Your Struggles

God spoke to Abraham (Genesis 15:13); Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.

We read in Exodus 12:40-41; Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the Lord’s divisions left Egypt

God knows your struggles and He has prepared a way to deliver you from them!

Clinging to Worthless Idols

Currently we are walking through the book of Jonah during our Sunday morning worship services with the focus of "God's heart fro the lost". Last week we looked at chapter 2. One of the key verses from this chapter that speaks of God's heart for he lost is verse 8;

Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.

Not only do we turn away from God's love for us, we also turn away from His grace and mercy for us. Likewise, when we cling to worthless idols we turn our love and attention away from God. In addition to this, we turn our love and attention from others that surround us.

What does it mean to "cling" to something? It does not simply mean that we turn our attention to it, it means that we choose to continually remain close and attached to this object. And, what is a "worthless idol"? It is any object of worship that is of little or no value. See, we all have "worthless idols" in our lives that we need to be free of. This passage does not speak to those worthless idols that have caught our attention, tempted us in some way, or even those worthless idols that we have worshiped from time to time. This passage speaks specifically about those worthless idols in our lives that have become so important to us that we have begun to cling to them, we have made the choice time after time to remain close to them and to remain attached to them.

And we have a choice - each and every one of us - to be free of these worthless idols. We have been given this choice - this opportunity - to be free of these worthless idols through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and through the power of His Holy Spirit - Christ's gift to us.

God's heart for the lost is a heart of salvation, a heart of redemption, a heart of forgiveness, a heart of compassion, and a heart of love. God's heart for you is crying out that you would be free from the worthless idols that have kept to prisoner for far too long.

Won't you do away with these worthless idols in your life and turn to The One who died to give you a new life and a new way to live? Won't you today cling to Jesus Christ?

The Jesus Perspective

I found an article I wrote for the newspaper some time back and thought I would post it on here.

This past week I was reading Mark 5:1-20, an account of Jesus meeting a demon possessed man on the shores of Gadara. He delivers this man and sends the demons into a nearby heard of pigs. Take five minutes to read it yourself. As I read through this I considered the people of the region, Mark calls them the Gerasenes.

Jesus meets this demon possessed man, a human being and delivers him from bondage. Hallelujah, it is time to celebrate! But instead, the men that were tending the pigs, ran off to tell others about this tragedy. But, if they missed the miracle of the moment when Christ took those demons out of the man, they will get another chance to rejoice.

Up to this point many of the people of this region only knew him as ‘the possessed guy,’ ‘the crazy guy,’ ‘the screamer’ or ‘the cutter.’ Now, they get the chance to see him whole again, “dressed and inhis right mind.” Now they can show pity on him and be glad that he has been delivered. But it reads “they wereafraid.” To be clear, minutes ago he was hanging out in the tombs, he was cutting himself and screaming out in pain day and night and he was breaking chains with superhuman strength and now they are afraid?

The people begin to tell others the whole account. They share what has happened with the man who was possessed for such a long time, of thousands of demons came out of him and into the pigs that ran off the cliff and of Jesus, His power and control.

Jesus’ supremacy can no longer be doubted. Scripture reads that the people pleaded with Jesus to leave their region. They wanted Him out of there. The truth is that they would have rather had the pigs then Jesus.

Later, as the man begins to give a first-hand account of his deliverance in the ten-city region, we read people were amazed. Translated, it meant that the people marveled, they admired Jesus, His power and of the miracle.

People were always one step behind, afraid after the man had been delivered and marveled after Jesus left town.

It is my prayer that we do not emulate the Gerasenes, that we are not one step behind, running away when we should rejoice, fearing what we should embrace and dismissing the One we should welcome.

Maybe you feel a bit like the man at the beginning of the passage, you are facing the pressures of life, the loneliness of culture and the shame of the past. You are one step away from being free. And just as the man in the passage did, you need to run and fall on your knees in front of Jesus. Maybe you feel like the Gerasenes or you know someone who is struggling, you see someone hurting and know that something needs to be done.

Are you going to pass on by or stop and see what Jesus sees? It is all about the perspective that we take, the moment we pause and consider what a person is going through and how some of the simplest actions we take can change a person’s life forever.