It's Not About Me!

Our Creator has communicated to us about His presence, attributes, abilities, and His desired outcome for us and how to achieve it. He’s done this through nature itself, through the writings of His prophets in the Bible and directly through the visitation of His only Son, Jesus.

Jesus – His arrival was expected. The time and place of His birth and His mission were all written hundreds of years before He arrived, (Isaiah 53). God’s eternal Son who gave up His former bodily form and esteemed position, took on a mortal body like ours, a body that was subject (like us) to all of the elements of the curse, including death. It was also known beforehand that He would heal the afflicted and that He would be rejected, tortured, and killed and even that He would raise from the dead.

Jesus didn’t arrive at a particularly comfortable time in history. Human life for the common man was just a notch or two above the survival level. Societal order was provided by the brutal Roman rule, transportation was walking on dusty trails and the toilet was a trench. It was certainly a monumental step down for the Son of God to come here, so far from the glorious peace and beauty of Heaven.

During His visit, there was a remarkable exchange of information. During His time with us, Jesus (God with us) experienced firsthand just how it is to be human, not just intellectually but experientially. He experienced the difficulties we face in this world where both good and evil are on display, affecting us both mentally and physically.

Jesus experienced having close loving relationships with His earthly family and friends. He enjoyed the pleasures of nature’s bounty of food in shared meals and the fun of interacting with children. He was able to experience the joy of those He had healed. As the Scriptures foretold, He healed the deaf and lame, the lepers and even raised people from the dead. He cast out demons and fed 5,000 people with a simple child’s lunch and He controlled nature by walking on the water and calming the storm with a word. Through all of this, He had a welcoming and sometimes humorous personality that invited people into having a closer relationship with Him.

Jesus not only had a body like ours; He shared in our emotions which He experienced in a very wide range. He had empathy with the woman caught in adultery and another woman that had bled uncontrollably for years. He had anger for the defilement of the Temple and dread in His date with the cross and the separation from His Father that our sins would cause. He experienced temptation, when offered a shortcut to His Kingdom through Satan’s offer which included bypassing the cross. He wept along with others that had lost loved ones and He wept again when He experienced the foretold reality of being rejected by the religious leaders as the Messiah. He experienced ridicule, unbelief and ungratefulness and endured false accusations. He was slapped, spit upon, punched and brutally whipped just short of death and nailed to a cross, left to die between two thieves. This is how the Savior of the world was treated.

With the full gamut of abuse He suffered, our God can and does certainly minister strength and comfort to those that are suffering, because He knows what it is like to be us.

That is what our God experienced in the aforementioned exchange of information, but what did mankind learn? Jesus demonstrated how one conducts life in a way that pleases the Father by loving God and loving your neighbors and, even your enemies. Talk about a tough act to follow! He was the walking example of the attributes of God’s Holy Spirit according to Galatians 5:22.

For those that are willing to look into the Bible’s pages, we learn that we are sinners, an archery term meaning that we’ve missed the target and fallen short of God’s righteous standard. But God, because He loves us, has a plan to rescue us and He’s done the heavy lifting to make it simple for us to reach eternal safety. God is perfect in all respects including being perfect in judgment so with that, God cannot simply “wink” at sin. To be in God’s presence, requires us to be perfectly righteous (without sin), and mankind over the millennia has proven that living up to God’s righteous standard was impossible. God is perfect in justice which means that the penalty for sin (which is eternal separation from God) must be paid. There are two ways that can happen. First, each of us can individually bear God’s wrath, eternal separation from God, or, we can believe that Jesus was sent by God and bore ALL of our sins, past, present and future. Read John 14:1-21.

We are born destined to Hell but only if we choose that by rejecting God’s way of saving us… we have to walk around Jesus to get there. God’s way of rescuing us is gracious and loving and He has done this because He loves us – John 3:16. It might be cool to feature yourself as a rebel but, frankly, there will not be any rebels in Heaven.

We just have to wholeheartedly believe in Jesus as the One sent by God, trust that He paid for our sins, turn from our former way of life, and obey the things that His Son taught us. Changes in a new believer should become apparent because what we believe controls our thinking, emotions and actions. When one truly believes in Jesus as their personal Savior, He sends His Holy Spirit to live within them to help their inside reality become their outside visible reality. This is the born-again experience, God does not just repair our hearts, He gives us new hearts. Hearts that are surrendered in love to the One that gave us life and also took on the punishment for our sins. When one understands what God has done for us, it becomes pretty easy to give love and gratitude back to God, the One that has provided us life and such a wonderful rescue.

All of this is verifiable if one simply investigates; it’s not “rocket science.”

Have you read the eyewitness accounts of the things that Jesus said and did yourself, or, are you basing your conclusions about Him on things you’ve merely heard? It seems to me that for the sake of your eternal well-being, it would be worth your time to read what was written about Jesus. The Gospel of John is a good place to start.

So, what is the problem? The problem is that a majority of humans take the wonderful attributes that God has empowered them with and, somehow, they think they have done all of this themselves. Human Pride – “I’m my own boss, nobody is going to tell me what to do, look what I have achieved, I’m a good person, I’m in control, I don’t need God.”  Okay, so you are your own god, but, the day of your last breath and heartbeat is steadily coming. The second you die, God will be “calling the shots.” If separation from God is what you want, that is what you will get and it is eternal. Spoiler Alert: When you leave God, since He is the Giver of all good things, you will be separated from anything good. Think of it this way, all of earth’s evil actions distilled out and in one place where you are and you have a body that can feel pain but cannot die. Not a good outcome for you nor is it what God has intended for you. But, right now, while you are still alive, seek Him while you can. If you desire, you could sleep soundly and peacefully tonight knowing that you are “right” with your Creator. I highly recommend it.

Here’s How.