Forever (Psalms 34)

 

6/14/2014

Forever (Psalms 34)

     You are the righteous One forever! Your strength never fails….never fails! You never fail. Your life never fails! Your LOVE never fails!

     I look at wrong things and they will fail and be cast down with no one to tempt again! You will last, Your ways are eternal life and they create more good. I think of how it all began and I’m stuck. You amaze me Father! When we follow Your ways we participate in life. In verse 34:21 it says,

 “affliction will slay the wicked and those who hate righteousness will be condemned.”

Terrible things follow wrong doings and the participants because doing wrong (going against God’s designed ways) is going against the very system of life, the way things work. Of course affliction follows participants of wrong, it follows like your car breaking down follows putting vegetable oil in the gas tank.

       You, my Lord, are with those who walk in Your ways. I praise You Father for, Your Justice, Your perfect ways and Love You shower down on everyone everyday. Your shouting to us “I love You, come and find life I give freely!”

     

What kind of God is this?

      "Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me."

  -Philippians 4:11-13

     I finally know what this means! When I was a kid I always thought, "how is that even possible? Does he force himself to be happy by putting tape on the corners of his mouth and force a smile?"

      In this life, things are tough. We can't live like we are kids anymore. We can't control other things and people.  We can only choose to control our own thoughts. We can choose to have God in our lives. We can choose to trust him inside the chaos, the storms in life. He is our peace. He is our life. I'm not just speaking out of my hole here. I genuinely faced the junk. I have been through some junk in my life. I've been in some pretty rotten spots that I honestly believe would hurt anyone. I'm talking from experience here, He is my Lord in all things when Ive been there. I'm not just saying this to sound holy or some junk. Anybody can do this.....Seriously guys.

     You don't need to be "happy" about all the rotten happening in your life but you can be "content" knowing that He is all. He has you. You'll never be without (food,clothing,life) when you hope in Him. You are His. Take serious note in "when you hope in Him."
        He loves us. Nothing can break that. This God of risked everything to rescue His beloved (that's you). He created everything with the full knowledge that someday there will be people who choose to reject Him. We would beat and torture Him if we get the chance. What kind of God do we serve who does this? That is true love.

Blessings and Curses realization

     Lord, your blessings are great but so are your curses....I'm almost glad you didn't strike a deal with my people, not because I'd be afraid that i'd do wrong but because I can't control other people's minds and desires.
     Lord, I'm glad I know you! You are faithful to be with me. You even go out after the lost sheep! The reason that Your promises & curses were soooo very harsh and glorious was primarily because the Israelites were the people who would bring Jesus the Christ to earth to bring salvation to all of humanity! That wasn't just a vow with Abraham, it was a vow made to save the whole of humanity! You can raise a people of God from a rock of the earth but it was through love as the reason that you used Abraham's line. Abraham loved you and you were returning it as a gift to him by using him in your plan.
    

Love of the Lord’s laws (Galatians 3:23)

 Love of the Lord’s laws (Galatians 3:23)

     I was praying with my “face to face” devotional in Galatians 3. I never saw the law in the way that it puts it. It says on day 9 p.154 : “Lord Jesus Christ, before faith in You came, confined until the faith was later revealed. So that the law has become our tutor to lead us  to You that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer in need of a tutor.”

     That is awesome. The law was our tutor! Previously I understood the law as some sort of “hold” to be broken free of, when Christ came. It was a “hold.” It was like the “hold” of a teacher on his/her students with the rules of the class room, until the students are ready and passed the class! The law was a teacher like a parent teaches you the head knowledge of the rules of things. You’re ready when you’re mature enough to understand the reasons for rules.

     You are good Father. I love the precepts of Your laws. I never understood David’s love of law until now.

-Matthew

Destruction In Imminent

        God has so many laws and rules that He requires of the children of Israel in the OT. He’s pretty specific. It’s kind of a natural rule that things that are really specific are very important. God is trying to describe the one way that sin is paid for, what it costs. Sin costs death. There is no way around it. You can’t buy, cheat or steal your way around the fact that doing wrong things will kill you. I’m not using that in anyway other than the literal way, “wrong things,” as opposed to the right way to do it (the right way to: fix a car, run, play a game). You must follow the right way according to the rules. The rules for living life are built into life as we know it. For example, if you eat unhealthy and don’t exercise, your going to get fat. You can’t deny it ,there are wrong ways to live. If there are wrong ways, doesn’t that mean there is a right way to live? If you know the right pathway through the forest, that means you know the correct path.

            We messed up, God is saying that something without blemish has to die. If we want to have His true life, we need perfection. Israel can’t be perfect, we can’t be perfect enough to be with Him. We need a representative for the entire human race. God knows this. He knows that true life is only through perfection we can’t meet. God decides to pay the price for us. God must be perfect to live and give life.

         That leads me to another question that needs thought. Did God need something to die for Him? The answer is No. For something to die and be really a real price for anything that sins, it would need to be greater. Try to wrap your mind around this. I’m not even sure I can. God has always existed like He is. Think of this, we know and can imagine an absolute chaos, doesn’t that mean there is an absolute order? God is that absolute order. He is perfect. He is the exact opposite of the spectrum. It is very well understood that nothing can create nothing, 0+0 = 0. Everything in existence is on a downward spiral becoming more disordered. The only way to evolve (unless you live and think) is to de-evolve. Everything is becoming less to reach a higher state of entropy. Every living thing becomes less. Procreation is the “new” you but there is still DNA/ genetic junk passed along. It’s a prolonged death of all of humanity. Eventually we’ll all die as a human race, not evolve to a high state as the secular world predicts.

           Christ is God. God split into different parts all coequal, simply different roles. Each can perform the others role just fine, they are God. Jesus was predicted to come and die for all of humanity. You can find all of these predictions in the bible written thousands of years before He came. If we call out to Him and ask Him to be our representative, He will. That’s why He came in the first place. He came to save us all from death!

          Thank You Father, You are the One, the Savior of us all!

-Matthew 

Love of the Lord’s laws (Galatians 3:23)

    I was praying with my “face to face” devotional in Galatians 3. I never saw the law in the way that it puts it. It says on day 9 p.154 : “Lord Jesus Christ, before faith in You came, confined until the faith was later revealed. So that the law has become our tutor to lead us  to You that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer in need of a tutor.”

     That is awesome. The law was our tutor! Previously I understood the law as some sort of “hold” to be broken free of, when Christ came. It was a “hold.” It was like the “hold” of a teacher on his/her students with the rules of the class room, until the students are ready and passed the class! The law was a teacher like a parent teachers you the head knowledge of the rules of things. You’re ready when you’re mature enough to understand the reasons for rules.

     

-Matthew

Holiness (exodus 23)

      God told Moses to make a dwelling place for Him to dwell among His people. God’s absolute Holiness is so perfect and good that anything else in this world defiles Him. “Holiness” is a very difficult concept to understand. Imagine a perfect sphere. It’s perfect, it rolls amazingly smooth. If not for gravitational forces on this earth, the bumps and hills. It could roll forever.

     That’s what God, in His infinite perfection is. He is, always was, and always will be perfection. God is “good.” He is the epitome of  the meaning of the word and He is “just,” He always does the right thing and always has the right thing on His heart and in His mind. Because He is good, right and creates things to last. He won’t ever create  temporary things. He builds things right and they continue to last. But then, sin entered the world. And I think sin needs to be defined as well. Sin is, “missing the mark.” It’s hitting anything other then God’s mark. God being the absolute essence of all existence is the mark. If you think about it sin doesn’t live long , it’s a temporary existence. It creates contaminates and creates self-destruction. It shortens the life of everything that lives. Lets take for example, lying. Lets say you have a living thriving relationship. That relationship is living, so to speak. What happens if you introduce lying into that relationship. The person that you trust is misleading you. You can no longer trust that person who has become your friend. The living entity ,that was your relationship, slows and over time ceases, it no longer lives. You know how a good relationship is infectious? It encourages more good. That’s how you know something has God’s roots, it creates and continues to create.

        Holiness is the ultimate of who God is. Genesis 3:17 says that if adam and eve ate that fruit they will die. Not that they will immediately die, just that they weren’t ready for the knowledge of good and evil. It’s kinda like a child of 2 isn’t ready to know how to weld his daddy’s gun. Maybe God was waiting for a time down the road when humanity would be wise enough to handle that dangerous knowledge of good and evil. Either way, that one choice brought death (Genesis 6:1-6).

       Luckily, we have an eternal Father who loves the heck out of us! He Himself sent His only Son (who is God, the trinity is a strange study) to die for us. He taught us how to live, how to trust, and how to love in ways I can’t do by my own power. What we need to do is make the reverse decision in life. We need to realize the truth. We do not have the strength to do it or to be holy and clean by ourselves. He is Holy, He is strong, we can be holy enough to get ourselves to heaven.

       There are things in this life that will snare us.  We get the easy part, He pleads to us to follow Him. He wants us to take His good gift and follow His ways. It’s amazing that this Holy God would love us so much to become a man and pay the debt that we don’t have the ability to pay.

-Matthew Kelly