Seriously Stinky!

I have to tell you.  It's plain.  It's simple.   It is Truth.

"For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son  that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but  have everlasting life."  (John 3:16) 

There. 

Think about this.   God created the universe, the world and everything in it including the human race.   You can believe otherwise if you want to, but I fear that you will wake up the other side of the grave one day and be sadly mistaken.   Very sadly.

Anyway, on with my story...      Have you ever made anything?   Have you ever created anything?   I mean even a sandcastle, a house of cards, sewn a stitch, baked a cake, painted a picture, planted a seed?   If so, you will know what I mean when I say you feel like these things belong to you.   You feel like you can do whatever you want with them, but no one else better touch them.  You have a sense of ownership.

In the same way, God owns us.   He created us.   He can do what He wants with us and expect what He wants to expect  from us.  He can display us for all to see or He can toss us in the trash can as unacceptable.

Fortunately for us, He created us so that we could have a relationship with Him, not just be objects on a shelf or zombies without a brain.     He gave us the ability to choose.

Unlike zombies, we get to choose a lot of stuff.   We choose what we do, where we go, the clothes we wear, our friends, our lovers, our entertainment, our idols, our enemies, and so on.      Unfortunately, way back somewhere in time, the original non-zombie people that He had created chose wrong.  They chose to do something that He told them not to do.  

So, in order to rectify this wrong choice which, by the way, has affected every creature ever born, causing all of us to have this ugly putrescent stench which we can't get rid of no matter how much deodorant we use or perfume and cologne we spray on ourselves.    We kinda stink in God's nose like an old walking dead zombie as a matter of fact.  Ewwwwwww.... !   In order to rectify all of this, God sent His most precious possession.   He sent Himself in human form.  A human without the horrible death smell.

He sent Jesus as a sacrifice to die a tortuous death.   He did this because pouring out His own holy blood was the only thing that could remove the stench and make us acceptable to be near Him again.    He loves us so much He would die just so we could come near to Him again.    No, we are not zombies to Him.  We are precious to Him.

However, His sacrificed blood did not remove the choice.    We still have that.   We get to choose the type of relationship we are going to have with God.   Because we all have a relationship with Him either as a blood bought child or as one of His disobedient creations that refuses Him.  Remember?  He created us.. He can do what He wants because He owns us.     He even gave us some rules about having a good relationship with Him.      It is a list of  "Do This and Don't Do That" and all will be well with God.

So far none of us have been able to live a life without breaking most all the rules.  We should all be judged "Guilty - Life in jail - NO parole".

It is simple.   All we have to do is choose to believe in the Son and then we will have eternal life.    Of course, there is more to it than that.   Because if we choose to believe, then we also are choosing to believe everything that God said and did.    We can't believe part of it and not all of it.  We are choosing to believe that we MUST live our lives according to His rules.  We are choosing to believe that we contain a rotten death stench within that can not exist in God's presence unless He removes it.

So here's the gist of it:

• We have a stench that God calls sin.
  
  There is nothing we can do about it.
  
  God sacrificed His only Son for us.  He spilt His holy blood.  
  
  In order to honor the sacrifice of Jesus, God says that those of us who choose to believe in Him are covered by that blood sacrifice and our stinking sin is forgiven.  (That means God forgets it  ever happened and we no longer are a horrible smell to Him.)
  
  In order to receive this forgiveness, we have to believe that Jesus is the Son of God and died for us    AND we have to ask God to forgive us and save us from separation from Him (also known as Hell)... He saves us from hell through the blood that Christ spilt.
  
  Then we have to choose to repent (turn away from) our old sinful stinky life and begin living a life that  pleases God.  (still not easy, but it is doable.)
  
  We have to keep on choosing God over our natural desire to be stinky.   This is a life long process.

Good news!   Once you choose Him, God will be right there with you every day...helping you.

This sounds like a lot of hooey to some of you.

To others it sounds like there is a hope for you after all.   Yay!!!!

I promise you.   Seriously!  This is unchangeable truth.

There is no escape from God.

You are not a brainless zombie dancing in a graveyard.

One way or the other, your relationship with Him is your choice.     



Appointment

Today is an important day.   It is an appointed day.    It is the day that my new grandson will be born!!  It is a birth day!!

Colt Daniel Ellis will be brought into the world today.   His birth is not a random thing.    God has formed him and created him and appointed him to be born in this time and in this place.

The Lord of all creation has a purpose and a plan for this new little one.

My prayer, as for all my grandchildren, is that this child will seek the Lord and know Him.   Serve Him. Live in Him.   Fulfill the purpose for which he is created.

Welcome to the world, precious one.



"and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His children.' "Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness  through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead."  (Acts 17: 26-31)