Daily Thoughts about God

“Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.” Hebrews 10:23-24 (NLT)

In the movie, Jakob the Liar, Jakob is a prisoner in a Jewish Ghetto in Poland during World War II. Everyone living there has lost all hope of ever being rescued and many have resorted to suicide. Jakob hears a radio broadcast and shares what he has heard with his friends. The news travels like wild fire through the ghetto. Jakob is moved by the renewed sense of hope he sees and so embarks on a plan to keep hope alive in the ghetto.

While watching this movie, I was astonished by the power of hope. Many of us have only a sketchy idea of what it is like to live without hope and we so easily take for granted the hope we have in Christ. “And this hope will not lead to disappointment…” (Romans 5:5 NLT)

We forget that we are living in as dark a place as Jakob was. People all around us are living and dying with no hope!

We have the hope. The hope that will not only give them purpose in life but will rescue them eternally!

What if we were to use the gifts God has given us to overwhelm others with the love of Jesus? What would happen if we had an outbreak in our churches of love and good deeds? Would people see the hope we have in Christ? Would they be “infected” with our love for God and others? What if we couldn’t contain this pandemic? Remember, it just takes one!

Thought: What gifts has God given you? Take some time to evaluate what gifts you have and ask God how He wants you to use those gifts to bring His light into the dark places where you live.

By Kristi Huseby

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If you have lost hope and would like to renew your relationship with Christ you can do so today. We are filled with the Holy Spirit by faith alone. However, true prayer is one way of expressing your faith. The following is a suggested prayer:

“Dear Father, I need You. I acknowledge that I have been directing my own life and that, as a result, I have sinned against You. I thank You that You have forgiven my sins through Christ’s death on the cross for me. I now invite Christ to again take His place on the throne of my life. Fill me with the Holy Spirit as You commanded me to be filled, and as You promised in Your Word that You would do if I asked in faith. I now thank You for directing my life and for filling me with the Holy Spirit.”

Does this prayer express the desire of your heart? If so, bow in prayer and trust God to fill you with the Holy Spirit right now.

If you prayed this prayer, we at Thoughts about God would love to hear about it! We would love to send you information to help you discover more about the Spirit led life.

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I have done a good deal of thinking and writing about Pharisees (probably because I understand them so well) and one comment that Jesus made about them stands out to me:

“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” Matthew 5:20

Such a statement would have come as a shock to the general Jewish populace who considered the Pharisees as perched atop the religious hierarchy. It certainly would have come as a shock to the Pharisees themselves, who took pride in looking down from there. These people spent all their time being righteous. They were scrupulous about this, and in so doing, they set the bar for everyone else. They were the righteous professionals. To disqualify them and everyone under them, as Jesus did, put righteousness out of everyone’s reach.

Which, of course, was the whole idea. This was not a statement to make people try harder to be holy. It was a statement to persuade people to give up trying. If Jesus was rejecting the best that the best could do, then who could possibly stand a chance of being good enough to get into heaven? No one. And isn’t that the point Jesus was trying to make? Only sinners get saved; only the lost can be found. The Pharisees were too good for heaven, too good for grace, too good for the gift of salvation.

True righteousness is something that can only come from Christ, and it comes through the admission of our own unrighteousness and a total dependence upon God to make us clean. What He wants is way beyond us and we cannot begin any real growth without realizing this. Our goodness comes through faith in what Christ has done for us on the cross in forgiving our sins and in giving us His Spirit. It is that Spirit that begins to work on our insides, changing us from the inside out, and the good that comes from this is so clearly outside our ability to manufacture it as to leave us as surprised as anyone.

I’ve often heard the objection to becoming a Christian on the grounds of Christianity being a crutch. I always laugh when I hear that because if that’s all faith is, I wouldn’t be a Christian either. Did Jesus endure a brutal death on a cross just so he could hand us a crutch to help us along? I don’t think so. We weren’t just stumbling along without Jesus; we were dead.

Christianity isn’t a crutch; it’s an iron lung. It’s a cure for cancer. It’s a heart transplant.

Question: Have you ever heard someone derisively refer to faith as “just a crutch“? How did you (or how can you) respond to such an accusation?

By John Fischer

You can comment on this devotional online at:
https://thoughts-about-god.com/blog/2015/01/25/jf_more-than-a-crutch/

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Outbreak!

More Than a Crutch

Daily Thoughts about God Posts

Outbreak!

More Than a Crutch