Matthew 5 verse 7

Happy are the pitiful, because they shall be pitied. Matthew 5;7. Pitiful a word defined in the dictionary as; an expression of contempt and pity, the way the word pathetic might be used. You might also see it used in reference to something unfortunate or deserving of pity — like a homeless mother and her child, begging for money on the street.

So showing pity or mercy, take your pick in choices of words is a quality Jesus expressed mankind had to have in order to be shown pity to themselves.  Do we show pity? As Christians it is necessary to show not only love or forgiveness we need to show an action of pity in order to create a serious Christian attitude towards those needing a Christian shoulder to lean on.

James chapter 2 verse 13 brings it out in a much more subtle way, it emphasizes the need to attach this quality in order to achieve a justified reward in the end. " For justice is pitiless to him who has not showed pity; pity flouts justice.  In other words pity triumphs over Judgement and this powerful scripture places many in a watchful eye from Christ who is the one given full reign on deciding the eternal travel a person will take in the next new world we as Christian seek to be apart of.

I looked to an old proverb for clarification on what is needed in order to keep an elder or a person who leads the congregation in a frame of mind similar to what Christ was saying on the sermon on the mount to his disciples and a crowd of people who listened to the master teacher show pity and reveal how pity trumps Judgement.

Whoever stops up his ear to the cry of the lowly one will himself call and not be answered. Powerful words from Proverbs 21;13.  So, Continue being merciful, just as your Father is merciful Luke 6;36 so strive to be a Christian with a quality of mercy or pity Jesus will search out those in the time of the end that have such a rewarding quality to smile with them and take their hands and call out their names as members of a world filled with those meek in spirit.

Jesus serves us.

There are various ways our service of Christ can become tangled in a web of wrongful reasoning. For some of us it is because we fell into a wrong view of Jesus himself. We struggle to believe that he can really be as generous as he is. We think that there must be a catch if he is really going to love us and save us. That catch is that we will have to work hard for him if he is really going to keep his promises to us.

Jesus came to serve. Jesus comes into our lives to serve us. There is no catch, there is just loving, humble, kind service by the creator of all things as directed by his father to do. Jesus does not wait to see if you will serve him, he simply serves you. His greatness is not that he can command the service of billions, it is that he serves billions.

If you follow Jesus, your relationship with him, your status before God his Father and the promise he gives to fill you with his Spirit will never depend on how you serve him. It is all about his service of you. What do you really want? What is the desire of your heart? Maybe it is rest from the burdens and weariness of life. Maybe it is hope at a time when despair seems the only real option. Maybe it is someone who will love you faithfully. The desires of our heart, our deepest hopes and dreams, are precious. Jesus promises these to us on the basis of how he serves us, not on the basis of how we serve him.

Jesus says, ‘Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ John 15;13.
Jesus’ death transforms the relationship we have with him. It makes him our servant but it also shifts what it means when we serve him. His death brings us, his people, to him in marriage. We become his bride and he becomes our husband. It also brings us to God as a Father, not only as a King. So many blessings flow from these new relationships that we have with Father, Son and the Holy Spirit who the Father sends to live with us. One of them is that we now serve the Servant as a bride and as children.

Jesus was asked once which commandment of the Law was the greatest. He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these”  What God wants is really quite simple: He wants us. All our service for God must flow from those two commands to love, or it is not real service; it is a futile effort at best.  Mark 12;30-32 and also Matthew 22;37-39. Powerful meaningful straight to the point scriptures.

Fight the good fight of faith

Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses. 1 Timothy 6;12 Faith is a powerful addition to Christian life it works for us because without faith our entire belief of an invisible God is simply nullified,  So when faith is mixed in with other Christian qualities of mildness, love,  patience, righteousness, godliness, they all blend and produce a person different from those who seek only valid proof via physical contact or want more facts by actually seeing the individual or item in question.,

 I recently popped the question to google on how many religions there was and as always it brings up the most popular ones through their total amount in the denomination, I know many of them have faith and also many who may doubt as we all have at one time or another. The faith process is not an instant add-on to your belief in an invisible God, it takes time and courage to establish such a not so popular belief system in the 21st century. So why fight for an invisible God? How do you display your faith in something unseen for millennials of time? Let me help you with this one and we will start with a simple look at the very place you might live at.

Go outside for a moment and gaze at the surroundings you our associated with, if a bush or tree is visible look at its beauty and how strong and firm it reveals to you. Notice the leaves as they blow in a direction based on the power of the wind. Stop right there! The wind, hmmm and invisible force yet clearly visible to you do to the action it is portraying on the leaves of the tree. So you do not see the wind but feel its warmth or cool air as it flows past your cheeks. Faith is similar, you can never see God but his presence is all around you due to your power of faith.

When you look around outside have the faith to visualize what God must have been like, his attributes and traits are similar to yours and mine, yet he possesses a dynamic power unseen to mankind due to the energy it reveals is to much for us to get close to. Faith reveals this through the endless scenery we see from an artist who has a different sunrise or sunset to see every single day, a different calm or violent ocean with waves crashing to the shore in such a awesome display of white foam and sprinkles of water that attach to your face.

To view faith as simply coming from a bible is absurd when you see the real power in all that is created,  The truth is that we are surrounded by evidence of a Creator who is wise, powerful, and loving. Romans 1 verse 20 from the king James bible says it all, Paul saw the need to build the faith of the Roman congregation with these words. "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Romans 1;20.

Without excuse, such powerful words, they let others know that God and all his glory created for us a vast planet filled with all the needs and all the beauty we could ever want or imagine.  God’s qualities could be seen “from the world’s creation onward,” notes Paul. In this context the Greek word rendered “world” does not refer to the planet Earth. Rather, it refers to mankind.  Hence, Paul is saying that from the moment humans were created, they could see evidence of the Creator’s qualities in the things he made.

People will say that we got here by a series of explosions or just by some chance from a cosmic event gone bad, well that to me sits in a pool of green water from a swimming pool left untreated or cared for.  Do not the starry heavens and the variety of foods that delight our stomachs reveal such a quality? So faith is not based on visual recognition it is simply based on your recognition of A God that is loving, honest, incorrupt, powerful, and most of all gentle to all those he has created.

So fight the faith in a way that will make you stronger, seek prayer and seek God in a way that makes your faith stronger, use your surroundings to help you visualize who and what God is to you. I personally look at the vast landscape seen from above and see the carving of a world so unique that to question this as mere chance is simply absurd to me.

EL

Worship with Spirit and Truth.

To begin we need to know spirit from flesh, both completely different in every way, you see we can never ascend to the heavens in a fleshly body due to the make up of our bodies etc etc. So lets see what Jesus meant by worshiping with spirit and truth. Let us look at John chapter 4 verse 23 for a closer look at those who Jesus and God approve of in worshipping him.

But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. John 4;23. That word seek seems to present another action does it not? God seeks those who want to worship him in the manner approved by his standards that he placed based on the messages in the bible. He wants to find hearts and individuals who want to love as he loves, this is verified in another scripture that  he showed to us on how he seeks our hearts and glances at us through his eyes.

For the eyes of Jehovah run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. Herein thou hast done foolishly; for from henceforth thou shalt have wars. 2 Chronicles 16;9 ASV, The name of God is placed in this scripture to emphasize that he is a personal God with a name to represent himself to all mankind. The American standard version and other bibles look to use this name to show the relationship God wants with mankind.

I noticed as did you the eyes searching for hearts, yes hearts of individuals who want to serve him and to do so means to learn about him through the message conveyed in the bible and conveyed by his son in the gospels he had written down for all to see. So now we know God is a spirit, and spirits are invisible to the naked eye and this spirit is the spirit of truth and of action, God allows us in his grace to enjoy freedoms we can never find by the offerings of Satan's world.

So how do we worship with spirit and truth as God requires of us? Lets look shall we? John 4;24 says "God is a spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth.” So truth is a major part of knowing God and getting God to see your heart. Paul the writer of Romans gives us instruction on what spirit and truth implies, lets look at the powerful two verses at Romans 12 verses1 and 2.

 "So, brothers, I urge you by God’s compassion to present your bodies a holy living sacrifice acceptable to God, your rational form of worship;   and do not shape yourselves to fit in with these times, but be transformed by reconstitution of your mind so that you may be judges of what is God’s good and acceptable and perfect will." 

So through Christ we can transform our minds from darkness and remain strong knowing that spirit and truth involves us as Christians to remain focused on love and forgiveness and to heed Gods words that inform of us what direction we must pursue to remain in his visual path that will swoop us all towards a time where all this will show us gods true beauty for all mankind.

EL

Forgiveness versus Judgement.

To avoid spoiling our useful habits, we must not have as close associates those who practice bad things. This applies not only to associating with unbelieving wrongdoers but also to associating with those who claim to worship Jehovah but who deliberately violate his laws. If such professing Christians engage in serious wrongdoing and do not repent, we do not continue to associate with them.—Rom. 16:17, 18.

I pulled this from a magazine called the watchtower bible and tract society, a instructional magazine designed to teach people who follow a faith known as Jehovah's witnesses. I wanted to take this particular paragraph and analyze it for all of us to see that we need to be careful of manmade writers who tend to promote a false way of treating others and then turning around after their Sunday sermon and continuing the very practices they urge others to stay away from

The scriptural reference they use is so contradicting to the actual paragraph only a person with limited reading skills would even contemplate such a reference as a action to avoid others. here is what The Apostle Paul wrote at Romans 16;17,18. Now I urge you, brothers, to keep your eye on those who create divisions and causes for stumbling contrary to the teaching that you have learned, and avoid them. ¹⁸  For men of that sort are slaves, not of our Lord Christ, but of their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattering speech they seduce the hearts of unsuspecting ones.

The teaching they have learned? Paul was discussing in a letter to the Roman congregation the need to stand fast in the new teachings of Christ by means of himself and others who walked as Apostles during a critical time when Christianity was now been born in an era filled with tradition of the dominant Jewish faith.

I noticed how this article when read in its entirety flourished in a hateful way towards anyone who would be not a member of that faith I rolled my eyes and shook my head in disgust, Jesus would never approve of anyone writing an opinion based on Pauls' letter that was designed to strengthen a congregation from returning to old ways of Jewish tradition.  He would approve of people addressing others with Love and humble them with encouraging words telling them he loves them for who they are and not what people who assume to believe others to be.  (Judging others a violation of Christ's words from the sermon on the mount found at Matthew 7;1.

They entitled that set of paragraphs with a question saying...We should avoid companionship with whom, and why? So they want to avoid all those who create a division among their faith based belief.
The intention here is to ridicule others from behind closed doors, to  pre judge and to show lack of love for fellow believers of any other faith. I could go on a rant here about what Jesus would do yet it in itself is what a Christian of faith based on Christ's examples and teachings would be the only response needed.

Now here is paragraph 7 which really puts them on the wrong side of Christ ...." Maintaining Christian integrity is far more important than becoming popular with people who do not live by Jehovah’s laws. Our close associates should be those who do God’s will. Jesus said: “Whoever does the will of God, this one is my brother and sister and mother.” Mark 3;35 says that and the will of God is to not Judge as Jesus made that statement very clear at Matthew 7 verse 1. Stop judging or you will be Judged. Clearly Judging other faiths is evident.

The pushing of immorality is not a bad push yet to push such an action you must have a faith that rejects all forms of immorality, this faith has a proven tract record of pedophilia among those who they claim to be servants of God. ( Elders).So Christians out there who serve Christ according to the Gospel be alive in spirit and truth and know Christ is the way the truth and the life.

I urge people who serve Christ to love one another and to avoid the snares that Satan has put into practice, avoid association with a faith that claims to love at your door when knocked on, but when you see the real picture filled with even family members who do not believe like them are removed from the house, or rejected for been who they are. I simply look to Christ who told peter to forgive as many times as he can for that is a Christian thing to do.

Then Peter came and said to him: “Lord, how many times is my brother to sin against me and am I to forgive him? Up to seven times?”   Jesus said to him: “I say to you, not up to seven times, but up to 77 times. Matthew 18;21,22. So follow Christ's instructions as Gods messenger not that of a man or a writer with opinions based on opinions not Christ's actual love and character.

EL

Matthew 6 Verse 10

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Matthew 6 verse 10. The words from the master himself, a man who sent us a message from the heavens to ensure us of the better ordeals to come. So what is this verse all about? We hear people site this verse in open prayer and we seldom grasps it true content. First we must remember that Jesus was here to reinforce the bible message by giving people a glimpse from the past, the past back 2000 years ago was one where most people seldom listened to a man like Christ and relied heavily on so called religious leaders of the time who were swayed by politics or beliefs found in other mythology platforms.

Please feel free to look at an exciting scripture from the book of Daniel in your own personal bible to help clarify this scripture of prayer Jesus was voicing to the crowd of onlookers and his new disciples in training. Daniel 2 verse 44 sends a powerful message from the past of an event that will occur in the future that awaits some of us in the not so distant future. It reads..."And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall the sovereignty thereof be left to another people; but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever." Daniel 2;44.

Daniel received visions from God to ensure mankind that one day all of these current nations or powers as we know them to be will no longer grip mankind in a way that dictates their own beliefs or their own ideas of how they should live according to rules made from mankind. The word that sticks out from the American standard version bible is the word Sovereignty it symbolizes meaning of total dominance versus what were use to seen in todays world of ever changing leaders and dictators.

The kingdom  that the message conveys is a ruler ship of total certainty, no room to wiggle a new leader or to vote in a powerful regime that would serve only the interests of the few not the whole.
So with that said Jesus continues on through his talk and concludes in that chapter with a reinforcing message found at Matthew 6 verse 33. But seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.  Seek, a word of action, it conveys instruction for people to draw upon and go after in a way that will reassure them of reaching such a wonderful world filled with a ruler of love, sympathy, forgiveness and the power to understand all mankind's issues.

So Matthew 6 verse 10 has a message that gives us hope in a world filled with tragedy Christians need to convey this hope through all the distractions and all the never ending babel from people who try to draw you away from a God that knows us best and knows our needs. The conveying thoughts of Matthew 6 verse 10 stretch further , lets take a look at a few more encouraging scriptures.

The last book of the bible draws a conclusion that only God could provide to us through his power and through his angels that serve him. Revelations 11 verse 15 talks of an angel who sounded his trumpet to reinforce the end of a world made up of temporary rulers and usher in an arrangement only God could provide.  "And the seventh angel sounded; and there followed great voices in heaven, and they said, The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ: and he shall reign for ever and ever." Revelations 11;15

So to summarize, we read that a kingdom is soon to become reality for all Christians to take hold of, a world where peace will prevail, no more stress filled days or worries of how to make ends meet, love and security of knowing your loved is what all mankind will look forward to. Strive for this my fellow Christians and you will succeed in the days ahead, seek this kingdom and the rest will be trivial to you.

EL

The Journey

Welcome to my journey in which Jesus is the traveling companion in my life, he has supported me through good and bad times and now deserves my utmost attention as we see the ever-growing world around us erode directly in front of us. I want this journey to be one of happiness for all, were bombarded with fears, gossip, drama, and even hatred that is never questioned by those of so called intellectual backgrounds.

So the start to this journey must take us where we seldom go to, we need to go to a set of 4 books in order to achieve answers from writers who based their writings on personal accounts with Christ or even eye witness accounts from other people who listened and witnessed the power and glory of one man who loved us so much he was willing to leave a place where his power reigned eternally.

To start we must endeavor to set aside a time and place where personal study can be your main focus, it doesn't need to be a special hour or time limit, just a few minutes where you can follow along and see the power of scripture for yourself through the thoughts and feelings of the man who gave all of us a second chance at hope, faith, love and most of all life.

This introduction piece is designed to encourage you that we will dive into the love of Christ versus the adversary known as Satan's hate for mankind and show you how this entire issue from the Bible is a theme that is so simple we miss the mark every time we listen to others who want to give an opinion based on history marked by writers with inaccurate visions of the past  which seem based on their own version of the past tense. So the theme is? Well lets use a better word...message, the bible conveys a message, not some hidden code not even a design based for only a few to know its content.

Matthew 6 verse 10 draws a hint of  a theme to be played out so we will discuss this verse in great detail in our first entry to this journey we all as Christians should endure to discover.

Please Enjoy the journey of a lifetime.

EJL