Blog post December 4th

Blog post December 4th

 

Daniel 11:36-12:13

1 John 4:1-21

Psalm 123:1-4

Proverbs 29:2-4

 

"God is love", not "Love is God".

 

From today's reading we see how the antichrist will start to become the center of people's attention and there will be great suffering for Gods people ahead. Yet the great suffering is tempered by a great promise of hope for true believers.  Many people try to be "stars" in the world of entertainment, only to find their stardom is temporary. God tells us how we can be eternal "stars" by being wise and leading many to Gods righteousness. The trials we face make little sense to us when we go through them, but they can purify us if we are willing to learn from them. God does not reveal everything to us in life. He will tell us all we need to know.

  "Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits" in 1 John 4:1,2 means that we shouldn't believe in every message or anything that someone says that was inspired by God. We need to make sure that their words line up with the word of God. We can also test this by seeing how that person's lifestyle and the fruit of their ministries but most importantly, is what they believe about Christ.  Do they teach Jesus is fully God and fully man? Our world is filled with voices claiming to speak the word of God. Give those voices the tests to see if they are speaking Gods truth as there are false prophets.

 

The antichrist will be a person who embodies all that is evil. It is easy to be frightened by the wickedness we see all around us and overwhelmed by the problems we face. Evil is stronger than we are, however God is even stronger. He will conquer all evil and his spirit and his word lives in our hearts. God is the source of our love, he loved us enough to sacrifice his Son for us. Jesus is our example of what it means to love, everything he did in life and death was loving. The Holy Spirit gives us the power to love, He lives in our hearts and makes us more and more like Christ. God's love always involves a choice and an action, and our love should be like this. How well do we display our love for God in the actions and choices we make?

It is easy to say we love God when that love doesn't cost us anything more than weekly attendance at religious services. But the real test of our love for God is how we treat people right in front of our family members and fellow believers. We cannot truly love God while neglecting to love those who are created in his image. 

 

 Many people in today's world do not acknowledge that Jesus is from God, they believe in things of the world and not of God. They place their trust and life in the world and not Jesus. In a season where we rejoice in Jesus, let us extend Love to one another and be an example of the love that Jesus is in us.