I Turned to the Lord

 Jesus says in Mark 10:15, "Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." 

 God loves you and made you for a purpose.  He wants you to be with Him in heaven someday. The Bible says that in heaven "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Revelation 21:4). God is perfect and He can't allow sin into heaven. No one can ever be good enough to earn their way into heaven. "There is no one righteous, not even one" (Romans 3:10). So God had a plan! He sent His Son, Jesus, to die for your sins so you can go to heaven. He took your sins, nailed them to the cross and offers you Jesus' righteousness in exchange - this is a free gift for all who believe in Jesus as their Savior. "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16). Jesus didn't stay dead, but rose again to life on the third day (celebrated on Easter)! Turn to the Lord right now - you can pray and tell Him you believe that Jesus died for your sins and rose again, you can ask for forgiveness, and thank Him for the free gift of salvation!  

 “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord” (Acts 3:19).  Repentance alone could give the impression that WE are the ones doing something to be saved; it could make it into a works-based idea of being saved. Or even that it is transactional, like Jesus did this, and we have to do this. So, do we do as Paul wrote, “go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Romans 6:1-2). What role then does repentance have?  In order to be saved in the first place we must realize that we have sinned. Even a little child can realize they are a sinner. Our realization of being a sinner and the pain and regret it has caused, leads us to realize we need a savior, and that salvation has already been provided for us (“while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” Romans 5:8). We are just receiving it by faith. The repentance is a profound change of mind about our current sorrowful, sinful state and the truth about Jesus Christ as Savior -  from unbelief to belief! 

We have all sinned: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). God is holy and perfect. He is also just. Even as sinners, we want to see justice done when people break “our standards”, meanwhile we’ve broken God’s perfect standards. And often, we can’t even live up to our own standards, let alone God’s…which is why we need a perfect Savior!  God’s love and His justice intersect perfectly in God the Son, Jesus Christ, dying on the cross for our sins. “He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Christ” (John 3:26).  God is both just and the justifier!  

Free will could not exist apart from justice, either we would be puppets or there would be total disorder.  In 2020 in Seattle, a "police free" zone was made on Capital Hill.  This community, born on subjective values like freedom from hierarchy with communal and cooperative living, quickly had it's own security leaders emerge and deteriorated into deadly violence.

I knew I was born again when I believed in Jesus because His Spirit testified with my spirit that I was a child of God (Romans 8:16), but what does this mean? I thought about this for several months (although I should have prayed for wisdom based on James 1:5). The answer came together slowly. I had always wondered about John 3:5, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit”. Based on the following verse in John 3:6 “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit”, I thought water meant natural birth and Spirit is being born of the Spirit. But what does that mean exactly? Was Jesus saying that aliens (!) couldn't be born again?  That seemed unlikely in this particular conversation. Soon after, I came across one missing link! 1 John 3:9 says, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.” In Strong’s concordance, this word seed is the same word used for sperm, implying offspring, that is used in 41 times in the New Testament. We are supernaturally reborn by the Holy Spirit with God’s seed (“DNA”) when we believe in Jesus as our Savior.  Praise God!  

But, what about the water Jesus talked about in John 3:5? In the Old Testament, water is used for purification, for setting things apart for God.  In the New Testament, it says that this water is the Word, Jesus (Eph 5:26).  I love this picture. - think about the creation of the world in Genesis.  God the Father is there speaking the Word (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit is there hovering over the water (Genesis 1 and John 1).  In 2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV, it says, "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.":  YOU are a new creature, a new creation, now through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.