Have you ever focused on the difficult passages of scripture in which Jesus said things that seem difficult, if not impossible, to live out practically? I know I have, and I continue to circle back to them throughout my Christian walk because I know the more I try to understand the scriptures the better I am able to understand God and my walk with him.

This is the third article on myths we believe in. If you have not read the first two, please read them first to understand why I am calling these topics myths. When Christians read the scriptures we take our cues about how to understand what God is saying from so called “Intelligent” people who claim they know Greek and Hebrew words and sentence structure. But, have we been brainwashed to believe false ideas about what God is saying? History is not always right, especially when it comes to scripture. 

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.

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?

If you gave your life to Christ your heart had to go through a transformational process where you changed from wanting to live for your self-interest to wanting to please God as your top priority. If your heart didn’t change salvation was never truly realized regardless how many times you prayed the sinner’s prayer. After all, God is more interested in transformation than he is in just forgiveness.   

Some people want to believe that a belief in God is not necessary in order to have good morals. They believe their morals are correct because they want to believe them regardless of whether these morals are based on something more solid than just their feeling. Thinking God is necessary to help us construct good morals is different than thinking that God exists. Remember, Satan believes God exists but he and the other fallen angles don’t live or exist with any morality other than to steal, kill and destroy. (John 10:10)

I have been a believer for over 50 years and I have heard a lot of teachings and sermons on receiving a “CALLING” from God.  I think most of those teaching have been about some type of ministry calling yet rarely are they on what Jesus meant when referring to the idea of calling. In my estimation, Jesus rarely talked about ministry calling and almost exclusively talked about the calling that God presents to mankind for relationship.

Have you ever wondered how you would change your past if you had the ability to go back in time? I think most of us would make different choices if we are honest about the past.  It might be about taking one kind of job over another or moving to a new city or even the friends we chose. Regardless of the individual details, our choices about the future have significant effects our life, both in terms of our fulfillment and our fruitfulness.