Showing posts with label eternal life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eternal life. Show all posts

Friday 26 June 2020

Metaphors


Photo By I, Jina Lee, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2408448

Jesus used many metaphors, and one of the most common was comparing himself to food and drink. We need these to survive and won’t live long without them. It is the same with humans and Jesus. Without him, we will not live eternally because God is life itself and if we spurn him, we have actually chosen death.

In Isaiah chapter 55, God calls to us, pleading with us to come to him and have life:

He says, “Come, all who are thirsty, come to the waters. You who have no money, come and eat! Come buy wine and milk at no cost to you.

Why do you spend money on what is not bread, and work for what does not satisfy?

Listen, listen to me and eat what is good and you will delight in the richest fare. Give me your ear and come to me; listen that you may live. I will make an eternal pact with you; I will give you the faithful love I promised to David.

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways and the evil ones their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord and he will have mercy on them, and to our God for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish – so is my word that goes out of my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

(Now God speaks about the future life in heaven.)

“You will go out in joy and be led in peace. The mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

Instead of a thorn bush will grow the juniper, and instead of briars the myrtle will grow.

This will be for the Lord’s renown, for an everlasting sign that will endure forever.”

(The first verse of Isaiah 56 is apt in these days of injustice.)

“Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my goodness will soon be revealed.”




Thursday 21 April 2016

Eternal Life.

If someone would have asked me what eternal life is; I would have told them it is living forever.

I heard a preacher say that was wrong. Jesus told us what eternal life was.

He said, "And this is eternal life, that they might know you (God the Father) and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."  John 17:3

The preacher said eternal life is not a time-span.

Eternal life is a person.

I was at a family dinner one time and one of my son-in-laws asked me, "Do you know God, Belle?"  I answered, "Yes." Then he asked everyone at the table, my daughters and their children, "Does she know God?"  They said, "Yes."

But, now I would say, "I know him in a small way. I am learning about him and knowing him better day by day."  Because what I thought I knew about God has grown and expanded from the day I gave my life to him when I was nineteen. And I won't fully know him until I am in heaven and can learn more and more of his love and goodness.

How can we know God? Read the Bible each day and tell God you want to know him. It's that simple, but also hard because we must persevere and not give up.  ""You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart."  Jeremiah 29:13

Thus says the LORD: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.”  Jeremiah 9:23-24

"I will give them a heart to know that I am the LORD, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart."  Jeremiah 24:7

"And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest."  Hebrews 8:11

"If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”  John 14:7

"I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me."  john 10:14

"Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?"  John 14:9




Tuesday 12 January 2016

Are You Good Enough to Go to Heaven?

Who Am I?

A person who wants faith.

"I'm a pretty good person," said someone I once knew. "I'll probably go to heaven."

Well, if we are saved by being good, I doubt any of us would go to heaven. Years later, that same person apologized to someone in my family and said, "I was a monster." He had come to see what he really was and "good" wasn't it.

Who is God?

Someone who can save us from death and give us eternal life. (And giving us a fun time up there.)

We are saved by one person who was good: Jesus.

He asks us to seek him and to follow him. After seeking and learning about him, if we want him and ask him to live in us, then we are saved. We are saved because he died for us and his own good life covers our bad life.

This is called, in religious circles, "Righteousness by Faith."

I've listened to a lot of talks on this subject lately. It is very easy for Christians to slip into, "Righteousness by Our Own Works."  Christians can focus on how they live their lives so much that they forget who they asked to run their lives for them. In religious circles this is called, "Legalism."  Legalists always judge people harshly. And not just other people, but they judge themselves harshly also, so they are never happy because they are never perfect enough. I know this because that is who I once was.

Now, I have a tendency to flop between faith and legalism. Just when I think I'm living my life through faith, not works, I find myself running to legalism once again. I was raised in a pretty legalistic-type home and church. It is ingrained in my brain, "If you are good you will go to  heaven, if you're bad, you won't."  By the time I was a teenager, I figured I could never be good enough to be a Christian, even though I wanted very much to be one.

My older sister felt the same. She said to me once, "Why be a Christian when they can keep you out of heaven on a technicality?" Like me, she felt it was hopeless to even try. After learning about living by faith, she did come to God. Her favorite preacher is Joyce Meyer, who has also been an inspiration to me.

This is what Paul wrote on faith vs works.

"If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. 
What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
Romans 4:1,2

So, believing what God says is part of faith. If we were saved by our good deeds then we would have something to boast about. But we aren't. Actually, any good we do comes from God anyway, who is the maker of all that is good.

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights..." James 1:17  (Don't you love the name, "Father of Stars.")

Paul goes on to write:



"Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation."

 "However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness." 

David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:
“Blessed are those
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord will never count against them.”

Romans 4:4-8

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:23

"Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."  John 4:10

Eternal life is a gift. But just like gifts on earth, you must hold out your hands and receive it.























Tuesday 27 October 2015

God's Priorities.


Who is God?

Jesus said, "And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?"  Matthew 16:26

God's  #1 priority is your soul and its salvation. He wants you to be with him forever in heaven. He wants to be your friend, your father and your God.

Who am I?

I've always wanted to live in heaven. When I was a little girl, I would look at the skies and hope I would see Jesus coming back in the clouds as he said. 

My first mother-in-law was frustrated with me because I became a Christian. She once asked, "Why do you want to be a Christian anyway?  I said, "Eternal life?"  She didn't have an answer for that and I couldn't understand how anyone could not care about it.  Now that I know God better I think I would have said, "Living forever with God," because I'm so excited about meeting him.

Say a person becomes a big success in their career. They buy everything they want, travel anywhere they want and they do anything they want. They are still going to die one day and all that is worth exactly nothing. I think this is what Jesus meant. 

Some people don't want to follow Jesus because they are afraid of what God may want them to do. But they need not fear. After you give your life to God your mind becomes closer and closer to his mind. You will want to do what he wants you to do. It's a daily comittment; God doesn't expect any of us to become perfect right away. Life becomes a school where we constantly learn about God and how to do things for others.

Jesus said, "I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one--as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me."  John 17:21



Saturday 10 October 2015

Look and Live.



Who is God?

Jesus said:
"As Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.

For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."John 3:14-18

After snakes had entered the camp of Israel, Moses lifted up a pole that had a sculpture of a snake on it. God told the people if they would look at the snake they would live. Some looked and were cured of snake bites, those who did not look died. Why did God do something so strange?  What was the lesson?

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers
The people in the wilderness bitten by the fiery serpents, the poison-virus spreading through their veins, and causing burning pain, torpor, and death—this was symbolic of the world lying in the misery, restlessness, and spiritual death, which came from the Serpent’s victory in Paradise. 

The serpent of brass lifted up by Moses, in which the sufferer saw the means of recovery determined by God, and was healed by faith in Him—this was symbolic of the means of salvation determined by God for the world.

MacLaren's Expositions
So here we have Christ accepting, as well as discerning, the Cross. And we have more than that. We have Christ looking at the Cross as being, not humiliation, but exaltation. ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up.’ And what does that mean? It means the same thing that He said when, near the end, He declared, ‘The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified.’ We are accustomed to speak-and we speak rightly-of His death as being the lowest point of the humiliation which was inherent in the very fact of His humanity. He condescended to be born; He stooped yet more to die. But whilst that is true, the other side is also true-that in the Cross Christ is lifted up, and that it is His Throne. For what see we there? The highest exhibition, the tenderest revelation, of His perfect love. And what see we there besides? The supreme manifestation of the highest power.


Paul writes, "God made Him (Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."  2 Cor. 5:21

There is so much to learn about God in these verses.

1. He loves us so much he gave his Son to us. Forever. He is called the Son of God, but also the Son of Man.

2. All we have to do as a Christian is keep our eyes on Jesus. We are not saved by anything we do. We look at Jesus through the Bible and talk with him thru prayer. This is how faith starts and ends. We are saved by faith in the Son of God.

3. God went through hell for us. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Hell is the second death. Jesus went through that on the cross. That is why he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." He went through the second death in his mind. He felt hell, which is being separated from God for eternity. It is not endless suffering, as some people teach about hell. If it was, then Jesus could have never left the cross.

4. God does not want to condemn the world. He loves the world. He wants to draw all to him so they can be saved. It is true he will one day judge the world; he must decide who is safe to take to heaven. Those who hurt people will not be allowed in. They would continue to do evil in heaven as they do it here. They would also hate heaven, because nothing inside them would be attracted to what is done there. They would not want to praise God and live in love and peace.

Okay, this is a looong post. But hey, it explains the plan of salvation! You can't do that in a few sentences, although I guess that is just what Jesus did.

Who Am I?

I am someone who thought I had to be a good girl (perfect, actually) to be saved. Of course I lived in fear of God because of that. It took many years for me to understand Jesus did it all and does it all. I have no need to worry about being perfect. If God wants me to be perfect, it is up to him to do it to me. I am happy in his love and acceptance of me. All I have to do is look and live.