** Trusting In God **
** Trusting In God **
We humans love the comfort of trust. We would like to be able to trust friends and relatives. It is nice to think about trusting our political leaders and our law enforcement officers. It is comforting to trust in our jobs. All of these trusts are in the world and the world shall fade away. History has proven time and time again that we cannot trust our politicians or our police officers totally. Friends and relatives can and do fail us. So if trust fails in these areas where do we put our trust? Just as history has proven we cannot rely on people, God has proven He Himself is totally trustworthy. Proverbs 11:28 states, --- Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf. --- (New International Version)
We can trust in the salvation Jesus offered to us. When we believe in Jesus and accept Him as our Lord and Savior we receive that salvation. Jesus’ offering will always be there but we can lose out on that salvation through sin. The Spirit of God cannot dwell in sin. Jesus paid for our sins -- it was His gift to all of us. When we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior we receive that gift. We must then strive for perfection. We will fall and stumble along the way but we must pick ourselves up and continue on. Jesus is there to help us in our quest.“I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.” Those are comforting words but they are not magical words. After we accept Jesus we cannot go on and commit various sins right up to the day of our death and expect a free ticket into Heaven. Some believe they can do just that. What they do not understand is that the Holy Spirit cannot dwell in sin. When we gossip about our neighbor we are not sinning --are we? Of course we are. The more we sin, the more time we spend without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, thereby furthering the distance between God and ourselves. If we continue on this path we will reach a point of no return. We will have hardened our hearts so much that we cannot hear God speaking to us. Let me quote Romans 6: 19-23 (New International Version).
I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you are slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.We do not have any magic words to say. We only have Jesus, and Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments.” It is through God's love that our salvation comes, and it is through our love for God that we receive our salvation.
~ ~ Simon West
© 18 March, Two Thousand and One
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This page was last modified May, 2002.
