Dear Friends,
God desires, above all else, that His children love Him, know Him and make Him known. When they do, He is glorified, our lives are fulfilling and the world is able to see the life of Christ revealed in and through us. The scripture tells us that this is our calling…Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Col. 1:27) This presents every child with the divine opportunity to manifest the living God to a dying world. We, through Christ, are the hope that the world is looking for and longing for. This is the destiny that we all share, to glorify God in love and deed. How we all do this, however is as unique as each of our lives. So, we are united in a single purpose and to reach this destination, we each must travel a life road that is filled with choices and obstacles that would easily derail us and keep us from our divine destination. In order for our journey to be successful, we must successfully navigate the crossroads that confront us each day. The crossroads are the daily life choices that we must yield to the cross of Christ if we are to ultimately glorify Him with our lives.
The desire to reach our destiny in God is the silent heart cry of every child of God. Each person has that longing in them and it was put there by the same God that created them. Christ put this longing in our soul so it would drive us to Him and to our purpose. We have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Jesus. We are His and His alone. There is no greater love for any of us than the love that we find at the cross of Calvary. This is where He took our place; bore our sins and our sickness, so we would be free, free to allow Him to live in us and through us. He did this for every child everywhere so we would partner with Him in reaching every child everywhere with His love. So every child was created for Christ, to glorify Him and to serve Him alone. (1 Cor. 6:20, 2 Cor. 5:18)
There are many who do not that this is the reason they are here. It is our mission to tell them, so they know and likewise come into the fullness of Christ as we have. When Christ died, He said, “It is finished”, that means that everything that needed to be done was done by Him. Nothing was left undone. He paid the price for all to reach their purpose in Him, to see His plan for them fulfilled. Each heart senses that there is so more to life as we know it, a purpose, and a reason for being here and that there is a distant hope that finding this life, the life of Christ indeed, will bring with it true joy and fulfillment. Although this is true, it is also true that we have an enemy whose sole purpose to keep us from reaching that destiny and fulfilling the plan of God for our lives. (1 Peter 5:8)
Our destiny can appear as a distant land that is beyond our reach and one that we may not know how to pursue. We have been easily distracted by the cares of the world and find ourselves sinking in a world filled with the quicksand of evil, perversion and negativity. What use to be a distraction for us is now an entrapment and an all out attack designed to by Satan destroy us and our purpose in God. (John 10:10) Our ability to even hear our own heart cry for purpose and fulfillment has been drowned out by the noise of desperation, despair, and demonic influence. We are confronted on all sides by negative life choices that threaten our very ability to survive.
But there is a hope, Hallelujah. Our hope is found only in Christ Jesus, the one who died to give us His life with abundant provision. (Rom.5:17) Our lives, as He planned for them to be, are most certainly still within our reach. We need only to accept the Savior, Jesus Christ and His love and surrender to Him and His way, at all cost. (John 12:24-26, 14:6) God requires our complete trust and obedience. We must pay the price of discipleship if we are to please Him and reach our destiny in Him. How we do this is not as difficult as you might think, but it is clearly not for those that are weak or those not strongly committed to the ways of Christ and the promotion of gospel.
We are to live our lives one day at a time, in trust and obedience to God and His Word and need to yield to the Spirit of God within each of us. (John 16:13) This requires a complete death to the flesh and the world’s way of living as with each day there are many, many choices or crossroads that we need to resist to stay on course. The Holy Spirit is our life partner and is ever present as our guide to provide us with wisdom and direction to make all the right choices that will glorify God. We need to remember that Christ paid the price for our victory, in the past, present and future. We Win – Win – Win, so to speak, at all times. You can look at it as a WWW formula for achieving success in God.
To win, we must actively maintain our commitment to Christ as Worshippers, engage the Word in every decision, and Walk in the power and anointing of Holy Spirit. Our relationship with Christ is foremost. Our daily fellowship with God and our time spent with Him in worship will tap us into the divine wellspring of wisdom that we must have to navigate life. Next, the Word of God must prevail above everything. This means that the Word of God must be the deciding and final influence on the choices we make, not our emotions, our peers, our family or even our own opinions. He alone knows the way we take. (Prov. 16:9) Finally, we must be yielded to the Spirit of God within us at all times. The Holy Spirit Himself will bear witness within us of the truth of God’s Word that must prevail in every situation. Our victory can only be found in the one who conquered and defeated both Satan and the grave. Each of us, by accepting Christ, has that same ability to be victorious with every choice in our lives. This enables us to not only live our lives as He originally planned for us, but also allows us to daily reveal the fullness of God within us, and manifest our true identity as sons of God.
Scripture tells us that a slave is no greater than His master (John 3:16). If Christ died for us, should we not also die to the flesh for Him? Shall we not die to all that would displease Him, being obedient unto death as He was? This is not the easy road and many will not take it, but this is the only road to fulfilling your destiny in Christ. (Matt. 7:13-14) We are commanded to share in His sufferings that we might experience His resurrection power. (Phil. 3:10) The way of the cross is the way of death to the flesh and it is the only way that the power and glory of God can be birthed in us. We must take up our cross daily with each and every choice or decision and yield it to the power of the cross. When we do this, we align ourselves to God’s original plans for us as sons of God who manifest His glory in the here and now. May Christ be glorified and may His plan for each of our lives be fulfilled, Amen. (Mark 8:34-36, Luke 9:23-26, Matt. 16:24:26, Jerm. 29:11)