If you don't fear God- you should. Seriously, you really should.
Ecc 12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.
Ecc 12:14 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.
Yesterday we read plenty of verse about the wrath of God, past and future. Yes, a future wrath. Our Savior did not magically make the wrath of God disappear. We laugh when various crackpots claim the wrath of God is pouring down on us during various 'natural' disasters. It's just nature we tell them, it has nothing to do with God's wrath. It can happen to anyone and it's all explainable by various weather patterns and such, oh, and let's not forget, global warming as a cause. God's wrath as we learned yesterday can influence the weather. We KNOW what God did during the flood, yes? We know, we really do know if we care to believe. We are so much more comfortable just writing it all off as pure chance, mere happenstance, an out of the blue occurrence. We do not want anyone to really believe God's wrath could be in play, because that means there is something for God to be wrathful about. We'd much rather call out we're all like Job, all these things are happening to us for no reason of our own, we're victims, not sinners, not deserving God's wrath.
If you believe in God, if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe in the Holy Spirit, you HAVE to believe in what they stand for. What purpose is there in believing if we don't really, truly believe at all? The fairy tale God, the fantasy Jesus Christ, the fictional Holy Spirit, these are the Gods that people are really wanting to believe in. People cling to their misplaced ideas of these three Gods, they nurture them, they build their lives around them. Ask if they believe and they'll readily stand up and shout, "Yes!" But then ask if they fear God, and they are a bit taken aback. Are they supposed to really fear God? But He's loving, kind, forgiving, a big ol' teddy bear God, what is there to fear. And hey, didn't He even tell us to fear not, that fear isn't a good thing? Isn't one of the signs of the end times- 'men's hearts failing them for fear'? So if we aren't suppose to fear, and we surely don't want our hearts to fail because of our fear then why should we fear God. Is there a difference in fear and fearing God?
Let me ask you something, as a child did you ever fear your parents? Come on, think about it honestly. Did you ever do something wrong and get called to task over it? Wasn't there a bit of fear involved as you were being told to explain? Did that fear displace your love for your parents? Is there a difference between that fear and the fear of say a complete stranger? Of course there is. You can have what is called a healthy fear and that fear involves an element of reverence, something the fear induced evilly doesn't possess. Being scared, being fearful of life around you is a revealer of a lack of trust in God that all things will work out for your good, no matter how awful they are- right? But fearing God is acknowledging the truth- He is our CREATOR, He is our REDEEMER, He is our SUSTAINER, He has POWER over us, over our lives, over our EVERY BREATH. Fearing God is knowing He is our JUDGE! Fearing God is comprehending He has a standard we are judged by, and that standard is revealed in His commandments. Our inability to live under that standard is real too, at least on our own. With Christ and with the Holy Spirit we are able to live under the standard God has given to mankind. Where we fail, He succeeds and He succeed for us IF and only IF we ask Him to, believing in Him to be our righteousness where we have none.
A constant, daily, hourly, minutely belief must exist in us. A realization that there is a standard, an understanding that we fall short of that standard, and a desire to seek forgiveness for our failing, repenting and a seeking unendingly to do what is right under our God's standard. We can never give up desiring to live as He would have us live- keeping His commandments- this is our DUTY!
We all have this duty, yet so many of us would rather hold tight to our fairy tale God and listen to the lies that we don't have live by any standard any longer, we just need to love. We stop realizing that the LOVE, God would have us live, is found alive and well in every single commandment. It's a lot easier to just throw out the commandments and live in our own idea of love. It's much easier to pick and choose the commandments we want to keep, after all, stealing and murder are wrong no matter what, right? So we can keep those. We might even choose to keep a few more right? But to follow them all, well that's just plain nonsense, isn't it?
Take a look at the ten commandments and tell me which ones you want to keep and which ones you don't… go ahead.
Have you found any?
If you really look at them, study them, know them, know their meaning, their truth tell me honestly do you keep all of them as they were intended to be kept?
We fall short, don't we? And it's not truly for lack of desiring to keep them, is it? It shouldn't be. There isn't a single commandment there of the ten that should be tossed away or changed in any way.
God warned us that the man of sin would think to change times and laws-
Dan_7:25 And he shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High: and he shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and half a time.
Change times, change laws! We have NO right to believe we can do that! We can't change God's laws to suit our idea of them. We can't make them more lax, more easy to follow, more simple to believe. We have to study them and follow them as HE desires us to!
By the grace of GOD and OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, through the power of the HOLY SPIRIT we will study more on this tomorrow. All in HIS amazing love!
Ecc 12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.
Ecc 12:14 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.
Yesterday we read plenty of verse about the wrath of God, past and future. Yes, a future wrath. Our Savior did not magically make the wrath of God disappear. We laugh when various crackpots claim the wrath of God is pouring down on us during various 'natural' disasters. It's just nature we tell them, it has nothing to do with God's wrath. It can happen to anyone and it's all explainable by various weather patterns and such, oh, and let's not forget, global warming as a cause. God's wrath as we learned yesterday can influence the weather. We KNOW what God did during the flood, yes? We know, we really do know if we care to believe. We are so much more comfortable just writing it all off as pure chance, mere happenstance, an out of the blue occurrence. We do not want anyone to really believe God's wrath could be in play, because that means there is something for God to be wrathful about. We'd much rather call out we're all like Job, all these things are happening to us for no reason of our own, we're victims, not sinners, not deserving God's wrath.
If you believe in God, if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe in the Holy Spirit, you HAVE to believe in what they stand for. What purpose is there in believing if we don't really, truly believe at all? The fairy tale God, the fantasy Jesus Christ, the fictional Holy Spirit, these are the Gods that people are really wanting to believe in. People cling to their misplaced ideas of these three Gods, they nurture them, they build their lives around them. Ask if they believe and they'll readily stand up and shout, "Yes!" But then ask if they fear God, and they are a bit taken aback. Are they supposed to really fear God? But He's loving, kind, forgiving, a big ol' teddy bear God, what is there to fear. And hey, didn't He even tell us to fear not, that fear isn't a good thing? Isn't one of the signs of the end times- 'men's hearts failing them for fear'? So if we aren't suppose to fear, and we surely don't want our hearts to fail because of our fear then why should we fear God. Is there a difference in fear and fearing God?
Let me ask you something, as a child did you ever fear your parents? Come on, think about it honestly. Did you ever do something wrong and get called to task over it? Wasn't there a bit of fear involved as you were being told to explain? Did that fear displace your love for your parents? Is there a difference between that fear and the fear of say a complete stranger? Of course there is. You can have what is called a healthy fear and that fear involves an element of reverence, something the fear induced evilly doesn't possess. Being scared, being fearful of life around you is a revealer of a lack of trust in God that all things will work out for your good, no matter how awful they are- right? But fearing God is acknowledging the truth- He is our CREATOR, He is our REDEEMER, He is our SUSTAINER, He has POWER over us, over our lives, over our EVERY BREATH. Fearing God is knowing He is our JUDGE! Fearing God is comprehending He has a standard we are judged by, and that standard is revealed in His commandments. Our inability to live under that standard is real too, at least on our own. With Christ and with the Holy Spirit we are able to live under the standard God has given to mankind. Where we fail, He succeeds and He succeed for us IF and only IF we ask Him to, believing in Him to be our righteousness where we have none.
A constant, daily, hourly, minutely belief must exist in us. A realization that there is a standard, an understanding that we fall short of that standard, and a desire to seek forgiveness for our failing, repenting and a seeking unendingly to do what is right under our God's standard. We can never give up desiring to live as He would have us live- keeping His commandments- this is our DUTY!
We all have this duty, yet so many of us would rather hold tight to our fairy tale God and listen to the lies that we don't have live by any standard any longer, we just need to love. We stop realizing that the LOVE, God would have us live, is found alive and well in every single commandment. It's a lot easier to just throw out the commandments and live in our own idea of love. It's much easier to pick and choose the commandments we want to keep, after all, stealing and murder are wrong no matter what, right? So we can keep those. We might even choose to keep a few more right? But to follow them all, well that's just plain nonsense, isn't it?
Take a look at the ten commandments and tell me which ones you want to keep and which ones you don't… go ahead.
Have you found any?
If you really look at them, study them, know them, know their meaning, their truth tell me honestly do you keep all of them as they were intended to be kept?
We fall short, don't we? And it's not truly for lack of desiring to keep them, is it? It shouldn't be. There isn't a single commandment there of the ten that should be tossed away or changed in any way.
God warned us that the man of sin would think to change times and laws-
Dan_7:25 And he shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High: and he shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and half a time.
Change times, change laws! We have NO right to believe we can do that! We can't change God's laws to suit our idea of them. We can't make them more lax, more easy to follow, more simple to believe. We have to study them and follow them as HE desires us to!
By the grace of GOD and OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, through the power of the HOLY SPIRIT we will study more on this tomorrow. All in HIS amazing love!
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