Making a Life changing Decision

After reading the last blog, what have you decided? Do you want to have eternal security as in being in heaven after you die? Are you tired of doing it on your own and want your life to have meaning?
Is it time to make a life changing decision? I hope you decided yes. If yes, please continue to read this. If no, please continue to read anyway, maybe you will change your mind, and this will help you to do so.
It is very simple to make Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior. Here is what the Bible says:

RO 10:9 That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. 11 As the Scripture says, "Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame." 12 For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile--the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, 13 for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

What exactly does that mean?

As we have talked about in earlier blogs, we are all sinners. Because of this we need a Savior if we want to spent eternity in heaven. We need a Savior if we want to be God's children and have him watch over us. But what do the above Bible verses mean?
All we have to do is realize we need a Savior, ask Jesus to be our Savior and to believe it in our heart. If we confess this we will be saved. If you want to do this, you can start by saying a prayer like or similar to the one following.

Prayer:
Dear Jesus. I know that in order to have a relationship with God I need you as my Savior. I need you as my Savior, because I am a sinner and there is nothing I can do to earn my way into heaven. The only way I can get there is by accepting that you died on the cross to pay for my sins and you rose three days later and are now in heaven preparing a place for me. I thank you so much for your sacrifice. Thank you for forgiving me of my sins. I also know that by receiving you as my Lord and Savior I become a child of God and you will be with me from here on forward to be with me and protect me. Thank you so much.
Amen

This is the initial start to your new life. If you truly made this decision, you are now a child of God. Now it is time to come to know God and to start walking with him. Now it is time to start living for him. To learn how to do that, you can come back for future blogs or you can check out our website @ http://www.meet-me-at-the-crossroad.com/
Welcome to your new family.

A Relationship with God

In our last blog we established that to have a relationship with God we need a Savior. But why would we want that relationship?
We have a lot of fun living as we want to. We don't like people telling us what to do. From all I have heard about having a relationship with God, it requires that we live a certain way. Why would I want to do that?

Without God we have the now, but nothing else. You can very possibly live a pretty, what you might consider, good life, but that is where it ends. Even if you acquire a lot of money, a lot of friends, a good husband or wife, or whatever else you might think makes life great, you are only living for the now. What about your future? Your eternal future?
A lot of people claim they don't worry about it. I don't know if I can believe that. When you sit down and things get really quiet and you truly think about your future, you think about the end of your life as you know it, are you at peace? Are you scared of dying? How can you have peace in that?
Nobody likes the unknown. It is in our human nature to want to live forever and all of us at some point are going to die. Then what? Are you okay about that part of your future?

Here is where a relationship with God comes in. Now it can't be a relationship on our terms, it has to be a relationship on God's terms.
A right relationship with God will secure our eternal future. It will not only do that, it will also help us in the here and now. According to the Bible, if we establish a relationship with God, we become children of God. Being his children comes with benefits.
The Bible says that God will help us in all things, protect us and watch over us. We will never have to do it on our own again. Knowing this will give you peace now and forever.

Do you want this? If yes, great. We do this by receiving Jesus as our Lord and Savior and surrendering to God.

But there is a major problem, most of us don't want to give up control of our lives. We want to be in control. See to become God's children, we have to give him control of our lives. We have to live according to what he wants, not what we want. By surrendering to God we establish our relationship with him.

Do you still want this? Only you can decide if you do.

What is the alternative?

Why would you need a Savior?

If we have established that God is real and that the Bible is the word of God, we can move forward.

Why do you need a savior? To know this lets start at the beginning.

God created the heaven and the earth. He also created everything in it such as the plant life and the animals. One of his greatest creations was man. The difference between man and the animals is that animals do everything by instinct. Man on the other hand has free will and is able to think and reason.
God created a man and then not wanting him to be alone created a woman. He put them in the garden of Eden. They where to live there and and take care of it. The only restriction they had was that they could not eat from the tree in middle of the garden. This tree was called the tree of knowledge.
Now even back then the devil was around. I am sure you have heard of him. He was there in the garden in the form of a serpent. And just like today, he was up to know good. He approached Eve and convinced her to eat an apple from the tree of knowledge and she in turn gave some of the apple to Adam. How did he do that? He convinced her that God was keeping something good from them. Here is what he said: "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
The thing they did not look at is what God had said earlier: "You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die."
The devil is good at half truth. He was right in that they now would know the difference between good and evil, but he left out the part that they would now die.

But why does that make us need a savior? Let's go on.

Let's learn something about God. God is a perfect God that can not handle evil. The Bible says this about God: "Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong." We have to understand that doing wrong is evil.
Because of what Adam and Eve did, God kicked them out of the garden of Eden. Now they no longer just lived, now they where also going to die. They had brought evil and death on themselves and all their decendents. This includes us, because we are their decendents. This one act put a separation between us and God.

God did not want this. He wanted us to have a relationship with him and be in his presence. So how can this separation be removed? Well just like today when someone does wrong, it has to be made right. It is the same with God, if someone does wrong it has to be made right. So how can a major wrong like what Adam and Eve did be made right? It would take a perfect sacrifice.

Okay but why does that make it to where we need a savior? We didn't do what they did.

There are two reasons we will not need a savior. One, we don't want to have a relationship with God. Two, we can live a perfect life without ever doing wrong and because of this we get to have a relationship with God. Here in lies the problem. The first choice leads to eternal consequences that at some point we will regret, because it is eternal separation. The second, because of what Adam and Eve did we can not live perfect lives. Because we are their decendants, no matter how hard we try, it is now in our nature to do wrong.

So if you want to have a relationship with God, you need a Savior.

Is God real?

Do you believe God is real? Let's establish that God is real. How do we do that?

We look at the evidence.

What evidence is there for the reality of God? If we look at the universe and nature, and if we look at it with an open mind, we will come to the conclusion that it is not an accident. I know a lot of people do not believe in creation. Let's just look how everything works and fits together and then try to imagine that all happened by accident. I think if we are honest with ourselves we will not be able to believe that.

If we look at the Bible, here is what it says: Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

So if we go by what the Bible says, there is no way that we will not know that there is a God. We know this by what he created.


So you say: That's just the Bible, how do I know it is true? We believe the Bible is the word of God and the writers as indicated in the Bible wrote under the inspiration of God. How did we come to that conclusion? Here are just a few reasons. The Bible was written over a spread of several thousand years. It was written by over forty different writers from all walks of live. None of them new they where writing anything for any such book and still all the books in the Bible fit together perfectly. There are a lot of prophecies in the Bible that have been fulfilled just between the Old and New Testament. The Bible is historically accurate. A lot of the New Testament was written by eye witnesses with much of it even backed up by non-christian writings. There are approximately 20,000 manuscripts that back up the New Testament of the Bible. The famous "Dead Sea Scrolls" support the Old Testament. These are just some of the reasons to believe the Bible.

Hopefully this helps you establish that there is a God. If it did we can move forward with what we talked about in the last post. If this didn't help you, feel free to ask more questions. We'll get into why we need a savior next time.

Passion for Jesus

Over the past seven years I have spent a lot of time at Motocross tracks. Over that time we have provided church services at some of the local tracks around Kansas City and for the Missouri Motocross Championship Series.
One of the things that has really come to my attention over these years, is the passion that people have for their sport and to what length they will go to make sure they can follow that dream.
The passion that I see at the track, is the passion I would like to see people have for Jesus. But how can that happen?
First they have to believe that there is a God. Once they believe that they have to believe they need a Savior. But why should they? I'll try to explain as we go along.