It has been an awesome week at Vacation Bible School at New Friendship! It has been exhausting, yet exhilarating! Today is the last day of VBS and the theme is Amazing! God’s Power over My Life! The verse says, “By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:3 MSG). God, by His power has given us everything we need for living a godly life. The minute that we accept His gift of salvation and become heirs to His Kingdom, we are equipped and called to serve God through His glory and excellence. I don’t know about you, but that is a LOT of pressure for me.
Sometimes, I wish that the minute we accepted God, He would make us into robots; God-robots. We would be incapable of wrong. We would be unable to make bad decisions. We would be immovable from God’s path for us. What causes me to think this would be ideal? Every time I think about the ways in which I have disappointed God, I think, “Lord, why don’t You just make me do whatever You want me to do, so I can stop messing things up?” But, the God I serve is too loving and kind for that. Yes, He has power over our lives, the nature that surrounds us, circumstances, sin and death. Yes, He will protect us from dangers seen and unseen and from being tested beyond our limits. He even gives us the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to guide is into all truth. However, God wants us to live an obedient life of our own volition. So, how do we live obediently? God’s two commands through Jesus in the New Testament show us that LOVE is the answer. Love God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37; Luke 10:27). And because God is a loving God and not a tyrant or a dictator, He allows us to choose love. Think about this, which we discussed in Sunday school last Sunday, when you love someone, which has a greater impact on you: the person does what you ask because you make them or the person does what you ask because they are compelled by love and respect for you to please you? This is not just about spouses and significant others. This is about family, friends, and fellow church members, too. I would venture to say that most of us want others to voluntarily show us love and not be forced to love us. In the same way, God wants us to freely choose Him. That’s how strong God’s love is for us! He has the power to make us God-robots, but He still lets us have free will to choose Him and His ways. Trust me, making the right choice is not always easy, but it is so worth it to freely choose to show our love to God through obedience. And, that freedom gives us the unique and uninhibited relationship with our God that He desires to have with us. It is a relationship that means more than any other in our lives and that affects every other relationship in our lives. God is not making me love Him; I just do because He loves me. I can show that love by choosing to live the life that He has planned for me forMs. EV
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