The Great Investor

With all the talk about the economy I thought I would give you an illustration about God from it. Suppose you were an investor with a completely cool and originally idea, but suppose, because you were already a very rich and important person you had no time to execute the idea yourself. So here is what you decide to do, you decide to entrust someone else with your idea, giving them complete responsibility for bringing it to life.

God is a lot like this investor He has wonderful mind-blowing extraordinary ideas for each of our lives, but it is our job to own His visions and do our part to bring them to life. It upsets me to hear people describe God as a tyrant, someone who has no respect for freedom and autonomy because quite the opposite is true of God. God wants us to be free, He wants us to have autonomy, authority and power, these are things He entrusts us with, much like how the investor I just described. Though God gives us theses things we must still remember that He is the boss. He is the one who supplies us with both vision and resources we need to bring it about; therefore what He says goes.

What is awesome about God is He is best boss you will ever have. God cares about you more than anything. As you work for him, He will give you all the help and guidance you need. And even if you screw up royally He is more than ready to give you another chance, that is, if you are genuinely sorry for you screw up. Take for example the story of Jonah. Instead of doing what God had asked him to do, which was to urge the Ninevites to repent, Jonah had fled in the opposite direction. Despite Jonah’s unfaithfulness God still entrusted him with the job of delivering the message to the Ninevites, but not before He lands him in the belly of a whale, which is where Jonah makes the choice to obey God.

The thing I hope you get from this is that the life God is trying to give you is much better than any life you will find apart from him. It is a life filled with great freedom, responsibility and fulfillment, and one that will be a joy to live everyday, that is, if you accept the invitation He gives you to work for Him.

Finished

Being a blog author has given me a better understanding of what it means to be finished. I’m someone who tends to start things but not finish them. Thankfully I find myself living by a new set of standards when if comes to blogging, because it is one thing to have an idea for an article and quite another to have one ready to be published online. Hopefully this standard of completion will filter it way into other aspects of my life.

In keeping with this idea of finishing, over the past few months a thought has been in frequent rotation in my mind. The thought is this “my life is the finished draft”. What this means is that the tasks which I try my hand at everyday are not counted as complete in and of themselves, but only counted as complete to the extent in which they change the nature of who I am. For example it does me no good to write about how I need to be some one who finishes things without actually becoming some one who finishes things. Likewise it does us no good to read and recite verses about loving God and loving our neighbor unless we become people who love God and our neighbor. To this respect none of us are ever finished just closer to completion that when we started.

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Because its no fun for me to be talking to myself

Growth

I keep paying attention to the dates beside each of these blog entries because

I seem to be going through a stage of rapid growth. The person who I was October 4 is not the person I am today, and the person I was this morning is not the person I am right now. I think about it this way it is like God has been doing some particularly heavy construction on my life since the day I started this blog (maybe part of the reason why I’ve been experiencing such rapid change is because God has been trying to catch me up to the image of the person he wants me to be, since I’ve been delaying starting this blog for several weeks now). To use the analogy that the bible frequently uses If God is the potter and I am the Clay God has been adding big chunks of clay to his wheel this past week.

Complementary lessons

-I would just like to remind you that growth and change is a fundamental attribution of the Christian life. If you call yourself a Christian and you have not change any in the past year or past couple of years something is wrong.

-We keep changing till the day we die.

Questions to Consider

When is a time you felt that God had been doing some heavy construction on your life?

What initiated that time of change?

Check out the ARCHIVES

Hey Peps make sure you check out the awesome messages in the Archives Section

Appraisal

I’m trying to turn a bad experience into something good by writing about it. Today as I was driving back from a women’s meeting at my church. I saw a sign for an Open House, right now I’m aspiring to be a real-estate agent, so I was immediately intrigued by the sign and decided to check it out. When I walked in the house I was greeted by the owner/builder of the property. We made small talk as I looked around the quant 3 bedroom 2 bath chateau with very impressive workmanship. After I had finished exploring the upstairs on my own the owner/builder asked me this dreaded question “So how much do you think it is worth?”. Though I am aspiring to be a real-estate agent I’m still very unschooled in property values, so drawing from my very limited reservoir of knowledge I came up the absurdly low figure of $150,000. I found out that this was an absurdly low figure from the response by the owner’s which soon followed.

“150,000 are you kidding do you know any property in Boston that is selling for that much”. I tried to cover up my blunder by reminding this man that I was new to real-estate (This was actually the second Open House I’d been to, but that didn’t seem to register). “You really do insult me young lady, I do good work” he said in a harsh tone which he assured me was not sarcastic. “Perhaps you should leave”, and this is precisely what I did apologizing all the way.

As I was leaving my head spinning from the experience, I was somewhat ashamed by my low estimate but even more ashamed and this man’s response. But driving back home I started to reflected on what God had been teaching me about people’s need for approval. You see this man was upset that I had given his property such a low value but had he stopped to consider how clueless I was about the real property value he wouldn’t have gotten so ticked off. This man after all was the one who built this property, he more than anyone knew what it was worth, and for him to take the response of a rookie agent so seriously was pretty dumb.

I see and obvious connection in my life and hopefully you all will see one in yours. We take people estimates/evaluations of ourselves too seriously when other people are not qualified to judge us, or to quote unquote place a value on us. The one who is most qualified to judge us is our maker/builder, God. The care and skill God placed into making us and the price He paid to redeem us shows how valuable we are to Him. As it say in 1 Peter 1:18-19 “Forasmuch as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, such as silver and gold…But with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish and without spot”

If we just hold fast to this God’s appraisal of us we won’t be looking for appraisal from anyone else.

Some questions to consider

Are you some one who takes peoples’ appraisal too seriously?

In what ways do you?

How do you deal with people who place a low estimate of value on you?

One Big Dysfunctional Family/ What I Believe

I am increasing coming to see that The world is one big Dysfunction family. I know first hand what it is like to come from a dysfunctional home, were every “discussion” dissolves into argument. Thankfully as a psychology major and a Christian I know what breakthroughs can be made when people stop fighting and begin making the effort to hear and be heard. One hope of Godspace.com is that people from every thought and belief pattern would engage in civil discussion about God, human nature, and the nature of our world. Now I would like to take the time to lay out three of my core beliefs, in order that you can better understand the perspective from which I write. Here they are.

Jesus Christ is the Sacrifice for Sin:

I believe that God came down from heaven in the form of his son Jesus Christ to die for the sins of the world. Accepting Jesus Christ into one’s life is the only way one can escape eternal separation from God. The way you accept Jesus is by make a confession of faith which, is basically a prayer which, one recognizes that you are a sinner in need of salvation and two recognizes that Jesus’ death on the cross is the means by which you receive that salvation. Jesus’ atoning death on the cross is the central message of the gospel and as a Christian I am called to share that good news with others. And this yes is one of the intention behind Godspace.

The Christian Life = Life in partnership with God

To me getting saved or accepting the message of the gospel, is like accepting God’s proposal for marriage. This is a big decision but also the best decision one can make. By sending his son God was basically inviting man back into his family after we had been estranged from him, a very potent illustration of this is story of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11-31, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2015:%2011-31&version=31)

Some might ask “why should I get married to God after all he seems kind of sketchy”, well you say this only because you have never had a personal encounter with God or his son Jesus. You have only heard rumors about God, but you have never met him face to face, if you did I am sure your feelings would change.

To get a better picture of what being in relationship with God is like, try imagining what it would be like to be friends with a celebrity you loved and admired, get that person in mind Oprah, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Tom Brady, Janet Jackson, Michael Jordan, Tiger woods, Michael Phelps etc, better yet think of someone who you already have a loving relationship with your mom, your dad, your significant other, a friend, well God is infinitely more wise, powerful, and loving than that person. Imagine being in a relationship with someone who was all wise all powerful, always present, and who love you with a perfect love, this my friend is God, and when you begin to see God this way it is hard to imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with him. God leaves no doubt about the fact that he wants to be in a relationship with us, this is the very reason why he came to earth and died. Not many people can say they have someone in their immediate circle of friends who is willing to die for them but this is exactly what Jesus did for you and for me.

The Holy Spirit the means by which we live life in partnership with God

I believe in the Holy Spirit is the 3rd part of the trinity (God the father, God the son, and God the Spirit). The Holy Spirit is the version of God who comes to live inside they believer once they are saved. The Holy Spirit is mentioned numerous times through out the bible, He is a very active yet much neglected part of the Trinity. An essential role that the Holy Spirit plays is to be a guide to the believer. He acts something like an internal GPS system helping us navigate our way through life, in essence directing us to the destination (or destiny) God has prepared us each. The Holy Spirit not only directs the believer on their travels through life He also gives them the fuel or power they need for the journey. A lot more can be said on the topic of the Holy Spirit but I will stop here, but please look out for an article on the subject in the near future.

Prove it

Some of you may be quite skeptical of the beliefs I have just put forth, e.g. the significance of Jesus’ life and death, the belief that we can have a close and personal relationship with God, or the belief that God through his spirit can live in us, instruct, and empower us through life’s journey. Some of you may be saying “prove it”. Well to you I say I don’t have to prove it, these things are true whether you believe them or not. BUT there is a simple way you can prove these things to yourself, the way you do this is by praying a simple prayer where you ask God to make Himself know to you, this is not the same as the prayer of salvation but to many of you it will be an important step towards it. God is very willing, even anxious to make himself known to you. Matthew 7:7 says “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” this applies even to the simple matter of finding the faith to believe in God. Some ways you can begin seeking God are by, reading the bible (particularly the New Testament), speaking with believers, and attending church services. However, if you are really serious about finding God do all these things with an open mind and a heart bent on knowing the truth.

Resources

Some resources you may want to check out are Biblegateway.com, http://www.biblegateway.com/, an online bible site, or LifeChurch.tv, http://www.lifechurch.tv/ which is an excellent online church (try going to the message archive page, http://www.lifechurch.tv/message-archive and scanning through messages). Also for those who live in the Boston area I highly recommend you come visiting my church, Jubilee, a multinational christain church location on 1500 Blue Hill Ave, http://www.jubileeboston.org/ .

I hope that this article was of much help to you whether you are a believer or non-believer. I pray that the Holy Spirit himself has spoken to you through it. I thank you all very much for reading it.

REMEMBER the idea is that GODspace be an interactive site so please leave your feedback, questions and comments.

In Christ Service

Deneen