Hi everyone, I have a few things to let you know about before I dig in. My delay this time was, hopefully something that will benefit us all. Yesterday I joined Substack. There is a feature on Substack to create a chat. I've been wanting to have a way to have dialogue, instead of just making comments on blog posts. The Substack name is also nite reflections. Search nitereflections in the search bar or hopefully this link works. The posts will be on here. I have been sharing them to facebook, but now I'll be sharing to Substack then the Substack link to facebook.
In the last post I mentioned a pastor named Francis Chan who left his mega church a number of years ago because he recognized his pride and arrogance was was putting his accomplishments and success on himself and not on God. One sermon he had years ago was a rope sermon. He had a white rope as long as the stage, with red tape wrapped around it a few inches long in the center. The message was, our lives are the red tape. We tend to live for what we can accomplish in that red tape area. We save all our lives for a little section of the red tape at the end. We tend to be so focused on our lives while we're alive we miss living for the eternity past the red tape. Sometimes our past before the red tape creeps in and causes us to lose focus on the red tape now and also distracts us from eternity. And if you are a person that holds to the belief of reincarnation, our past lives are also part of our souls journey even up to our red tape today. What are we doing now to ensure our eternity past the red tape? We talked a little bit about repentance recently. Let's look at that and some new stuff about salvation. As we saw repentance means turning from our self centered nature and feeling sincere regret and remorse the the things we've done and turning our focus to living our lives focused on God.
In a message on the messengerx app they mentioned Act 10. Acts 10 talks about Cornelius is a Centurion and a devoted God fearing man as well as his household. He prays every day and lives his life devoted to living a godly life. One day an angel appeared to Cornelius and told him God has heard his prayers and noticed his acts of charity. He is to send men to Joppa and bring Peter back to his house. While the men were on their way Peter had a vision that Cornelius was coming, so when the men got there Peter knew to leave with them. When Peter got to Cornelius's house and they were talking, Cornelius told Peter about his vision. Peter told Cornelius vs 34 "I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism in dealing with people, vs 35 but in every nation the person who fears Him and does what is right, is welcome before Him." Peter reminded Cornelius of all the things that Jesus had done because he was anointed with the Holy Spirit. Peter did say that the prophets said that everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name. While Peter was speaking the Holy Spirit fell on those who heard the message. Everyone was amazed that Gentiles and Non-Gentiles alike received the Holy Spirit. So he instructed them all to be baptized.
In the past I've heard it explained that "Believing in Jesus" means to believe in His teaching. Love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. To me that also means to live our lives according to the Beatitudes." So many current Evangelical Christian churches want you to think that if you walk to the front of the church, tell the preacher that you Believe in Jesus, get baptized, then you'll avoid hell.
I'd rather focus on the teachings of Jesus and not Paul but in this case Paul tells the Romans in Romans 12 to present your bodies a living sacrifice holy acceptable to God. Do not conform to the world but Be Transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's not enough to believe. Remember, the devil believes. He tempted Jesus in the desert and the demons didn't want to be casted out of the possessed man and into the pigs. It isn't really enough to believe we need to move away from our godless ways and transform into a life holy acceptable to God.
Like repentance we need to be transformed and work towards that transformation. Work by reading your Bible. Naturally I prefer the Ethiopian Bible. Right now while writing this I've been using an online Ethiopian Bible. It isn't a download. I have it bookmarked on a tablet. I like it because you can select a book in the table of contents and it goes there. If you search "online Ethiopian Bible" this should come up
Fliphtml5 https://online.fliphtml5.com
Thursday we'll get back into The Book Of Jubilees, until then,
Keep Searching,
Paul
Here's an image from Google Gemini Nano Banana, I thought of when I thought about this title
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