Living Life for Christ Alone

As I sit here, preparing to write a post that I know I must write after praying and talking with God, I find that there is no adequate way to begin this. Let me just get to the point... I have been reading in Jeremiah for the past couple of days and this morning was so struck by how hurt God must feel when His beloved people turn from Him to worship other "gods". Stick with me here... I imagine that most of you who call yourselves Christians probably read that sentence and said to yourself, "nope, that's not me. I haven't gone and worshiped another god." But let me keep writing about God's heart to you for a second and then I'll explain...

This morning, I was spending my time alone with the Lord, and asked Him, "where do you want me to spend this time?" I had been meditating on 1 Peter, but for some reason found myself in the first chapter of 2 Peter. I got stuck on verse 3 and couldn't seem to leave it to read the rest. I took out my pen and began to write one phrase at a time... "According as His divine power..."  It is God, not man, that has all the power that we need. It's all about Him and what He can do. His power is divine. Nowhere else but in Him can we find it.

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." (Gal. 5: 22-23) I should just leave those verses there and hope that a passerby reader might stop and ponder those words for a few moments. Recently, I was pondering Colossians 1:11 where it says in the middle of a long prayer, "Strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness." I had just failed again getting frustrated at a situation that was going on, and went to pray about it when this verse came to mind. One phrase reverberated in my mind: "Patience...with joyfulness." God was telling me,  When your patience is being stretched, you're supposed to be joyful about it...