In Love With God - lesson 10

In Love With God - lesson 10

The only thing that I want for this semester 

is for us to be in love with and on fire for God

      Is the Lord the first love of our life?

     Did you know that if you rejoice in the Lord for His answers to your prayers before they come to pass that you have just transitioned from the answer to your prayer being your first love to the Lord being your first love? If you are worried that the thing you are praying for is becoming more important to you than the Lord, this is a good way to be sure that it has been put back properly into it’s place. If the thing you are praying for has started leaving it’s proper place in your life you will fall into despair at every discouraging impasse. You can only truly rejoice in the Lord for victory if He has obtained His rightful position in your heart as your first love. You can only grab hold of His promises with all your heart and survive every discouragement if He has come into His rightful place in your life. Only true trust and love in the Lord will give you the strength to rejoice in the midst of every discouragement.

     Just try truly rejoicing from the bottom of your heart in the midst of your hard circumstances. I bet you can’t. Why not? Because first we will have to let go of our self pity. We will have to believe that the Lord is good and that He is a rewarder of all who diligently seek Him, and this is impossible as long as we want to hang onto our self pity and despair. We have to believe for real that the Lord loves us and is doing and planning the best for us in the midst of our storm.

     And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. Hebrews 11:6

     The other day the Lord told me to rejoice. He would not let me enter into any doubts or despair. He literally put a barrier between me and any doubts or even the smallest fear. He said, “You rejoice.” So I got up on my feet and attempted to begin rejoicing and He said to me, “You call that rejoicing?”  I had to laugh at that remark. So I attempted to rejoice more earnestly and again He said, “Do you really call that rejoicing? How would you really rejoice if all I had told you had already taken place?” I had to admit that my attempt at rejoicing still lacked some of the joy of whole hearted believing. This is a good measure of our real trust in the Lord. If His word to us is as real as it would be if it had already been done.

     The Lord has given us the weapon of rejoicing but only our new spiritual man can pick it up and use it. Our old nature of self pity and despair cannot pick up the sword of rejoicing. It is out of reach to it. Only the new man can let go of self pity and despair in order to grab hold of it. It requires a whole hearted love and trust in the Lord to use it effectively. But if our hearts are set on Him than we will find it a very effective weapon against every demonic adversary. It will radically change the entire world around us!

     This morning the Lord had me singing a song I wrote several years ago and when I got to the line
                         “Christ our redeemer is mighty, His victory is here”
I felt my adversary try to overcome me with an extreme darkness that could be felt. So I began singing that line again over and over and immediately my spirit soared into the heavens. The Lord just took me into the fullness of the reality that Christ is mighty and our victory is now! It seems that our adversary always wants us to be in doubt of the actual power of our God and of His ability to actually destroy the enemy right this very moment if we will rise up and praise the Lord in victory.

     Again, the sword of rejoicing can only be handled by the new man in Christ. The old man of self pity and despair must be put to death in order to take it up. So let us take up the sword of rejoicing! It is available to all who truly believe and have confidence in Jesus! He is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all we have hoped or dreamed!      

          Will we stand with confidence in our Savior today?!

-Seth

In Love With God - lesson 5

In Love With God - lesson 5

The only thing that I want for this semester 

is for us to be in love with and on fire for God

     Only a church in love with Jesus, will stand.

_  A loose church full of compromise with the world, will not stand.

     This body is carried away with the love of the world and cannot bear fruit because the seed will always be choked out in the end. It may have a good start on a lot of seemingly good ideas, but just as many conversations with a skeptical person on the street just go in circles with a true point for the Lord always being avoided (Anyone who has been out street witnessing has experienced this) so also will the work of a compromised church, come to little or nothing at all.

_  A church set on ridged outward control and full of  rules with no passion for Jesus, will not stand.

     This body is consumed with outward appearance and conformity with set rules and laws but always gets bound up in the technical side of every issue or gets burnt out trying to keep up their good works. Eventually men wear out and turn away and fall back into the world because they have found that works in themselves are unfulfilling. 

     However, a church full of the passion of loving their Savior, will never tire of the good works He has called them to! They might have moments of being discouraged and weary but they are continually going back to Jesus for strength and encouragement to press on with whatever the difficulty is. A church full of love for Jesus will not want the passing pleasures of the world that bring compromise and choke out fruit and nor will they burn out or become weary in well doing. For them the Hymn is fulfilled “It is well with my soul.”  Jesus says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light.” Matt. 11:28-30

     This is why we must seek a closer fellowship with Jesus than we have had. We must not be content with where we are in Christ right now because if we are it means that we are not fully in love with Jesus or we could never say that. A person in love actually can’t live without that close personal connection to the one they love. If we were fully in love with Jesus everyone around us would know it because our faces would show it and our actions would tell it and our words would speak it. This is the first love that our Heavenly Father admonishes the churches about in the book of revelation. If we do not have this first love continually burning in our hearts, we will fall away when the persecution hits or be choked out when the enticements of the world lure us in.

               The Lord tests our hearts so He can build upon them

     If we are failing by loving the things of this world more than Him, we will not grow or be affective in His service and He will not be able to give us a place of responsibility in His work.

     “I, the Lord. search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of His deeds.” - Jeremiah 17:10


-Seth

In Love With God - lesson 1

In Love With God - lesson 1

The only thing that I want for this semester 

is for us to be in love with and on fire for God.

     Which means Surrender, Surrender, Surrender! 

     Nothing else matters except being in love with Jesus with all our heart. 

     To surrender areas in our lives to the Lord that He has required of us is like removing an obstruction to the flow of blood in our arm. If you have ever fallen asleep in an awkward position and woken up with no feeling in your arm, it’s a strange feeling because you can see you have an arm but you can’t feel that you have an arm and as you sit up and try to get the blood to flow back into it you start to get feeling back and eventually full use of it again. When we surrender things to the Lord, that is often when we discover that we even had an arm to begin with! It is like a brand new limb to us that has never been used but slowly the circulation comes into it and we begin to learn how to use it and find that now we have the ability to do things we actually never could before! That limb really changes a lot for us! 

     It is easy to tell when someone is in love. It’s written all over them and they can’t do enough for the person they are in love with. They will pretty much do anything for them. This is how we are to be for our Heavenly Father. So in love with Him and His Son and His Holy Spirit that we will do anything for them. We want it to be obvious to all, Who we love. Unashamed of Him and continually speaking well of Him and gladly doing whatever is on His heart. This is the greatest joy our hearts could ever have. He is a safe place to put our heart where it won’t be crushed or disappointed or left behind. Our Heavenly Father is the safest place we could ever put our heart. 

                    Are there signs evident in your life that you are in love with God? 

     “I remember concerning you the devotion of your youth, the love of your betrothals, your following after Me in the wilderness, through a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord, the first of His harvest; all who ate of it became guilty; evil came upon them,” declares the Lord - Jeremiah 2:2-3 “But My people have changed their glory for that which does not profit.” - Jeremiah 2:11 

     Having the Lord is our glory and when we seek Him as our first love He defends and upholds us. Their are so many blessings that come with having Him as our first love! The devil is always trying to trick us into giving up our protection and safety by calling us into thinking that the world is more attractive and more important and more real than anything that we might find in Jesus. He is always trying to get us to compromise just a little and relax our hold on Him. He promises some comfort and relief if we just let go of God a little bit, but the reality is that he is never content with the compromises we have begun to make and will always continue to draw us further from the safety of the camp of the Lord. And the Lord says, “What injustices did your fathers find in Me, that they went far from Me and walked after emptiness and became empty?” Jeremiah 2:5 This is the question we always need to come back to. Why do we trade the Lord for the things of this world. The reality is, that as long as we hold fast to our old life, we sacrifice the new one in Christ. As long as we hold onto our old life our new life in Christ just doesn’t seem that fun or appealing. It is not until we begin surrendering our old life that the new joy in Christ begins to flood into our life. We must let go of the old in order to have the new. It is impossible to hold onto both. If we try to hold onto both we will neither have joy in Christ nor will we have a satisfied life in our old ways. We will just be miserable. “For My people have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:13

This is a lesson from the class I'm teaching at our Bible School.

Prince Edward Island Bible Institute

           -Seth

Pressing on in the service of our Lord

John 21:25

Pressing on in the service of our Lord

     “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the whole world would not contain the books which were written.” –John

     Jesus calls Himself the first of many brothers! The path He walked before us was one of great courage and many wonderful signs. His life was one continuous demonstration of the love and support our Heavenly Father has for us. What a wonderful example He has left for us! I get so excited when I think about what John is saying here; that the world could not contain all of the books it would take to write down all that Jesus did during His time on earth. The four Gospels give us different highlights of Jesus’ ministry in order to give us a glimpse into all that Jesus did while He was here. I marvel at Jesus feeding the five thousand people with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Creating something from nothing was as simple as breathing to Him.

     We who have been saved by Him have a wonderful heritage. It is so important to dedicate our lives to Him so that the rest of our time on earth will be spent in preparation for a glorious eternity with Him! We need to make the most of the days and years that we have in front of us taking the talents God has given us and multiplying them. I get so inspired when I read about the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30 how as soon as the faithful servants received their talents they immediately started working with them and doubled what they had been given. The joy of being diligent with what God gives to us to work with is something not to take lightly. It is a wonderful thing to feel God’s approval as we step out to witness or help someone in need. He is so pleased with even our faltering steps.

     It is time to ignore the distractions of this world and to ask God for His help in overcoming our lazy human nature and set about making the most of the time we have left! I know that I have shared this before but it still keeps me focused. Jesus gives a parable of a land owner who hires workers for his vineyard and every few hours he goes out and finds new people standing around waiting for work and he promises each of them the same wage for their labor even though some have worked longer than others. Finally at the last hour of the day he finds more people waiting for work and he sends them to his field. Now when the day is over he proceeds to pay each man the same wage and the ones who worked the most began to complain about the ones who worked for only an hour. My friends we are in the final hour before Jesus returns and our work is short! So let us work hard so that the ones who worked the longest will have nothing to complain about as we make up for the hours we missed!

     So let us press on with the time that we have and encourage one another to do more for our dear Savior that it may also be said of us that the world could not contain an account of all that we have done to serve our Savior!

          God bless you all!