THE LORD IS OUR TEACHER

The Lord Jesus taught the people around Him many things.

He taught His disciples the workings of the kingdom of God. He taught His friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus the principle of spending time  with God.. He taught Nicodemus the spiritual reality of being born again. 

Jesus taught people everywhere He went and now, the risen Christ continues to teach.

He brings illumination and revelation through His words of scripture to those who seek Him and yearn for the truth.

The Lord also teaches through His servants whom He anoints to rightly handle the word of truth.

The Lord will  give wisdom to any who ask of Him and He will do so abundantly and without restraint.

The Lord is the custodian of all knowledge and  can furnish us with portions of knowledge as we need it.

Praise His holy name.

Amen.

JESUS IS OUR LORD AND REDEEMER

All we like sheep had gone astray. We were born into a sinful nature that had doomed us into a permanent subservient  alliance with the kingdom of darkness.

We, as a race, had sold ourselves into spiritual and physical slavery from which we had no means of extricating ourselves.

The Lord Jesus, our sinless, perfect and immortal God, accepted the role of redeemer for us. This means that He would personally  pay the price to buy us out of our slavery and claim us as His own people.

Because our slavery was that of sin and rebellion against God, the only  price that could buy us was the death of a perfect, sinless and immortal man. Jesus, the only perfect, sinless and immortal person in existence, was the only one who could pay that incredibly high price but He, being perfect, accepted the cost and suffered death on a cross for us.

In dying, He paid for our sins and brought us out of darkness and into His marvelous light.

Our redeemer lives and we shall see Him with our own eyes when He returns in glory to judge the living and the dead.

Amen.

THE LORD IS A GOD OF JUSTICE

The Lord our God is a God of justice. He always keeps His word no matter what circumstance occurs.

His promises are absolutely dependable and His covenants are always kept from His side.

He will judge with fairness and with equity so that all will see that there is no injustice in Him. 

Delight in our God who is faithful and just and in whom we can rely.

Amen.

 THE LORD IS FAITHFUL AND JUST TO FORGIVE

"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." 1 John 1 : 19

"Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight."  Proverbs 3: 5-6

Amen.

OUR LORD TURNS ALL THING FOR GOOD

As we go through our lives, we sometimes reach points when we realize that the pursuits we have been preoccupied with have deteriorated into smouldering ruins around us.

All the energy we have expended on these pursuits has gone up in the acrid smoke of the dumpster fire of our hopes and dreams.

At these junctures, there is no where else to turn. We must stand before the Lord and seek His grace and mercy. We must confess our part in the train wrecks be it our stubbornness, our willful disobedience to the councel of God or even launching out with our grand designs without submitting ourselves to the guidance of the Lord.

Having reached the dead end in your circumstance, ask the Lord for wisdom and ask Him to order your steps so that it is He who selects your path and that it is His Kingdom you are serving.

The Lord will  turn all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.

Amen.

THE LORD JESUS OUR SALVATION 

The great wisdom of God put in place the salvation of mankind with astonishing implications.

Jesus, the perfect Son of God, gave Himself over to the Roman soldiers. In their custody, He endured false trials and accusations. He also endured humiliation and brutal scurging.

He was finally abandoned to death by crucifixion where He suffered and died. He descended into Hell and put again on trial in the spirit realm. However, in the realm of the dead, Jesus was too perfect to be held by darkness. His brilliance detonated in hell sending the powers and principalities into a humiliating naked panicked frenzy that made them a spectacle before all of creation. 

Jesus rose again and appeared to many witnesses. He then ascended into heaven where He was coroneted as the king of kings and Lord of Lords over all of creation.

It is from this lofty throne that He rules and reigns over all the affairs of His kingdom.

The wisdom of God, by mysteries set up before time, placed we who believe into the person of Jesus so that when Jesus died, we died with Him. Then when Jesus triumphed over the kingdom of darkness, we triumphed with Him. When Jesus rose from the dead and emerged from the grave, we rose with Him.

This is what is symbolized when we are baptized. We go into the watery grave  in death then we come out of the water in resurrection.

When Jesus ascended into heaven, we ascended with Him and when He was coroneted, we were coroneted with Him so that when He rules and reigns, we rule and reign with Him.

How wonderous is our God. 

Praise and honor Him.

Amen.

OUR LORD OUR HEALER

From ancient days, the God of Israel made His name know as a healer.

He healed those injured by snakes in the desert. He healed lepers and He healed those who had been struck by the plague.

The Lord, when He walked in our midst, was prolific in His healing and His ministry of restoration.  

He healed the blind, the deaf, the mute and those oppressed by the devil.

He healed the withered arms of the man in the synagogue and He healed the issue of blood of a woman who touched the hem of His garment. He healed the paralyzed young man and also healed the 10 lepers of whom only 2 came back to thank Him.

He also freed Mary Magdalene from 7 demons as well as the man in Ganasaret whose legion of demons were cast into the doomed herd of pigs.

The Lord Jesus withstood a brutal flogging where the Roman soldiers struck Him on his body leaving furrows like a plough. 

"By His stripes we are healed", the bible affirms. Jesus undertook the afflictions on His physical body so that we could be healed from afflictions on our own bodies.

How blessed is He who heals our infirmities.

Praise His holy name.

Amen.

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.

FOLLOWING OUR LORD AND GOD

The Lord our God undertook the extremely costly project of making salvation available to the human race.

He allowed Himself to be subjected to a frightfully brutal crucifixion as though He were guilty of sin as we human were. 

But of course, He was absolutely sinless and yet suffered the death of the worst of sinners. In doing so, He paid the price to redeem us from the evil  kingdom of darkness and into His kingdom of light.

We who believe in Jesus and the work He did on the cross to save us, are now in the kingdom of light. Now what? 

Now, we must learn to hear the leading of Him who saved us. Jesus said, "My sheep hear My voice."  This means that every person who believes in the salvation of the Lord should be able to hear the voice of God. 

Remember that His voice is described as a "still small voice" and hearing it requires quieting our souls to make out the words.

After learning how to hear the voice of God, we now need to learn how to follow the leading of the Lord. 

Here are some examples of what you might hear. The Lord may say He loves you  He may tell you to forgive someone in your life. He may tell you to call someone and encourage them. 

As you grow in this relationship, the Lord will tell you more things about His word, about His plans and even about the destiny He has for you.

This deepening of you relationship with God will come about by your responding to His guidance and following His leadership faithfully.

The bible says that His "yoke is easy and His burden is light." Pursue this relationship with God with everything that you have.

There is no greater value than a life lived in the will of the almighty creator.

Amen.

A HEART OUR LORD DELIGHTS IN

The Lord Jesus,  upon seeing Nathanael,  said to him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile."

In John 1 v. 47, the Lord describes Nathanael as a true Israelite because his heart was without manipulative deceit.  Nathanael was a straight shooter who never used cunning to get advantage over other people.

This trait is a high water mark of truthfulness because the guiless person not only does not deceive people,  he does not think deceptive thoughts in his heart nor does he pretend not to know things he does know or pretend to know things he does not.

Jesus, with His extraordinary perception, picked up the purity of Nathaniel heart by simply seeing him.  This is not to say that Nathaniel was sinless but rather that the mechanisms of deceit and subterfuge were absent from Nathaniel. 

The God of heaven finds that a heart with no guile is notable enough to be laudable within the hearing of others and to be inscribed in scripture for the ages to read about.

May we cultivate our  hearts to have no guile.

Amen.

THE LORD IS THE GREAT MONARCH

The Lord our God is the great sovereign king of heaven and earth. 

He is more powerful than we can concieve of and His influence is more vast than we can imagine.

He is perfect is all He does and righteousness and justice are the foundation of His kingdom.

He offers goodness and mercy to us who belong to Him all the days of our lives and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Believe in Him and make Him Lord over your life. You will never be the same again.

Amen.

THE LORD IS CLOSER THAN ANY BROTHER

If you have believed in Jesus for many years, you will start to understand this attribute of God that He shows towards those who trust in Him.

You will discover that the Lord is absolutely steadfast in His careing for you. When others would have long ago given up on you (including your own brothers), the Lord will continue attending to your wellbeing and preparing you for the destiny He has for you.

You sometimes will think He is not near and suddenly, a helping hand will silently right your boat and rescue you from disaster. 

The Lord is faithful and He is very close even when you think He is far away.

Honor His holy and wonderful name.

Amen.

THE LORD OUR CREATOR

The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it.

Even we humans were made by God. There is no part of our own existence that we are responsible for.

The Lord created us and knows each of us extremely well because we all came from Him. We are fearfully and wonderfully made by God. We are all formed with a purpose in the kingdom of God. 

He made us and set us free so that we might, by our own free expression and will, consign ourselves to His objectives. 

However, we are born into this world as rebels against God. Upon growing up, we find ourselves among a race of rebels and that we all cooperate with each other in our rebellion.

We, as a race, chose to set our own agenda and cast away the possibility of living our lives by the agenda of God.

It is here that Christianity speaks. 

We are rebels but most of us know there is something amiss. We know that we are wearied by our own evil behaviour and by the evil behaviour of other people. We know that we are running headlong into destruction and we can do nothing about it.

The rebellion in each of us has a remedy through the death, resurrection and lordship of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

If we reach a point in our lives  where we acknowledge our evil ways and repent from them and call upon Jesus to save us, He will provide the redemption for us that extricates us from the kingdom of darkness and translates us into the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The God who created us, set us free to choose whichever way we wished to live including remaining in the center of God's purpose. 

Our progenitors chose rebellion against God but even now, we are given a choice  between  living independently of God and taking our chances with whoever (or whatever) replaces Him and  living under the domain of God our creator.

The making of this choice would require these actions:

1 - Surrender from the rebellion against God by          repenting of our sin and believing in Jesus            Christ who died for us to give us life.

2 - Stay in rebellion by doing anything else other         than item 1.

This is the choice we must make while we are alive on earth because our death marks the sealing of the decision.

Chose life.

Amen.

THE LORD OF MERCY

The Lord of heaven and earth  is perfect and  righteous. His absolute rulership over all things makes Him the great and mighty God. 

We, on the other hand, are but flesh. We are given to piques of self-pity, moral weakness, deception, pretense and carelessness.

It is at these times that we need the mercy of God. He has provided this institution so that we can interact with him even though we are dithering and distracted and derailed by the working of our coporeal selves.

The mercy of God provides a place for the sons of the kingdom of God to come in from the rain and seek the grace of God.

Bless His holy name.

THE LORD IS OUR FAITHFUL PROVIDER

The Lord is unwavering. He is unchanging. His word is true and He will not go back on His word.

His promises are yeah and amen to those who love Him and are called according to His purposes. 

He knows what we have need of before we ask and because every one of our hairs is numbered,  He has every detail of our lives in view and He gives bountifully and lavishly to those who are His.

To become His, you must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ who died the death of crucifixion to pay for our sins. His immeasurable gift is that He underwent this death on our behalf so that we may be cleansed  of our evil deeds. 

Our evil actions had linked us inseparable to the kingdom of darkness but Jesus's gift of the sacrifice of His life broke our pact with the kingdom of darkness and joined us to His kingdom of life and light if we believe in Him.

Believe in Him and call upon His name and be saved.

Give your life to Him and become  a citizen of His kingdom. 

Amen.

THE LORD IS WORTHY TO BE PRAISED

The Lord Jesus is wonderful beyond description. He is majestic and full of glory. He shines brighter than the sun. 

He is worthy of adulation, adoration, exaltation, exultation and worship. 

He, the Son of God, undertook to save men from their sins and the damnation that was to follow. 

He alone paid the exeedingly costly  price of His blood being poured out on a cross. There is no other way to God except through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.

He is high and lifted up at the apex of all existence.

Praise and honor to His name.

Amen.

THE MERCY AND GRACE OF OUR LORD

The Lord Jesus Christ is our shepard.  He makes us like down in green pastures. He leads us besides still waters. He restores our soul.

He forgives us and cleanses us from unrighteousness. He remembers we are but dust.

He hold our hand so that when we fall, we do not fall headlong. The righteous stumble seven times but they rise up again. 

The Lord calls us back into His service and teaches us the ways to be overcomers.

Praise and honor to His name.

Amen.

 THE JOY OF THE LORD IS MY STRENGTH

The Lord of our salvation gives us two welcoming gifts when we are born into His kingdom. The gift of peace that passes all understanding and the gift of joy that is our strength.

The peace that He gives us truly is beyond understanding. In a place in the center of your heart and soul is a strange zone that you don't even realize that it is an area of turbulence. 

The Lord Jesus, who  has one royal title of " Prince of Peace", places His peace in your heart and calms a storm you didn't even know was raging.  You suddenly find a stillness deep inside that is indescribable to any person who has not experienced it. It is like explaining music to a person born deaf. 

The other gift is joy. This gift seems to bubble out of experience with the Lord. When you encounter Him and grasp how immediate and how personal He is, you find joying welling up in your heart almost as an involuntary response to His drawing near to you.

For these two wonderful gifts, give thanks to the Lord. 

If you have not experienced these two things, the Lord will save you first by your belief in Him and your belief that He died on a cross to pay for your sins.

The Lord will save you and from there, peace and joy.

Amen.

HOW OUR LORD SAVES US

We all  know we are not in good standing with our creator.

We know that we are lost and heading to darkness and damnation.

We can't help but feel that there is something wrong and that there must be something we can do but we never can figure it out. Most of the time, we just put it out of our minds and occupy ourselves with busy activities to distract us. 

Sometimes, we medicate ourselves to numb that nagging feeling that constantly gnaws at our hearts.

That feeling will never go away as long as we live. It is our human condition of being separate from God and trying to make do in a world system that does not seem made for us. 

The sensitivities of our hearts to the cruelties and absurdities  of our world are a hint that there is a mismatch between our world system and  our hearts.

The good news is that the God who made us has paid the price to redeem us from this fallen world and into the kingdom of light.

This good news is designed to work in a straightforward way:  We hear the good news that we have a redeemer who paid the costly price for us to cover our condemnation. 

We, by hearing this news, then believe the words and because these words are the very power of God unto salvation, find ourselves transformed into children of God. Things that we have never felt before, like true peace, suddenly fill our hearts and we become new creations in Jesus.

This is the only way we can be saved. Believing in the Lord Jesus Christ who died for us and paid for us to move from condemnation to righteousness.

Amen.

THE LORD IS OUR PROTECTOR

The God of heaven is our defender. He is our shield and our rock. He is the steadfast guardian of His flock of His believers.

He scatters our enemies and fends off those who attack us.

He strengthens us and prepares us to have courage.

He alerts us to the movements of our adversaries and teaches our hand to fight and our fingers to war.

The Lord is a great and mighty monarch. He is enthroned above every other throne. 

His kingdom is a kingdom of righteousness. 

There is none like Him.

Amen.

THE LORD OUR GOD IS WISE

The Lord our God is from everlasting to everlasting. 

There is nothing that can escape His notice. He knows when every sparrow falls. 

In His knowledge of all things, the Lord works in wisdom to perform His purposes. 

He undertakes insurmountable tasks ( like the salvation of men ) and devises plans to accomplish them. For example, He, being  perfect and loving, incorporated plans of great sacrifice of Himself by dying on a cross to accomplish His goal which was to save those He loves.

This daunting sacrifice of His life made possible the gift of redemption  which He offers to all men. All that we have to do is to be humble and believe in His gift of sacrifice and accept His matchless gift. 

This offer by God is wonderful news to to those who are repentant of their sins and is the power of salvation to those who believe.

The bible admonishes us not to overlook so great a salvation for there is no other way under heaven that the souls of mankind might be saved.

Amen.

 

THE LORD OUR GOD IS MERCIFUL

The Lord our God is merciful.

 He knows that we are but dust. He remembers  that we are but a vapour.

We are insufficient and we only gain sufficiency in our Lord and our God.

Thank Him for His mercy and grace.

THE LORD JESUS IS OUR ONLY HOPE

We humans are under the dominion of darkness. We are consigned to darkness because we, as a race, forfeited our sovereign position of leadership we were give over the earth.

The Lord our God, not willing to lose any of us, provided a way for salvation through the suffering and death of His only Son, Jesus. 

The death He underwent secured for us who believe a reprieve from our sentence of darkness. His subsequent resurrection granted us a chance to rise with Him into His kingdom of righteousness. 

Without this hope, we are doomed to existing in eternal darkness forever. This is not the environment we were made for. We were made for light and love and hope and life. For creatures like us, living eternally in a realm of darkness, hate, doom and death would be an unbearable existence.

The Lord Jesus paid the high price for us and is willing to save all those who call upon Him  asking for salvation from an eternity in darkness. 

He will not overlook the request of a humble heart. 

Amen.

BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD.

The name of the Lord is greatly to be praised.

 The name of the Lord is like a strong tower. 

The name of the Lord is the only name given by which we might be saved.

Call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.

Amen.