I have been convicted in my heart recently that I have been lusting after God. All I want is his blessings. All I want is to TAKE from him. All I want is to TAKE salvation. To TAKE redemption. To TAKE grace and mercy. To TAKE sanctification. To TAKE power. All I want is to TAKE his blessings. My heart is melting at the level of this revelation I feel God has given me. Even though my love towards him has been tainted with selfish desires he still, through his grace, shed light upon my heart.

I want to LOVE God. I don’t simply want to LUST after God. I want to GIVE God everything that I am. I want to GIVE God my best time. I want to GIVE God all of my adoration. I want to GIVE God my eyes, my mouth, my body, my heart. I NEED to GIVE God my will. No more TAKING. It is time to live a life of GIVING.

A successful business man is living in a world of success. He has had many victories in life. His world is different from the alcoholic’s.

My world is different from your world and your world is different from my world. As Christians though, God first called us out of our world and into His world. Now that we are in His world and we have the assurance that nothing will ever separate us from His love, it is time to enter other people’s worlds.

Do I mean that we must participate with them in their world? No, I just mean falling so deeply in love with a person, because of God’s love, that you no longer see them from the perspective of your world, but from the perspective of their world.

This is how Christ saved us. He stepped into our world.

God opens opportunities for us like this as well. I was talking to a friend the other day and he mentioned that a few years back, a successful business man gave him a book to read, but he ended up never reading it. I thought about how many times we do that. Basically what happened is that this successful man just invited you into his world, the decision is whether or not you want to step into that world.

This is evangelism. We want to bring people into God’s world, however we aren’t willing to go into their world to bring them. Christ came to us, at our most desperate state, and He brought us out of the world. This is evangelism, going into other worlds and bringing them out to Christ.

Take a step! Step into someone else’s world. There is so much adventure and excitement. The work is plenty, there are plenty of worlds to infiltrate, but so many few workers.

At first, we want to take a step back and scream out “heresy!” But let’s take a quick look at what he meant by this.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote;

“as Luther saw it, ‘sin boldly’ did not happen to be a fundamental acknowledgement of his disobedience; it was the gospel of the grace of God before which we are always and in every circumstance sinners. Yet that grace seeks us and justifies us, sinners though we are. Take courage and confess your sin, says Luther, do not try to run away from it, but believe more boldly still. You ARE a sinner, so be a sinner, and don’t try to become what you are not. Yes, and become a sinner again and again every day, and be bold about it.” (Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship)

What I believe Bonhoeffer is trying to express here is Luther’s, and every disciple’s, reality that we are sinners. We cannot help but to sin. But there is a problem, we tend to run away from sin. We tend to focus on the sin. We tend to give our all to stop sinning.

What if we acknowledge and accept that we are sinners. But as we believe that, we increase our faith in Christ. You ever notice that you actually minimize the sin in your life when you seek God most? You minimize sin in your life when you keep your eyes on Christ?

Focus on Christ and watch the sin fall off of you. Focus on sin and watch sin slowly but surely enslave you more and more.

Sin boldly, know that you are a sinner. But believe and rejoice in Christ more boldly still.

Have you ever loved somebody only to find out that that somebody is talking to another person? Jealousy raged inside of you didn’t it? But let’s analyze the reason. You were jealous because you wanted to give that person your love. You were jealous because you knew that he or she would never receive the love that you want to give them.

It is the same way with God. When I spend hours and hours in front of the television, God is jealous. Because God knows that the love that the tube gives me cannot compare to the love that God has in store for me.

When I turned to alcohol instead of turning to God, God was jealous. He knew that there’s not message inside that bottle. There’s no love at the bottom of that bottle. Yet I turn to it instead of turning to him.

To think that the God of the universe is a jealous God. He is crazy about me. C.S. Lewis said that “if you were the only person alive, Christ would have still died for you, nothing less.”

This God wants to know me. He wants to love me. How do I know this? Just look towards the cross of Jesus Christ. How can you miss it?

I have a vision of this blog being an interactive community where we can discuss and disciple each other to become more active and effective followers of Christ Jesus.

LORD, We come before you and ask you to bless this blog. That you may use this blog as one of your many tools to bring your followers closer to you. Open up the minds of every single person who stumbles upon this blog. Let their minds receive a Holy anointing that will allow your Holy Spirit to illuminate and enlighten their minds. In the name of Christ Jesus, we pray. Amen.