There should be times in our faith journey were we have encounters with God that are considered special in the eyes of God. In those times God expects that we will “RESPECT” him in a higher way in those encounters. My belief is that many don’t know they are experiencing a special time with God because of distractions in their lives. We can be so caught up in the complexity of our lives that we don’t notice God is doing something special for us and around us.
When you listen to many in the Christian community who profess they believe the Bible is the word of God and the ultimate authority in their lives you might want to dig a little deeper to see if that is in fact the truth or if what they really mean is they support their Christian doctrine with their particular slant. There are many who profess they believe that scripture is the final word in their lives when it is not.
We live in a time in history when we are so attached to our technology that we are losing our ability to truly care for one another in meaningful ways. Our addiction to smartphones have beguiled us into an insatiable hunger to be informed about what’s happening in the world, and people in whom we are interested, that we are unaware of how separated we have become from the people right around us.
Just because people surrender to Jesus Christ doesn’t mean they are living and thinking like the Lord would desire. The apostle Paul spoke about the need to “NOT” be conformed to the thinking of the world but to be “TRANSFORMED” in our thinking so our choices and actions would be pleasing to the Lord and our lives would be blessed. The problem is that we so often exchange transformation of thinking for learning doctrine, which often hardens our hearts rather than making them softer towards the Lord. Transformation is a process rather than a belief and transformation doesn’t happen without God’s help and our cooperation.
If we are honest, all of us know we have messed up in some areas of life, and some of us have messed up a lot. When we consider being held accountable for our actions I think we all want, or hope, for mercy to win over judgment. Just how or why could that be the case if we are brought before a judge about our actions? What about being brought before God over our lifetime of actions and words? Will we receive justice or mercy? How do we define what justice and mercy are?
When you give your life to Christ you lose some, if not all, of the friends you had in the world prior to your conversion because you choose to live for something other than yourself and the pleasures of this world. What we often don’t expect is losing friends afterwards, who are followers of Jesus as well. Losing Christian friends can happen because life is not static but always in motion and our relationships, even in Christ, can suffer because we change or our friend changes, both in biblical understanding and in the resolution of offenses.
I think there are many instances in our lives that God is probing our hearts and minds to see if we will participate in a creative miracle with him or deny participation because we only see the natural. Being spiritually minded is not denying the natural but working in tandem with the natural. However, learning how to think both naturally and spiritually together takes a lifetime of training and discipline.
What if we could have more confidence in prayer? What if we could pray with greater confidence and really see things change, rather than just praying with little expectation like too many of have a habit of doing, would you and I pray more or pray less? My belief is we would love to pray with confidence, except much of our praying seems more like wishful thinking than confidence.
If you find some things in scripture that are hard to swallow, or hard to apply, you are not alone. I have walked with God since 1969 and still find some things difficult that God calls me to do or believe. Some things cause me to outright argue with God or at least invoke in me desire to avoid them. Why? Because my salvation is still in progress and God is not through helping me to get a Kingdom mindset rather than a selfish worldly one. This leads me to voice a concern I have with modern preaching and teaching in the body of Christ.
This is now the fourth article exploring whether God changes his mind. What we think about God’s willingness to change things based on how and why we pray makes all the difference in the world as to if we are motivated to pray as we are challenged by scripture to pray. If you have not read articles 1-3 please do so before reading this one.
