Living Life for Christ Alone

  When suffering grows long… Pretense is cast away and the true colors of our faith are revealed. Questions surface, doubts speak, and endurance wears thin.  This is when we are purified by fire. How will we answer the questions?  How will we fight the doubts?  How will we keep going through the suffering when the endurance all but disappears?  The answer is simple. So simple in fact, that we easily overlook it.  We can’t. Our own resources are not enough to pull us through. And when we finally embrace that fact, we open ourselves up to One greater than our weakness.  He steps amid the rubble of our broken lives, sees the crushed self-will, the shredded self-confidence, the sense that all control is lost, and finds us in a place where He can do something with us.  For before the long season of suffering began, though we thought we had built up something He could use, He saw how we were trying to mix self in with His power. And He also saw the grea...

 “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loves us…” 1 John 4:10 Love is NOT defined as us loving God.  Why?  It’s no miracle for imperfect ones to love One so perfect as He is -even if it is only in an admiring sort of way.  If love is us loving, the best we give is our leftovers, for we are always self-preserving. And that love amazes no one.  Don’t look at humanity to see what love is. You’ll never learn love there. At least, not in the fullest sense.  No, the best ways we love are when we live fully in the way God created us, but even then it falls way short.  Fatherhood, motherhood, marriage, friendship, etc. -these are only dim pictures of the love of God.  Love is THIS: God loving us.  One so perfect should not love ones so unlike Him -but He does.  He set His love on humanity and chased her all the way to the grave. He traded His life for hers. His perfection for her filth.  We are the ones who should have hung o...

Love... A word that keeps surfacing in my life lately.   I see it in my children’s picture bible as I catch sight of a depiction of Jesus hanging on the cross.   I hear pleas for Love in those who speak of their pain.   “Oh, to be truly loved,” the heart cries.   I wonder just how deep love can reach and as I reach for the deepest that I can find, I realize I still have not found the depths.   Love –as limitless as God.   Love –as profound as He is.   Love –wider than the widest ocean, vaster than the heavens.   However much we open ourselves up to it, there is always more. Love – the very expression of God.   Do you really know Him?   You might say yes, but have you tasted Him if you have not yet tasted love?   For He has said, “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)   The more I peer  into its depths, the more captivated I become.   Could there be any greater, more awe-striking way for God to express Himself? Take a wal...