God Created All Things

God created all things. He created you and me. He knows us. He knows every desire we have, whether it is little or big. He knows our thoughts and the struggles we have in our thought life. He knows when we doubt and He knows when we are strong in faith. He knows all about our bodies. He created them. He knows all about our personalities. He created us. He knows all about our abilities. He put them in us. Do you get the picture? The One Who created us can be trusted. He is the One! He is the One True God! He cares deeply about us. He loves us intensely.

Let’s dwell in some scriptures today to increase our trust in God.

Psalm 115:9,10,12,15
I trust in You, Lord; You are my help and my shield.
The Lord has been mindful of me. He will bless me.
I am blessed of the Lord Who made heaven and earth.

Rev. 4:11
…He has created all things; for His pleasure, by His will they were created, brought into being.
That includes me!

John 1:3
All things were made and came into existence through and by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made; nothing came into being without Him.
Colossians. 1:16
…all things were created by Him and for Him.

Colossians 1:19
All fullness (divine perfection, powers and attributes) dwells in Him permanently.
Colossians 2:9,10
In Him dwells all the fullness of God.
I am complete in Him.
He’s the Head of all principality and power.

John 1:16 and 2 Peter 1:3,4
Out of His fullness I have received grace, spiritual blessing, favor, gifts ---- everything that pertains to life and godliness.
Through His Word I am a partaker of His divine nature.

Romans 11:36
All things originate with God and come from Him.
All things live through Him ---- all things center in and tend to consummate and to end in Him
Acts 17:28
….In Him I live and move and have my being.
To Him be glory forever! Amen----so be it!

It’s all about God. It all begins with Him, continues in Him and ends with Him. We are in Him. Therefore, we are safe and secure in Him. We can trust our Creator. What He creates, He can maintain. He is capable. He has the ability. He will take care of us.

Our Faithful God

Yesterday we talked about our being faithful. Today let’s talk about God’s faithfulness. Wow, what a subject! We read in God's Word that He is faithful to us. I know that some of you are saying that it doesn’t look like He and His Word are faithful to you sometimes. I have had those feelings at points in my life. But here is the bottom line. HE IS FAITHFUL ALWAYS AND HIS WORD IS TRUE ALWAYS for anyone, regardless of who you are or how much you feel like you can’t believe or that things are not working in your life for your good.

God is still faithful when you feel like you are not able to grab hold of that faithfulness. In times like that, grab hold of this statement and believe it is true for your life, regardless of what you are experiencing: GOD IS FAITHFUL TO ME! HIS WORD IS WORKING IN MY LIFE! That is what faith is all about: trusting God when it looks like there is no reason to trust Him. He is not a man that He can lie. Whatever His Word says, that is for you. It is true for you regardless of what you may be experiencing to the contrary. Choose to believe. Choose to receive the truth of His Word working in your situation. CHOOSE!

Let’s look at a few scriptures to confess and meditate on God’s faithfulness until we have faith built up in us to believe He is faithful to us. They are taken from the Amplified Bible and personalized for confession.

2 Corinthians 9:8 tells us that God is able to make all grace abound toward us so that we may always have enough, regardless of the circumstances or need. We not only need God’s grace to get saved, we also need God’s grace to live. His grace is His ability given to us. It’s that simple. Why do I talk about grace here when we are focusing on God’s faithfulness? We need His grace, His ability, to believe.

Deuteronomy 7:9
I know, recognize and understand that the Lord my God is God; He is a faithful God; He keeps His covenant with me (His promises, His Word) and He keeps His mercy (steadfast love) with me who loves Him and keeps His covenant (Word).

1 Corinthians 1:9
God is faithful, reliable, trustworthy and therefore ever true to His promise, and He can be depended upon. By Him I was called into companionship with His Son Jesus Christ my Lord.

God, You are faithful to Your Word and to Your loving, merciful, compassionate nature. You can be trusted. You are ever true to what You say.

2 Thessalonians 3:3
Lord, You are faithful; You will strengthen me and establish me and set me on a firm foundation. You will keep me from the evil one.

Revelation 19:11 and 21:5
Lord, You are called Faithful, Trustworthy, Loyal, Incorruptible, Steady and True. Your Word is faithful, accurate, incorruptible, trustworthy, true and genuine.

God and His Word are forever faithful to me as His child. I can trust Him.

Faithful

A faithful man shall abound with blessings…. (Proverbs 28:20)
In Matthew 25:14-30, The Parable of the Talents, Jesus talks about a faithful person.
In a number of scripture passages, God is spoken of as a faithful God.

What is faithful? What does it mean? How does God look at faithfulness?
A faithful person is one who is true to his word and follows through on what he says. He consistently does what is right. He can depended upon to get the job done when he is assigned a task. You can depend on that person when you need something accomplished. You can walk away and know that when you come back tomorrow or whenever the deadline is, the work will be completed with excellence and without complaint.

In today’s world faithfulness is a trait that not everybody sees as important. The thinking goes like this: “Oh, well, if I can’t get it done, I can’t get it done. What’s the big deal! I have so many other things to do. They will understand.”

Apparently God thinks it is a big deal. In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus commended the person who did something with what he had been given. In Proverbs we read that a faithful man shall abound (that means overflow) with blessings. I want to be blessed so I ask God to keep me faithful every day to Him and to others.

If you have challenges in being faithful, ask the Holy Spirit to help you to become that person who can be depended upon. He will help you. He always helps us to do whatever we need to do. Ask Him. Ask for God’s grace or ability to become a faithful person.

God’s faithfulness will make you faithful. Look at 1 Thessalonians 5:24.
Faithful is He Who is calling you to Himself and utterly trustworthy, and He will also do it, fulfill His call by hallowing and keeping you.
Look at that. God is faithful to you. You can trust Him. He will fulfill His call on your life. I know He will help you to be faithful. You can depend on Him.

God My Father

Today I have another set of scripture verses to confess over ourselves and those we love, whether they are family or friends.

Psalm 89:17,24,26,28,33,34

God, You are the glory of my strength and in Your favor my horn shall be exalted.
Your faithfulness and unfailing love (loving kindness) shall be with me and in Your name shall my horn be exalted (Great peace and prosperity shall be conferred upon me.).
Horn: Emblem of excessive strength and stately grace
I shall cry to You: You are my Father. You are my God. You are the Rock of my salvation.
I thank You that Your mercy and loving kindness will You keep for me forevermore and Your covenant shall stand fast and be faithful to me.
Thank You that Your loving kindness will You not break off from me, nor allow Your faithfulness to fail (to lie and be false to me).
Thank You that You will not break or profane Your covenant with me, nor alter the thing that is gone out of Your lips. Your Word is what has gone out of Your lips, Lord, and it will not return to You empty, void, meaningless, without producing any effect or bringing results in my life and the lives of those I love.

I believe I receive this scripture working in my life. I believe. I receive.

The God of Peace

Hebrews 13:20,21 is a scripture we can confess over ourselves, our loved ones and our friends every day and meditate all the days of our lives.

The God of Peace, Who is the Author and Giver of Peace,
brought again from among the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, (He also brought us from the deadness of our sins.).
He made Jesus alive (and you and me) by the blood that sealed, ratified the everlasting agreement, covenant, testament.
The God of Peace (Peace: Wholeness which means nothing is missing or broken in your life) has made me alive by His blood. That blood has sealed the everlasting agreement which is called covenant, between God and me.
The God of Peace, the Author and Giver of Peace strengthens me, completes me, perfects me and makes me what I ought to be.
He equips me with everything good, so that I may carry out His will.
I carry out His will while He Himself works in me and accomplishes that which is pleasing in His sight.
He does this through Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory forever and ever.
Amen----so be it!

I believe this is true for me and I receive it as done in my life.

Light and Rest

In John 1 we read that in Jesus was life and that life was the light of men. What does that mean? In Jesus was the Life of God (zoe: without death or stress) because He knew the Love of God (agape: love without any strings attached), which brought understanding (Light) to Him of His Father. Even so, for those of us who are children of God, in us dwells the Life of God in the person of the Holy Spirit. That life is meant to produce an understanding of the ease and rest in God.

This Life of God is a choice we make every day. It is not just a one-time choice when we get born again. Every day, before we get out of bed, we are already making choices. Are we frenetically planning our day so that we can get all accomplished that we have to do? Or are we taking the time to rest in the Lord, abide in His Love and enjoy His Presence? Out of that calmness comes revelation or understanding of our day. He will show us what to do. He will guide us. He is in charge.

We may have a thousand things on our mind and a multitude of things to do. That kind of mentality produces stress, which produces sickness and disease, which leads to our early departure from this earth. You see, satan has it all figured out. He doesn’t have to do a frontal attack on us most of the time. He can just stress us to death. That takes care of us. We are gone. And he starts on the next one and the next one and the next one.

Jesus rested in His Father’s care. He was always at ease and joyful because He knew His Father’s love for Him. Out of the love of the Father came the life of the Father (zoe) that knows no unrest and stress.

In our Lord is perfect peace, which comes from His indwelling perfect love. That perfect love produces a perfect life. That perfect life guides us into the perfect Light (understanding, revelation) of His Presence. In His Presence is fullness of joy. Joy is the strength of our lives. Joy is the product of LIFE.

There is the natural life and there is the eternal, God kind of Life (zoe). I know that every one of us will choose the God kind of life. There is no other way to live and be free of stress, anxiety and fretting. In these days we need to focus on God’s Love inside us which produces God’s Life flowing through us and shows forth God’s Light for all the world to see that we are different. Let His Light shine and they will come to you. “What is different about you?” they will ask, and you can tell them. What a divine way to witness! We let our lives speak. He does the rest.

Light

Romans 13:11-14 could be a scripture Paul wrote today, this very hour. Let us listen to the voice of these verses.

It is a critical hour. It is high time to wake up out of our sleep to reality. Our final deliverance is at hand, nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone. The day is almost here. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the FULL ARMOR OF LIGHT. Put on, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its desires.

What a scripture passage this is. Do you see the solution to the darkness of this present hour for all of us? Put on the armor of light; put on Jesus Christ; put on the full armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18.

For a few minutes, let’s look at the Light of God. Jesus is called the Word of God in John 1:1. In the Psalms we read that the entrance of the Word brings light. Here in Romans 13 we are instructed to put on the armor of light. In Ephesians 6 we are told to put on the full armor of God. Every part of that armor is a reference to the word, Jesus, the Light of the world.

What does light do? It dispels the darkness. Wherever there is light, there cannot be darkness because one little sliver of light means that it is no longer dark. Think about that for a moment. The instant you read God’s Word, you speak His Word, you meditate His Word, the Light of God is there for you, in your mind and in your heart. It is the Word. It is the Light. In the very beginning of the creation, God spoke Himself into the very atmosphere of this earth. LIGHT, BE! In essence He was saying: ME, BE! What He is, He spoke out of Himself into this earth. What makes God God is what created this earth. Light is at the root of the formulation of life. Without light, life as we know it could not be.

Light makes manifest, reveals. Light is understanding, as darkness is pushed back. Have you ever been pondering something, trying to understand it and all of a sudden it is like a light bulb comes on and you exclaim, I see! That’s what we are talking about. God wants to bring understanding to us of His ways, His Kingdom, His life. And His Word is the key to unlock that understanding. Without His Word, there is not the foundation for understanding Him. The Holy Spirit takes His Word and shows us the Truth of it, the reality of the inner workings of God. As Psalm 119 expresses it: His Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. The entrance of His Word gives light, brings understanding.

Any time that you are “in the dark,” pondering the way to do something, go to God the Word and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to you the way to do it, the decision to be made, the pathway to take. He is faithful and will provide the answer every time. What we must do is be patient and trust Him to bring us the understanding that we need to walk on through to victory.

Love

Have you ever tried to love someone and failed miserably not once, not twice but time after time? You think you have this love thing down to a science and then they do something more to absolutely provoke you to want them to disappear off the face of the earth. Come on, Christians, everyone of us have experienced this type of situation at onc time or another in our lives. It seems that person rubs our fur the wrong way. If you have ever rubbed the fur of a cat the wrong way, you know that they do not like it one little bit.

What is the reason we fail at that love (Remember we are talking about God’s agape love, not human love, which is naturally doomed to failure.)? I have seen the answer to our dilemma. It is this. Until we know how much God loves us individually, personally, we cannot love others with His love. It is not a reality to us. The Word of God tells us that we will love others as we love ourselves. We have been going at this love walk from the wrong direction.

First, develop that love relationship with God by focusing on how totally and deeply and unconditionally God loves you personally. Yes, you! That is where we must start. Out of that understanding will come our devoted love for God. Then we love ourselves because we see that we are worth loving because God loves us. We see ourselves as the apple of His eye. Then, and only then, will we be able to love others as God wants us to do. Our love for them comes out of our love relationship with Him. It all begins with a personal revelation of His Love for us (you and me, particularly you).

My prayer for each of you today is that God Himself will give you a personal revealing of His total and complete love for you. He sees you as perfect and worthy and of great value through the blood of Jesus Christ His Son and your Lord. God’s divine love is the greatest power in the universe. You have Him in you today.

Jesus Is Lord

We hear the expression “Jesus is Lord” many times in Christian circles. We say that Jesus is Lord of our lives. The Spirit of God asked me a question this morning which I am going to pass on to you. Am I really LORD of your life?

According to Webster’s 1828 dictionary, the word Lord means one who possesses supreme power and authority; one who governs your life and is in charge of your life. Supreme means one highest in authority, one holding the highest position of government and power in your life; highest, greatest, most excellent. In Scripture Lord is Supreme Being, Jehovah. The word Lord is applied to Christ and the Holy Spirit. Christ is called the Lord of Glory and the Lord of lords.

When we recognize the lordship of someone, we give them the privilege of governing our lives and being in charge of us because their power and authority is greater than ours. There is no power and authority greater than God’s power and authority. So the smartest thing any of us can do is to yield to His Lordship in all areas of our lives.

Any area of my life or yours about which we are fretting, worried or anxious has not been given over to the Lordship of Jesus. Ponder the question today: AM I REALLY LORD OF YOUR LIFE?