Freedom in Christ

How blessed are we? Christians, a group of christ-followers, are given the AMAZING opportunity to know God. Not only to know of him, but actually know him and be with him and be loved by him. When I'm at school or in a public place I look around at all the people and wonder. Do they know the Lord? What are they struggling with inside? I wonder how people get through stuff without God to help them out. I wonder how people can chose not to know God. It honestly breaks my heart to think of people not knowing our creator. It has brought me more joy and fulfillment than anything on this earth ever could. I am continually in awe of the power God has and how he blesses me.

The biggest thing that held me back from deciding to go after the Lord with everything I had was when I realized that I needed to give everything up. Partying, swearing, gossiping, boys, etc. Now, not saying I'm perfect and don't do any of those things anymore, but I'm saying that the things that people consider "fun," are not what God considers good. I wanted to remain partly in the world as well as in the kingdom of God. I realized the hard way that you can't have both. But after I decided not to be of this world, all that "fun" stuff no longer seemed fun. God has created life in such a way that we don't need those things to be happy. When we chose to utilize the freedom he's made for us, we are capable of living life the way God planned it out, which is FAR better than anything we could try to do.

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.
The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Galatians 5:16-23

I'd challenge you to examine yourself. Take a good look at the things you're finding fulfillment in, the things you are doing to have fun or be happy. I need to consistantly do this in order to keep my mind focused on the Lord. The path is narrow and it's easy to take a step off it, but if you keep your head up and open your eyes to the things in your life, it will be much easier. God offers us complete freedom in him. No longer to we have to be slaves to the sin of this world. The emptiness in our hearts can only be filled by God, so we need to quit trying to fill it with other things.

I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.
Psalm 119:32

MGMT 1003

Just a cool little story..

Today I had a Management exam and I was freaking out about it a little bit. I haven't listened in class at all this semester, and I've read 2 out of the 6 chapters that were on the exam. Last night I was going to study after FCA, but I ended up going to applebees until like 11:30pm. Well worth it, but I woke up this morning, slept through my first class, and only had time to study for an hour. Our exam had part multiple choice than 10 essay questions-8 of which we have to answer. Our teacher accidently printed copies of the answer key instead of the actual exam so as he spent the first 15 minutes of class printing the real test we had more time to study and he came back and told us that we only had to answer 7 of the essay questions. Oddly enough, there were exactly 3 essay questions that I had no idea what the answers were, and I didn't even know enough to make something up. The other questions were all things that I remembered from studying. It was a cool little thing from God and it just made my test go so smoothly. Just wanted to share =)

jumbled thoghts

I'm finding it so hard to focus on my homework right now. I think I've been to about 10 different websites...checked my school email, checked my regular email, checked my bank accounts, read some article online, facebook, blogs, checked my class websites. I am trying to hard to avoid homework because I just have no motivation. Blahhh.. But I just realized that I haven't spent anytime with the Lord lately. This past week I have allowed myself to be busied by so many different things. I found myself looking for every possible oppotunity to avoid just sitting and being in the Lord's presence. I just realized that as I tried to avoid doing my homework, I have been putting off getting into the word this week or just spending time with God. Not that I don't want to, I have just been doing other things.

I love spending time alone, one-on-one but I feel like I need something more. I need a bible study, I need a church, I just need consistancy with something in my life. I haven't found a church that I can really plug myself into, so starting tomorrow I am going to start checking out different churches and trying to find one that I can connect with. Definitly is something important; we can only do so much on our own.

(I just read over this and I don't think there's much meaning or anything to this post, it's pretty much just brain barf...oh well)

reality check

With things going on in my life lately, I have built up a lot of frustration and anger inside. I'm not like super ticked, just really upset and even hurt. Recently I've been in a situation where I literally did nothing wrong. A ton of people are really upset with me, said incredibly hurtful things, and don't care much for me anymore and it just feels like crap. I didn't do anything to deserve this. Seriously.. =/ But the thing that has just made it even worse is to realize that this is what we do to God on a continuous basis. Even though in this situation I didn't do anything, or at least didn't intentionally do anything, wrong, I have done many things wrong in other situations. God NEVER does anything wrong. Ever. Yet here we are, hurting him so much every single day. I feel really selfish because here I am moping around feeling sorry for myself when God is up there being hurt every second of every day by every person on this Earth. Gahh, I don't even want to think about how painful that would be. I thought my situation was bad... It was a reality check for me to realize that we are all just as crappy. Maybe we don't do intentionally hurtful things, or say things to bring people down like some other people, but as a whole we are all mean people, at least in the context of how we treat God. After everything that has happened this past week, I am praying that I can get rid of the anger, frustration, and hurt that I have because of people in this world and realize that I'm no better than so and so. We need to stop focusing our attention and emotions on things happening around us and pour it all into the Lord because he deserves all of our thoughts and attention. Make sense? Idk, kinda jabbered that out. Oh well.