of His Kingdom. Further to that, whereas a servant in debt to His lord should expect no special pivilege, our Lord makes us sons and daughters of His Kingdom with whom He shares His inheritance of righteousness.

Praise the Lord our God. 

Amen.