A Quote by Robert Jeffress
God's love means that our Creator desires to have a relationship with us. God's holiness prevents him from having fellowship with us and, instead, demands the outpouring of his anger against us.
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There are two gods. The god our teachers teach us about, and the God who teaches us. The god about whom people usually talk, and the God who talks to us. The god we learn to fear, and the God who speaks to us of mercy. The god who is somewhere up on high, and the God who is here in our daily lives. The god who demands punishment, and the God who forgives us our trespasses. The god who threatens us with the torments of Hell, and the God who shows us the true path.
There are two gods. A god who casts us off because of our sins, and a God who calls to us with His love.
Every relationship for a Christian is an opportunity to love another person like God has loved us. To lay down our desires and do what's in his or her best interest. To care for him or her even when there's nothing in it for us. To want that person's purity and holiness because it pleases God and protects him or her.
Let none, however difficult the circumstances, consider himself as debarred from the way of holiness. Have we but God and the cross of Christ, we have the means for becoming altogether holy in our walk and conversation. What dungeon is there that can shut us out from this? Only let us use the present location and means faithfully and truly, taking them from God's hand, and we shall find him able to free us from all that is really a hindrance. Let us each one desire to be a saint in his own place and calling, instead of building 'castles in the air' of future holiness.
In the matter of fellowship God looks not at how much we apprehend of His will but rather at what our attitude towards His will is. If we honestly seek and wholeheartedly obey His desires, our fellowship remains unbroken, even though there should be many unknown sins in us. Should fellowship be determined by the holiness of God, who among all the most holy saints in the past and the present would be qualified to hold a moment's perfect communion with Him?
The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.
It is an item of faith that we are children of God; there is plenty of experience in us against it. The faith that surmounts this evidence and is able to warm itself at the fire of God's love, instead of having to steal love and self-acceptance from other sources, is actually the root of holiness: It is a fatal mistake to think of holiness as a possession which we have distinct from our faith... Faith is the very highest form of our dependence on God.
Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.
Trusting God means transferring our confidence and hope from ourselves to him, acknowledging that we have no ability in ourselves to live in a way that pleases him. Only he can change us by the power of his Spirit in us. This trust is manifested in a context of obedience in our lives to the biblical mandates God calls us to pursue. Training means acting upon that trust by doing things that help us rely upon God more and live out his desire for us.
Let us pause before the Child of Bethlehem. Let us allow our hearts to be touched, let us allow ourselves to be warmed by the tenderness of God; we need his caress. God is full of love: to him be praise and glory forever! God is peace: let us ask him to help us to be peacemakers each day, in our life, in our families, in our cities and nations, in the whole world. Let us allow ourselves to be moved by God's goodness.
I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive.
Remembering that God is my source, we are in the spiritual position of having an unlimited bank account. Most of us never consider how powerful the creator really is. Instead, we draw limited amounts of the power available to us. We decide how powerful God is for us. We unconsciously set a limit on how much God can give us or help us. We are stingy with ourselves. And if we receive a gift beyond our imagining, we often send it back.
God created us, He created us for His glory, and He created us to have a relationship with Him, and He created us to be all that He desires us to be and He's jealous of that because He does not want to share that with others.
God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in His image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in Him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by Him, His mark is deep within us. We have God's joy in our blood.
God's love is so extravagant and so inexplicable that he loved us before we were us. He loved us before we existed. He knew many of us would reject him, hate him, curse him, rebel against him. Yet he chose to love us. God loves us because he is love.
Trials always change our relationship with God. Either they drive us to Him, or they drive us away from Him. The extent of our fear of Him and our awareness of His love for us determine in which direction we will move.
A human encounter with holiness is devastating. It refuses to allow us to be impressed with the things of the world we’ve been chasing. It refuses to allow us to remain comfortable in our sin. It refuses to allow us to remain on the throne of our lives. And it leads us to a relationship with the only One who can perfectly love us, who can forgive all our sins, and who can make us into His likeness. Our encounter with His holiness is our devastation. And our devastation is our salvation.
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