Daily Bible Verses for 5/18/2017
Daily Verse(s)
For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.
Reading Notes
This is one of the most important passages in all of the Bible, if we can understand this we will have a joy filled life of love for God and love for Christ Jesus our Lord. We are saved by grace through faith, which means it’s not by any type of religious works we do. Dear believer, this is important for us to thoroughly understand. This is the difference between Christianity and all other religions, the difference between Christianity and everything else in the world. All of Satan’s work in the world today is to hide this simple truth, the truth of the Gospel. That God, because of His immense love for us, saved us by His grace, which means by His great love, He gave us something we did not deserve to have. And the grace of God works through our faith in Jesus Christ, with no consideration given by God for our status in the world, our material wealth, who we are, or what we have done good or bad. There are no good deeds by which we can earn Heaven, we cannot earn what has been freely given to us by faith. Secular atheist and every other religion will tell you it’s all about you, that you can make yourself acceptable to God, that somehow we can do things to make God accept us into Heaven. Why? Because that’s Satan’s message, it appeals to our pride and it’s spread out into the world and disseminated through a multitude of ways, by a world which is at enmity with God.
False religions will give you their list of deeds, whereby they say you will earn heaven or happiness. Why? Because it appeals to our pride, it appeals to our ego, it allows us to feed our sin nature and still make the claim of being religious. When in fact, without Jesus, there is no relationship with God. Moreover, while works of pride feed our sin nature, it’s not what God said. He said we are saved by grace, which is free, by faith in Jesus. Which means we believe God, and we believe in Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior. There is nothing more we can add to that great gift. So what good are religious works you say? Works are dead, we instead care for others out of the love we have for Jesus and those around us. When you love someone dearly you do good things for them, not because you have to, but because you love them. Because our love creates a desire to serve and when we love Jesus so deeply, we develop a love for others as well. The result of which is we do things for Christ and others because of our desires for service, which come as a result of the supernatural love God has placed in our hearts. And out of love, we help those in need, not because we have to, not because we expect anything from it. We do so because of our deep love for Christ, who first helped us when we were His enemies and replaced our heart of stone, with a heart of flesh. We were given a new heart and a new spirit, which we can now use to love those around us. We help others out of our love for Jesus, because He died for us when we hated Him, that through Him we may live forever with Him in Heaven.