"Moving Forward!" - 2

"Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now caught." (John 21:10 KJV)

  "This is what the LORD says: "You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. For I know the plans I have for you," says the LORD. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me."" (Jeremiah 29:10-13 NLT)

 Let me try this again! Whether you can believe it or not, God has known you all of your life; as a matter of fact, before you were even conceived in your mother's womb, He knew you and had plans for your life! I know that might me hard to swallow, as they say; but we don't know what or how or when, but God knows everything, past, present, and future!

 Hopefully we are on the same page, because what I am going to say, howbeit too lightly, will depend upon that understanding: God has guided and moved you around, all through your life! We obviously did not know anything about what He was doing, because we still don't know what He will do next! But we can, with all that we know now, trust Him to get us through this life and be securely with Him, on the other side. 

 I'm really trying hard not use so many exclamation marks, but this is something I think is important. To get right to the point: It really doesn't matter what you might go through, good, bad, or destructive, if you are His child, you will come through whatever it is, His child! There is nothing you can do right now, or later on, that He didn't already know you would do, the moment you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart! 

 Sorry, but I had to do it! That said, I believe that God will prepare us for everything we must go through, in one way or another, so that we can withstand whatever it is, without giving up on Him and falling from grace. Even then, I still believe that we are not forsaken or condemned; whatever someone else might say, God is the judge! 

 If you don't believe it, then you really need to read the Bible, from start to finish, leaving nothing out, not even those books that seem as though they don't mean much, because they wouldn't be there if they didn't mean anything to God! That is what matters more than anything else: Do what God wants, not what we think; because He is God, and we are not.

 Added to that, are the ways and means by which we are prepared for suffering. Again, God will never allow you to go through something that you cannot handle; and when I say handle, I mean that your soul will survive, but your flesh might get wrecked, or even torn to pieces. One of my greatest fears, is that of dying in a fire; but even then, having heard about some of the saints that were burned at the stake, that they sang songs to the Lord as they flamed on, into eternity; I have to imagine Jesus was with them in the fire! 

 If I haven't shared this before, I'm sorry; and if I have, this is a good time to share it again. When I was in the hospital with my wife, there was a situation going on in Florida; a woman named Terri was in this same situation as my wife, health wise that is. As I sat next to her bed watching the news, her life was shown, and I looked at her, and then looked at my wife, realizing that they both had the same injuries. 

 As it turned out, her husband had already moved on, and had two children from another woman; as Terri had been in a facility for 15 years in her condition. Her husband wanted to have her starved to death, but her parents and siblings wanted to care for her. He was stopped by the Govenor and the State Assembly, only to later find a judge to overrule what they had done.

 I say this because it is more than interesting to me that God allowed me to see that, because it was that heartless act that made me determine in my heart that I would never take my wife's life, but that I would care for her as long as God has her here on earth! Even though people give me a hard time, saying things like, "How can you let her continue in that condition?" I believe, it's not me, but God who keeps her here; I'm just the one who promised to love and care for her, no matter what... 

""For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God's one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God's light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants."" (John 3:16-21 NLT)