Taking a break

I’ll be taking a break for a while to check out some options for domain names and to also catch up on some reading.

Have a wonderful time this Christmas! Spend your time wisely! Everyone matters to God, so try to spend and share Christmas with everyone that God sends in your life.

See you all next year!  God bless you and keep you, may God make His face to shine upon you! Peace be with you!

– Rae

Our value

“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16 NLT)

Today’s Daily Hope devotional from Rick Warren talks about value.

As an exercise for myself I am thinking of three material things that I have lost over the years and I am now assessing their value to me:

1.) A mobile phone that my wife and I purchased as matching phones.

2.) A Diver’s watch that was originally my dad’s that I inherited when he passed.

3.) A 5-Quart Kitchen Aide Mixer (hahaha) that I totally forgot where I placed when I was moving from one apartment to another.

All three items had caused me so much heartache at the moment of losing them for different reasons.

The phone was a matching set that my wife and I had. We try to have as many matching things as much as possible, we’re weird that way, from the matching shirts down to the matching phones. So imagine my grief when one day as I was going out to work and halfway to my workplace I reached for where my phone should be in my pocket and it wasn’t there. I rushed back home, tossed the place upside down and sulked when I couldn’t find it.

My dad’s diver’s watch was forcibly taken from me as I was applying for work during a summer of my second year in high school by someone who had a knife to my side. Even up to this day I am still looking for that very same watch model to replace the original, but it’s value would never be replaced.

Losing this last item totally escapes me. For the life of me, how do you lose a Kitchen Aide Mixer unless it was purposely stolen? Of all the items in my kitchen arsenal, my Kitchen Aide was perhaps my most treasured one, it made my life easy as a cook and a caterer. It was beautiful to look at! It had a pristine ceramic white finish, polished chrome parts, complete attachments that allowed me to make anything from dips, cold sauces, desserts, pastries and breads. I remember shuttling back and forth from my new apartment to the old one feverishly rummaging through all of my remaining things hoping to find my most treasured mixer. To no avail.

So it is with spiritually lost people and God. Can you imagine the heartache that God has over one lost soul? It’s the kind of heartache that causes a great and mighty God to send forth His only begotten son into the world as a token of redemption, so that those lost to sin may be redeemed and be found again.

A spiritually lost person doesn’t lose his or her value with God. That person may lose his or her way in life, God’s protection, happiness and joy but not his or her value. That person will always be valuable to God. The Bible envisions angels rejoicing and praising God for every lost soul that is found. I can imagine the Almighty God beaming with such joy in welcoming those that were once lost to Him.

Today’s Daily Hope devotional speaks of your value to God. You and I are valuable to Him that He sent His only Son for our sake.

In our love for God, may we look at all the other lost souls and not think in our hearts that they have lost one ounce of their value to God. And if they are indeed valuable to God then they must be valuable to both you and I.

Let’s not forget: everyone matters to God.

Gleaned from: The Christmas Story Reveals Your Value.

Grace 101 – A holy aggression

I love a particular translation of the Bible known as The Message or MSG. It brings so much oomph to certain verses, makes certain verses more alive and screaming with the purpose that God set His word to do: touch lives.

A particular verse that I am somewhat familiar with is Romans 5:20 which talks about the purpose of the Law: the systematic method of things-to-do that God provided for man; it also talks about grace – that despite the knowledge of the increase of sin due to the application of the Law that grace also increased even more.  In the NIV it is a verse that may not so much hold great impact to the average reader such as I.

Then along came The Message.  A version utilizing such simplistic language combined with a more expressive style of writing.

Now the two-liner verse reads:

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

Romans 5:20 (MSG)

This is the first time I’ve read such a phrase that used so simple words but packed so much power. Aggressive forgiveness! I love that!  I’ve never thought about grace to be aggressive. More often when grace comes to mind it has a somewhat passive power about it, but not at all! Aggressive forgiveness!

Can you imagine a kind of forgiveness that pins you down, that refuses to let you go? A forgiveness that is so actively involved in your lives? Can you imagine yourself stumbling every now and then yet having Grace run after you, actively seeking you like a heat-seeking missile aimed at your heart and mind? Can you imagine a forgiveness so amazing that even before you decided to make that wrong move you were already being actively forgiven? Actively restored?

Aggressive forgiveness! That’s the kind of forgiveness we have with God. The Bible says that no amount of sin can separate us from His love. We can be secure of that.

Now since through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God is aggressively forgiving us of our short-comings, are we not also called to show an aggressive stance in our dispensation of forgiveness to others? I hope and pray that as we read and ponder upon the beauty of Romans 5:20 that we may ask God to make us as active as He in forgiving those who has done us wrong. Let us be aggressive in our forgiveness.