We Get Grace. God Gets The Glory.
I am so tired of the lies. Aren't you?
Praise God! I am so thankful to have found Truth!
This post might ruffle some feathers. It's not going to be gentle and easy to read and it may in fact offend you! However, if there is one thing I have learned..when you walk with God, things can get a little... uncomfortable (to say the least!) as you face some harsh truths about yourself, the world and the way we tend to think when we leave God out of the picture.
I used to be someone who believed the lies of the world. I've read all the self help books. I've read horoscopes. Turned to mediums and so called guru's to tell me how to fix my life. In fact, some of my previous posts on my personal Hive blog reflect that attitude.
I was wrong. Not only because some of what I was doing was going against the word of God but because I was buying into the hype.
We've all heard it before...
"you're perfect just the way you are"...
"as long as you're a good person, that's all that matters"...
"do anything you want, as long as it's not hurting anyone else, who cares!"...
I mean...what?!?
These are nothing but false promises of the world. Lies. Deception. The truth is...without God, we are nothing! Sure, you can be a "good person" (to the worlds standards I suppose.) I know plenty of non-believers who are good human beings. As far as I know, they haven't killed anyone or robbed a bank... so they must be good, right? Hmm...
The only promise that matters is the promise of God. All the other nonsense is a way for us to turn the glory inward and praise ourselves when really we don't deserve any of it.
God gets the glory. God gets the praise! It's so important that we remember that we are saved by God's grace, not through our own works.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't work on ourselves. From day one of my Christian experience, I feel like I've been put under a personal microscope and have done nothing but work on who I am.
The difference in my perspective is that instead of working on myself, improving and then patting myself on the back and telling myself how awesome I am...I have now turned the praise back over to where it belongs. I no longer serve pride, arrogance and selfish ambition.
I serve Jesus Christ.
Yes, I work on myself, according to how God's Word tells me I should and then when I do improve, God get's the glory. It's not by my little effort that I've succeeded. It's by His mercy and His grace and His never ending supply of patience that I have succeeded in anything I do.
The promises of this world will forever fail you. You will never find true satisfaction in it. However, the choice will always be yours on who you serve and make no mistake - we all serve something! Either you're choosing the serve this world or you're choosing to serve God. No matter how many experts you turn to or how many help books you read, only one will save you.
Who do you serve?
Okay I don't understand what you're calling a lie historical facts and stuff is not.
Hey Cheryl, I saw your comment that you removed, but wanted you to see my response :)
The problem with this is the frame of it all...
You think all this happens to you because of God?
You know this is the devil's world right? Things go bad, not because of God...But because sin is built into the DNA of this planet.
The fact that a child is born every day, heck even that YOU were born is because there is a loving God. But this planet isn't supposed to have good things happen...At all.
Think your anger is pointed in the wrong place. Not that it isn't valid, it very much is...but remember who the enemy is :)
no I do not believe that I believe that I was not educated and ready for the real world when it became an adult that's that's what I believe and that's more factual there's a lot of mean people out there but we all experience that in our life some what and but I am really totally against religion and that's just where I am I can't tell anybody what to do or be and they do they tell you what to be and what to do and I'm not going to do that
That's most beautiful thing about God...You are 100000% free to choose what you believe and how you believe :)
I'll be praying for you, Cheryl. God loves you. I hope that someday you can see that. There will always be mean people. You are right. They get real mean when you start praising Jesus out loud too! LOL
I'd just like to say though that religion is not what I was referring to at any point in my post. Just pure love for God in all His glory!
Still wish you the best of luck and I sincerely appreciate you commenting!
Hi Cheryl,
You removed your first comment and that's okay. The "lies" I was referring to are the lies that the world tells us in that...we don't need God. Almost everything society does today pulls us away from God. That is what I was referring to.
As far as historical facts go - I would say you are right, they don't lie. And there are literally so many and so much evidence that supports the Bible and God's word. But you'll never see it on the news because we (society) has decided that God doesn't fit in our agenda.
I appreciate your comment. I will admit I was struggling with your first one (understanding it) but you're welcome to share your thoughts here.
Well okay I I kind of got your message about answering but I tell you the truth I don't see any of that and I know you I don't know what country you live in but we're USA is a country of separation of church and state that means you have the right to worship anything you want or not worship a thing but you can't make it a law have a good night
I live in Canada. But regardless...no matter where a person lives, or what the laws are...it's always a choice to serve God. In some countries it's illegal to praise or worship God. And in other countries where there is complete freedom, people choose not to. In both situations, it's still a choice.
Joshua 24:15 says,
"But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
Beautifully stated. Anything good in me is Jesus--the rest is leftover Kimberly that leaks out because we still live in a fallen world. !BBH
Thank you for your kind words. I like how you put that! "leftover Janelle" lol
It is so easy to fall into the mindset of "saving ourselves." It's not only a worldly, "self-help" mindset, but also (perhaps even more so) a religious mindset . For the longest time I believed the religious adage expressed so powerfully in Galatians: "God saved me, but now it's all on me to clean myself up." Or in my case, "I'm so grateful to be the wretch that God saved, I have to spend the rest of my life trying to somehow pay Him back for that gift." I learned the hard way that is a horrendously miserable place to live.
Through much prayer, study, and mind renewal, I've come to realize that I can't do anything! The "apart from me you can do nothing" in John 15:5 actually means just that. Strikingly humbling, but incredibly freeing. The process of learning to "walk by the Spirit and not gratify the desires of the flesh" and to "keep in step with the Spirit" is neither a worldly nor religious self-improvement process. It's simply surrender. It's learning to love Him. To seek Him. To choose Him daily and to ask Him to fill me with His desires. To learn to know His voice (John 10:4). The natural result of this laying down of MY "rights" and lesser loves is that the closer I get to His holiness, the more of my junk gets burned away in His purity, and the more righteous I become.
I trust the Holy Spirit to convict me and redirect me when I'm wrong, but I do my very best not to fall into my old trap of wasting my time staring at everything wrong with me when I could be fixing my eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of my faith and being transformed into His image as behold and contemplate the glory of the Lord (2 Cor 3:18).
Would it be okay if I post things in this group that aren't exactly "Bible Study"? I'm beginning to share a series of posts that I wrote during my time doing mission work in Honduras. They are more of a devotional style than a straight Biblical analysis, but they are often Scripturally based. Please let me know!