If God loves us.....

I had a question on my last blog post and i felt i should focus on that for today. Being that it is one of the most difficult questions for Christians to answer i will try my hardest to make sense of this.

First things first is that the world isn't as God planned for it to be. If you read through Genesis Originally when God created the world everything was good ( Read through Genesis 1:1-31). and as you continue reading you will understand that Suffering in the world is a result of human kind turning away from God = our relationship with God turned to poop. This was the fall of man or As many people know as the story of Adam and Eve (that was the start at least)

Now God is just and will not allow this rebellion to last forever, every human being and the world itself is under God’s judgment, and will continue to decay and go wrong until God ends it one day. He wants everyone to understand the state of things and so uses our circumstances (including suffering) to makes us aware that the world is not as it should be. He wants us to turn back to him and be reconciled.

So God, because of his love, has done something about the suffering in this world. He has sent Jesus to die for us. Jesus was God’s son, he was a perfect man, who did not deserve God’s punishment, and yet he took our punishment by suffering and dying a most unjust death on the cross. The book of the Bible called First Peter tells us that “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” (1 Peter 3:18)

And after having suffered and died for us, Jesus was raised back to life, and when he returns, the world as we have it now will end. Those who believe in Jesus will enter a new world where there will be no tears and no suffering.

So this is a very simply outline of just some of the things the Bible talks about suffering, and is by no means complete. The main thing to understand is that suffering comes from our selfishness and rejection of God, we as a human race has bring it upon ourselves, and we and our world are also under God’s just punishment because of this. But this is not going to last. God loves us dearly and has already suffered himself in order to bring us out of this suffering world. We have a choice to accept this gift from God, or to persist in our selfishness and remain under the punishment of God.

If you would like to look into this issue further, there is a very good book I can recommend, called If I were God, I’d end all the Pain by John Dickson. It is a very short book that goes through how different religions respond to suffering and explains why the christian message gives a satisfactory answer in light of this.

Hope this will help.

For we know that all things work together for good to them that love God,
to them who are called according to His purpose
Romans 8:28

One Million Dollar Happiness?

You ever find yourself thinking......about absolutely nothing. I have been finding myself in this situation very much lately.

In this past year i found myself discovering a total different plan for my future. As a child i would always find myself making future goals for myself & to be honest i had high expectations. One goal that really stands out to me was when i was 15 i decided to make a goal for myself. Taking a piece of paper i wrote down what i had planned for my future. I had given myself 4 years to have built up a Company that would make me a millionaire before the age of 19. High expectations?

Well in the next 3 years i found myself having gone through over 4 business and moving on to the next ( BC Media, AB Online Sources, Arbor Woods Lawn service & more, But only to find myself getting close to the dead line of my goal. It was the winter of 2008 and i new if i wanted to make my dream come true i needed to sit down and get serious, a month later i found myself with a Advertising agency called Aidem Design. With a lot of work and commitment the company was afloat. It was a little shaky at first but then i started to see the piece fall into place. With in 3 months the company was on the road to success, With a weekly gross of 1,500 dollars i felt i was finally almost there.

But what i didn't realize was the closer i got to success in the world the further i found myself from satisfaction. I wasn't happy. That might not make sense to some of you reading this, But I found my goal becoming my master. My life was devoted to becoming what i wrote on that piece of paper 4 years before. Around this time a freind of mine asked me if i would like to join him in a trip to visit a old friend of ours And i needed a vacation so i thought why not. But what i didn't know was at this time my old friend was planting a church in a lower income area. I went to his church that Sunday morning & the message he spoke that day changed me. It help me realize what i have been missing in my life. I felt i had it all..... but it was in that moment that i realized everything in this world can not compare to that one thing i was missing.

Luke 16:13 "No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."

And i found this true in my life, I could not serve the lord and peruse my goal as well. But the joy that came when i decided to follow the Lord fully was worth more then 1,000,000 dollars x10.

One year later i found myself graduated from the MCM Ministry School working as the Media Director for a small church just one year old. The church that changed my life forever. And in the next few weeks i will be putting together the material to begin the first year of Element Academy as the director of the school. It wasn't easy but with the lords help i made it to where i am today.

The goal for my life now is to show others how to find the simple joy that changed my life one year ago.