"Direct Responsibility"

"As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun." (Psalms 58:8) When is comes to God's punishment, although we have limited liability for our sins because of what Christ has done, we are still very much responsible to ask for His forgiveness; so much so, that the final judgment is not based upon what we did or did not do, but it is based upon whether or not we have accepted His free gift of salvation and we are seated in Christ. Oh, I know, something tells me that we are getting ready for something very big to happen, so we had better fasten our seat belts, and we had better stay in our Seat! I just can't put my finger on it, but there is more to this verse than meets the eye; no pun intended. The biggest part of trusting God is holding on; and when I say, holding on, I mean that we hold on tighter the more bumpy the ride gets. There was something I heard at church last night, and I had to write it down, which was, "We cannot have any victory without the battle"; as simple as that might sound, it also goes for the stretching of our faith; we really cannot experience the strength of what we believe without our faith being stretched; sometimes, even to the point of breaking. Do you think you know how strong you faith really is? I don't know if I actually do, because I have not yet experienced what it is like to be stretched to the point where my faith has been broken; and maybe I need to explain what I think it means to have our faith broken, because it might not seem clear enough just to say 'broken', without the definition of what that actually means. The way I see it, our relationship with God is meant to be personal; and because it is meant to be personal, we need to go through something that might cause us to give up everything else, just so that we can hold more tightly to our personal God. It's like your faith is stretched beyond the capacity of what you are capable of on your own, and so your faith is broken; which is not a bad thing, because once your faith is broken, you are holding directly unto God; there is no more doubt in what you think that you know, because now you are securely fastened to the One you know. It really comes down to knowing that the One you are holding onto is really holding you... "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away." (Matthew 24:35)