Journal of Faith: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling Philippians 2:12

Did you ever wonder why The Bible talks about length of days AND long life in Proverbs chapter 3? Well I realized a few days ago that it's because they are two different things! Long life is the extension of your life while length of days is the extension of your day.  In proverbs it says that if we keep God's commandments that not only would our lives be extended, but our days also.  To any single parent like me you really do wish there were more hours in a day.  Sometimes I have to stop and pray "Lord please help my time so that I can do this laundry" or "Lord I just need one more hour for sleep".  In Proverbs it says that we can extend our days by following God's commandments in our hearts.  If we can take on the heart of God than we can extend our time!  Is that crazy or what?  I could hardly believe what I was reading.  I had previously chalked it all up to repetitiveness, but fortunately for me I was wrong.  I need more productivit...

People often times think of charity cases as people who are pathetic and desparately in need of someone to preserve their existance with some act of giving.  Some people pull out a check book or say a quick prayer, and trust me when I say those things are helpful, but charity is much more than that according to the Bible.  Charity can suffer for a long time and still be kind.  Charity is humble and honest.  Charity is everything that Christ did for us with his life, death, and resurrection.  Charity is something that we all need.  I need for people to be kind to me when I get on their nerves.  I need people to appoach me with humility when they see that I am going through something.  I need people to not rejoice in evil things, but to rejoice in the truth.  I need people who will bear with me, and believe in me.  If we were all honest I think that we would say that we are in need of people like this in our lives. We need charity, a...

For anyone who may not know, a christian is a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ and someone who believes that Jesus is the son of God who came to the earth to be our perfect example of how to live before dying for the sins of the world so that we could all have a restored relationship with God and live in heaven with him some day.  We also believe that after three days Jesus was raised from the dead and still lives today sitting at the right hand of God.  The Bible says that anyone who believes this in their heart and confesses that with their mouth will be saved.  You see because God is holy he can not even look upon sin, and when we are born we are born into a sinful existance. If we sin one time God can't even look at us and our connection with him is lost.  The sad thing is that we have all sinned.  No one has lived their entire lives without sinning except for Jesus.  Therefore we all are in need of a savior which is Jesus the Christ....

I am always thinking about community and how we are suppose to be knitted together.  Everyone is so different and it seems that for some societies the only way to insure one's own survival is at the cost someone else. That is a lie and a scheme to keep us from seeing that the only way we can all thrive is to work together for the cause of love.   In the story of the tower of babel the people understood the power of working together for a goal, but they misunderstood that they put themselves in opposition of God and therefore sealed their demise. What I gleaned from looking at this story again is that the only two things that garauntee success and fulfillment in the lives of all people are unity with eachother and unity with God.  The word of the day is reconciliation.  Here is the breakdown.  Christ came to earth to reconcile us to God, but we can not be reconciled with God without also being reconciled with our brother (that means all humanity) because in ...

I go to a church that focuses on giving and finding ways to bless other people.  Since I am working a business and not in a regular job anymore I don't always have money to give.  When I do have money to give I get so excited and I am grateful to be able to give something, but recently the Lord showed me that even in my excitement to give I wasn't quite giving what God required.  After feeling horrible while an offering basket passed me without a contribution from me I prayed to the Lord to give me something to give, and the next week he did.  I was so happy that I would have something to give.  The money wasn't going to pay for anything that I needed so I figured the church could do better with it then I could, that was until it disappeared.  I was devastated.  I prayed about what to do with that money and it didn't seem right for it to go anywhere but to the church.  The next week I was not only sad but angry at myself.  When I finally foun...