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WHEN YOU TAKE GOD SERIOUSLY
MCLEODS, New Brunswick, January 13, 2024 – Jesus didn’t spend his ministry looking for people who didn’t believe in God and trying to get them to believe. That wasn’t his aim or purpose. Jesus spent his ministry inviting people who already believed to commit to the highest level of belief that encompassed every aspect of their lives.
What he essentially did was to invite people to take God seriously.
As followers of Jesus, we should not only be taking God seriously but aiming to get others to take him seriously, too. We do this not by threatening them (as some religions do) but by reminding them of Jesus’ teachings.
What does it look like when you take God seriously?
First and foremost, you totally and willingly submit to God. You don’t submit 50% or 75% or even 99% – you submit 100%. When you take God seriously, you take him at his Word, which means you keep his Commandments, the first of which is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. You don’t love God just a little bit or when it’s convenient for you, or just on Sundays for an hour during church service. You love him 24/7. You fall asleep thinking about God, you wake up thinking about God, and he’s on your mind all day long. God and Jesus are your constant companions, through God’s Holy Spirit that you received at your rebirth, and you do nothing without their prompting. Jesus said he only did what the Father showed him to do and only what pleased the Father. Jesus didn’t dream up this or that scheme and then run it by God for his approval; he waited for God to show him what to do. We’re to do the same.
When you take God seriously, you understand that he means business. Yes, God is loving and merciful, but he’s also just, which means he dictates and approves vengeance. The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament. They are not different gods, as some would have you believe. The God who incinerated two of Aaron’s sons for burning incense to demons and then forbid Aaron to mourn them is the same God who lovingly called down from Heaven that Jesus is his son and we should listen to him. The same God who directed the children of Israel, under Joshua, to stone Achan and all his family to death and then to burn their corpses and heap rocks on their remains is the same God who sent his Holy Spirit to baptize the disciples at Pentecost. The same God who utterly and without remorse destroyed Sodom is the same God who lovingly nurtured John the Baptist in the wilderness.
What this means is that unless we want to end up like Aaron’s sons or Achan and his family or the people of Sodom, we need to take God seriously and thoroughly understand that he means business. It’s not enough to say that “God loves me” and “God is merciful” and “Jesus died for our sins so I’m covered” and then go on our merry way, living the life of the world. The hypocrites, as Jesus pointed out, thought that being children of Abraham was their spiritual covering and automatic ticket to Heaven, but they were dead wrong. We’re also dead wrong if we think that being followers of Jesus is our spiritual covering and automatic ticket to Heaven or that “pleading the blood of Jesus” is going to be a sufficient defense on Judgement Day.
Trust me – the last thing you’ll want to find out at the Judgement is that you are indeed judged on your every word, thought, and deed, just like Jesus warned us we would be. The devil is working overtime to get you to believe that’s not the case, that all you need is “faith” and to throw a little charity here and there and you’re good to go. The devil would have you believe that the Commandments are old school and optional, and that all that matters is “love”. He’s fooled a lot of people in that regard. I hope you’re not one of them.
When you take God seriously, your life looks nothing like the life of the world. You understand that, like Jesus, your time is short and you’re here only to do what God sends you to do. You don’t make long-term plans or any plans at all: You’re entirely in God’s hands. Also like Jesus, you don’t marry or have romantic relationships but instead become a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. That doesn’t mean you cut off your genitals; it means you live as if you don’t have any. If you’re married, you leave your spouse. You don’t divorce, you separate. A spouse will only take your focus off God. So will children. You live celibately and without ties, attachments, or dependents. You don’t have a mortgage and you don’t have credit cards. You don’t take out loans. You owe nothing to anyone. You don’t own a house or land. If you have a job, you don’t have a boss. You work just enough to earn your daily bread and with the understanding that you might have to stop working from one day to the next. Your job is not your priority; your family is not your priority; your possessions are not your priority: God is your priority.
When you take God seriously, nothing written here shocks you or unsettles you. You agree with every word and see yourself reflected not in the hypocrites or in Achan and his family, but in Jesus. When you take God seriously, you respond with enthusiasm to his invitation to take your commitment to the highest level and you send God your RSVP right away; you don’t make excuses as to why you can’t or won’t: You simply do it.
When you take God seriously, spending all day, every day, with him and Jesus is not an obligation or an imposition: It’s pure pleasure. It’s life itself, outside which there is no life.
When you take God seriously, you do the right thing for no other reason than it is the right thing. You treat everyone as you would want to be treated, no exceptions. And if you fall short of these aims (and you will, we all do; only Jesus didn’t) – if you fall short, you make your amends and you keep going. You don’t wallow in self-pity or self-loathing; you don’t tear out your hair and berate yourself publicly or privately; you don’t make excuses or point fingers of blame: you make your amends and you keep going.
When you take God seriously, your life is blessed morning, noon, and night, wherever you are and wherever you go. You’re the happiest creature on Earth, when you take God seriously.
BEAUTIFUL THING
CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, May 16, 2023 – To love God is to serve him, is to have faith in him and to worship him, and all these things have the same wellspring, which is full submission to God. Loving God, serving him, having faith in him, and worshiping him are all expressions of submission. You cannot love God without submitting to him, any more than you can serve him or have faith in him or worship him without submitting to him.
Without full submission to God – as Jesus showed us and taught us – you cannot know God.
But what does it mean to submit to God?
Your one and only possession on Earth is your will. God gave it to you freely and intended for you to use it freely, which is why it’s called free will. Your free will is what enables you to make decisions, to choose, to accept or to reject. Your free will is centered in your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
When you submit to God, you choose God, which is to say you choose his Way and his choices, like Jesus did. The first Commandment, which Jesus taught us is the greatest of all Commandments, is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. In other words, the first Commandment is to submit to God everything we are and everything we can call our own. Our free will is all we can really call our own, and it gains expression through our choices that are driven by our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So when we submit to God, we give back to him our sole prized possession – our free will. We give it back to him as he gave it to us – freely, and with no strings attached.
It’s a beautiful thing to submit to God, to freely and lovingly give back to him what he so freely and lovingly gave to us. This is submission to God. When you do it, when you free-willingly submit to God, your will and God’s become one. God can then work through you for your good and for the good of all those around you.
Like I said, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing to give to God the one thing that’s truly yours, and to say to him “Please take it”, and “Thank you”.
When you do that, when you give to God the one and only thing you truly own, you become like Abraham and like Moses and like Joshua and like Caleb, and like Samuel and like David and like John the Baptist, and like Jesus. You become like all those who, since the sacrifice of Jesus, have submitted to God in Jesus’ name.
In free-willingly giving your free will back to God – in free-willingly and fully submitting to God – you join the powerful and growing cloud of witnesses that Paul spoke of. You become part of God’s family and are afforded all the privileges of being in God’s family, as his child.
Other than to be God himself, there is no greater position on Earth or in Heaven than to be a child of God.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
ADDICTED TO GOD
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, September 22, 2022 – Everything good in your life comes from God.
It might come THROUGH people or nature or something else, but it originates in God.
God and God alone is the source of all goodness.
I mention this, because people (including born-again believers) sometimes have a tendency to take credit for good things when they happen, or to attribute good things to other people or to anything other than God. We must be careful not to do that. We must be careful always to thank God for blessings, understanding that he’s behind all of them.
God doesn’t get offended when we misdirect our thank-you’s, but we miss out on the blessings that come with thanking him. When you leave God out of the thank-you equation, you lose. Go ahead and thank people, by all means (lest they get hurt or offended), but don’t forget to thank God.
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Bad habits that keep you from being on target with God’s will are not something that you can break on your own or in isolation (that is, one at a time). For instance, wanting to quit smoking without understanding why you smoke in the first place will only lead to your failure. I have spoken with dozens of people (including Christians) over the past few years who are desperate to quit smoking but find they simply cannot do it. Their desire to inhale nicotine-laced smoke is stronger than their desire to quit.
Addictions are sensory- and memory-based. Even the thought of smoking gives addicted smokers the same sensation as actual inhalation of nicotine smoke. In fact, for some addicts, thinking about the addicted behavior is more satisfying than actually doing it. That’s because the thought of the desired addicted behavior releases the same chemical in the addict’s brain (dopamine) as is released during the the execution of the addicted behavior. Which is also why it’s so difficult to quit addictions like smoking, as you’re fighting not only the physical desire for nicotine, but also the strong memory of how it satisfies you, which is accompanied by a dopamine rush. Such a powerful force cannot be overcome just by wanting it to be overcome.
The day I was born-again, I went from drinking 6 to 8 drinks a day to drinking none. I had no desire to drink alcohol in the months following my rebirth. I did start to drink again later, but only sparingly and socially (one drink a few times a week). And then I stopped altogether.
I mention this because I’d been an alcoholic since I was a teenager. I’d been drinking heavily almost daily for 20 years before I was reborn. I never thought about quitting and would likely still be drinking heavily had I not turned to God. I’m not against alcohol per se (Jesus drank socially, and his first public miracle was turning water into wine), I’m just against alcohol for me.
But I know I could never have quit on my own or through any kind of a program or buddy/mentor system. Alcohol was my “medicine” that I legitimately thought I had the right to take. It was my default when things got stressful or hectic, or when I was feeling down or in the mood for a party. I used any excuse to drink, so that over the years nearly every activity I did was memory-stamped with alcohol and the initial euphoria it induced in me.
Such a pervasive addiction would have been almost impossible for me to escape on my own. I’m strong-willed, but not that strong-willed. I thank God that he sprang me from alcohol addiction not because I asked him to, but because whatever alcohol gave me, God then gave me instead. The reliance on alcohol was turned into a reliance on God, so that whenever I felt stressed or depressed, I turned to God. If I was unhappy with something, I turned to God. God rather than alcohol became my default, but this change I could not have arranged on my own. It came through submission to God and only through submission to God and was ultimately effected by God, not by me. First came my submission to God, then came my healing from addiction.
There is no other way to be fully healed from addiction than through divine intervention (in other words, a miracle). But it first requires full submission to God. Prayer – however fervent – without full submission to God will not stop the addiction.
*****
Do you have an addiction that you’re trying to quit? Stop thinking about your efforts to overcome it and focus instead on submitting yourself, body and soul, to God. The more you submit to God, the less power your addiction has over you. The more you submit to God, the more dependent you become on him and the more you will turn to him for all your needs rather than to drugs or to people. Fully submitting yourself to God will not only solve all your problems, it will give you the best ongoing high you’ve ever had, without any hangover or other nasty withdrawal symptoms.
If you have only one addiction during the rest of your time on Earth, let it be to God. We’re made to be addicted to him. Let your dopamine rush come from thinking about God and spending time with God. Let it come from just thinking about spending time with God. Let your focus be on him and him only, and he will get rid of everything that doesn’t belong in your life. You won’t have to do a thing. That’s a scriptural guarantee:
“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and everything you need will be given to you.”
*****
All good things come from God. He is the originator and source of all goodness. Goodness can come through people and things, yes, but it originates in God. He sets it in motion. He sends it to you.
May your addiction be only and always to God.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 