Not a second to waste.

The clock of life is ticking away.

As I was driving home one day, I couldn’t help but notice the memorial stones from a cemetery nearby. Something inside me was telling me to go and explore. It was almost like a magnetic effect, I felt as if someone was calling my name and my eyes reverted from the road to the cemetery and back. I decided to drive to the entrance and go in. Emotions of sadness coupled with reverence tugged at my heart. I wanted to take a walk, but there were no places to park, so I found myself driving around on the narrow road that surrounded the entire cemetery. My eyes fell on the names engraved on the stones and the flowers that adorned them. I drove around and stopped frequently so I could read what the engravings said. Phrases like, “beloved husband and friend,” “to my wife, gone but not forgotten,” and “to our brother, our souls are waiting to join you,” captured my attention as I was getting lost in a sea of burial stones. A sense of hopelessness washed over me but it was quickly overcome by God’s reassuring presence. The lonely stones reminded me of the reality of this life. Death is inevitable. Every living soul in this universe has or will taste death sooner or later. The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 12:7, “and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” The Word of God is so true and powerful! Me and you are but dust in which God breathed His Spirit and gave us life. God didn’t just give us life, but He also restored us to life in Him through the cross! How beautiful and marvelous this is! I want to live my life for the One who gave me life and salvation! I want my life to leave the imprint of Christ and His love in this world. I don’t want to live my life disconnected from the reality of eternity, but I want to embrace it and live out the calling I have received with everything that’s in me! I want to touch the lives of those who are stumbling in the darkness and let the Light of God bring them back to life! This life is so short. All too often we live for ourselves and forget that this life is not about us; it’s about God! I’m thankful that through the grace of God I will spend eternity in heaven, but that’s not all. I want to live my life here on earth with a heart that’s truly devoted to Jesus Christ. Nothing else matters! I want to die to myself completely and let Christ live through me. It’s so easy to be selfish and focus only on your own needs and problems, but look around you! There are so many souls who need Christ!! He didn’t shed His blood for just me and you. The price He paid is too high and I want to honor it with my life! I pray that God will awaken our hearts to the reality of life. I feel that the Church is asleep. We are so caught up in ourselves. We think that this life is all about us when it’s NOT. It’s all about Jesus Christ!!! We need the Spirit of God to awaken us to the reality of His will. We can’t waste our lives on the things of this earth which are temporary, we need to focus on the eternal because that’s all that is left in the end. Our churches are filled with mediocre Christians who think that the Christian life is all about going to church, having a nice home, driving an expensive car, and adding a few moral ambitions to their lives. Though we profess to know God, we are distant and lukewarm. True joy is not found in a husband/wife, a career, not even in earthly success. True joy is found in Christ alone! In giving Him everything that we are. In living for Him every moment of our lives. In a life of surrender and sacrifice. In living a selfless life. I want my life to leave Christ’s eternal imprint in a powerful way! When I will close my mortal eyes that I may open them in eternity, I want my memorial stone to stand as a radical inspiration for others to live lives truly abandoned to Christ. I pray that we will not be satisfied with living an average “Christian” life, but that we will live lives of complete surrender, full of passion for Christ! So many times, actions have a more powerful impact than words. So, live your life in the Light of Christ and lead people to Him! Your life will come to an end. I wonder how many of those memorial stones marked the beginning of eternity in heaven and how many of those souls are spending eternity in hell. We have a crucial role to play in this life! The sand of time is slipping away too quickly through the hourglass of life. Are you living every day as if it were your last?

Are you unhappy?

Complete surrender is the key to finding the life you’ve been looking for.

I can vividly remember the day when I experienced salvation. The day when I died to myself and was resurrected to life in Christ Jesus. The day when I lost my life in order to find it. It was the day when the old was made new, completely new! On that day, I realized how filthy I was and how much I needed His salvation. I needed to be forgiven, to feel the freedom that comes from it surging through my veins! Oh, how beautiful that day was! To have the weight of the sin I was carrying taken off my shoulders!!! To surrender all that I was to the One who carried the cross in my place and who was made sin so that I might become His righteousness! I could have never done on my own what Christ did for me on that cross! I will never be able to fully understand the beauty and mystery of it and I want to keep the memory close to my heart forever! This life is like an ocean, with waves hitting against the shore of our heart in magnificent force. Sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up in the midst of it all; to overlook what Christ has done on our behalf and the life that we found in Him. It was through complete surrender that we found life in the first place, yet we don’t live lives completely surrendered to Christ anymore. The world around us has a way of making us “numb” to the effect of the cross. It’s not that the cross is of no effect anymore, because the power of it is stronger than anything else in this world! It’s just that we often become part of the world instead of letting God change the world through us. I’ve noticed that we can become a little too “comfortable” in our salvation and instead of living in it every day of our lives, we can so easily let sin creep in. This can take the form of a worldly mindset that shouts to us and begs us to focus all our attention and time on us instead of on Christ and what He wants to do in our lives. Instead of conforming ourselves to the image of Christ, we tend to conform ourselves to the image of this world. I’ve seen this happen in my own life and it happens in a very subtle way. If we don’t immerse ourselves in the Word of God and spend time in His presence through prayer, how can we constantly renew our hearts and minds in order to allow the Spirit of God to lead us on the path that we should follow? We wonder why we don’t feel as close to God as we used to feel in the beginning. Our focus has shifted. It used to be God, but now it’s become so many other things. We try to fit God in our lives, instead of giving Him full control and building our lives around Him. He is not our first love anymore. He just isn’t! Look at the way we spend our time and what consumes us. Are we devoted to God or ourselves? Are we starving our flesh or are we feeding it? If we feed our sinful nature, we starve the spirit; it’s just the way it works. When we sin, do we confess our sins and repent of them while turning away or do we let sin over sin accumulate in our lives until our sensitivity to the truth fades more and more? Do we allow Christ to be Lord over our hearts or are we serving our own desires and ambitions? We need to let Him renew our hearts and minds. Like a book that’s been long-forgotten on an old library shelf, so have we forgotten about our hearts and what the finger of God wrote on the pages of our life. We have forgotten that the hands of the One who wrote the story of the universe picked up the old and dusty book of our lives and with a gentle blow He dusted us off of our sinfulness and filled us with life. He erased everything and rewrote the story of our life. The pages of our heart became white and new. God wants to keep it that way. Let’s allow God to make our hearts new and pure again! There is nothing in this life that is as strong and powerful as the power of Christ to forgive sin and make everything new! God longs to be close to you and He’s been waiting for you to surrender your heart completely to Him in the same way that you surrendered when you first accepted Christ as Lord over your life. You found your life by losing it and the true Christian life is lived in a constant and complete abandon to God. We are focused on so many different things, when our sole focus should be our God! We try to make life work on our own and become so frustrated when we find out that we can’t make it work, yet we still don’t realize that everything we need will be given to us if we seek Him FIRST- with our whole heart. Give God everything! Your time, energy, dreams, all that you are! Life, freedom, fullness, blessing, joy, peace, stability, balance, wholeness, and true fulfillment will be yours.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Matthew 6:33 (NLT)

The Lord is my strength!

Psalm 27:

¹ The LORD is my light and my salvation;
         Whom shall I fear?
         The LORD is the strength of my life;
         Of whom shall I be afraid?
 ² When the wicked came against me
         To eat up my flesh,
         My enemies and foes,
         They stumbled and fell.
 ³ Though an army may encamp against me,
         My heart shall not fear;
         Though war may rise against me,
         In this I will be confident.
 ⁴ One thing I have desired of the LORD,
         That will I seek:
         That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
         All the days of my life,
         To behold the beauty of the LORD,
         And to inquire in His temple.
 ⁵ For in the time of trouble
         He shall hide me in His pavilion;
         In the secret place of His tabernacle
         He shall hide me;
         He shall set me high upon a rock. 
 ⁶ And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me;
         Therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle;
         I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the LORD.
 ⁷ Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice!
         Have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
 ⁸ When You said, “Seek My face,”
         My heart said to You, “Your face, LORD, I will seek.”
 ⁹ Do not hide Your face from me;
         Do not turn Your servant away in anger;
         You have been my help;
         Do not leave me nor forsake me,
         O God of my salvation.
 ¹⁰ When my father and my mother forsake me,
         Then the LORD will take care of me.
 ¹¹ Teach me Your way, O LORD,
         And lead me in a smooth path, because of my enemies.
 ¹² Do not deliver me to the will of my adversaries;
         For false witnesses have risen against me,
         And such as breathe out violence.
 ¹³ I would have lost heart, unless I had believed
         That I would see the goodness of the LORD
         In the land of the living.
 ¹⁴ Wait on the LORD;
         Be of good courage,
         And He shall strengthen your heart;
         Wait, I say, on the LORD! 

Amen!