bible.com/bible/1/jer.29.11.KJV

Perhaps forgiveness is not one of your felt needs. You may have so completely immersed yourself in the relativism and self-justification of your culture that you have numbed yourself to the sting of your own guilty conscience. If so, then Peter’s command will fall on your willingly insensitive ears.

However, if the guilt of your sin has invaded your carefully protected peace of mind-and you see yourself as being in opposition to a holy and good God-then this admonition will be a welcome relief to your soul. If you, like Peter’s audience, have been stumbling over the question, “What can I do? What should I do?” — then here is the answer:

Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Only in Christ is forgiveness of sins to be found; there is no way to clean your record up on your own, by yourself. But through Jesus Christ you can find remission of your sins.

Repent… every one of you. No one is guiltless before God and so there is a universal command to repentance… and each one who does repent and confess their sins is called to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, publicly professing their faith in him.

Forgiveness of sins without repentance through Christ is not an option. Repentance and faith without a public witness, through baptism, should not be a consideration.

Those who long for their sins to be pardoned are commanded to repent of their sins and publicly acknowledge Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior by submitting to baptism. Have you obeyed?

How can we grow in our prayer life? It is very easy for prayer to become routine. We default to commonly uttered words or familiar patterns of prayer so that all our prayers end up sounding similar. Prayer can become rote or repetitive, where we just say the same thing over and over without much thought. Or maybe this is just a struggle of mine.

One of the ways to break repetitive and routine prayer habits is to pray the Scriptures. And there’s no better place to start praying the Scriptures than with Paul’s prayers for the churches. Here’s some insights from William Barclay’s New Daily Study Bible on the opening line of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21. May these notes infuse your prayer life with more meaning and break the routine we can often fall into.

The God Who is Father

“It is for this cause that I bow my knees in prayer before the Father, of whose fatherhood all heavenly and earthly fatherhood is a copy, that, according to the wealth of his glory, he may grant to you to be strengthened in the inner man, so that Christ through faith may take up his permanent residence in your hearts.” – Ephesians 3:14-17

He begins with the words: It is for this cause. What is the cause which makes him pray? Paul has painted his great picture of the Church. This world is a disintegrated chaos; there is division everywhere, between nation and nation, between individuals, and within a person’s inner life. It is God’s design that all the discordant elements should be brought into one in Jesus Christ. But that cannot be done unless the Church carries the message of Christ and of the love of God to everyone. That is what Paul is praying for. He is praying that the people within the Church may be such that the whole Church will be the body of Christ.

We must note the word used for Paul’s attitude in prayer. ‘I bow my knees’, he says, ‘in prayer to God.’ That means even more than that he kneels; it means that he prostrates himself. The ordinary Jewish attitude of prayer was standing, with the hands stretched out and the palms upwards. Paul’s prayer for the Church is so intense that he casts himself face down before God in an agony of passionate request.

His prayer is to God the Father. It is interesting to note the different things which Paul says in this letter about God as Father, for from them we get a clearer idea of what was in his mind when he spoke of the fatherhood of God.

1. The Father of Jesus

God is the Father of Jesus (1:2–3, 1:17, 6:23). It is not true to say that Jesus was the first person to call God Father. The Greeks called Zeus the father of gods and of the people; the Romans called their chief god Jupiter, which means Deus pater, God the Father. But there are two closely interrelated words which have a certain similarity and yet a wide difference in their meaning.

There is paternity. Paternity means fatherhood in the purely physical sense of the term. It can be used of a fatherhood in which the father never even sees the child.

On the other hand, there is fatherhood. Fatherhood describes the most intimate relationship of love and of fellowship and of care.

When the word father was used of God before Jesus came, it was used much more in the sense of paternity. It meant that the gods were responsible for the creation of men and women. There was in the word none of the love and intimacy which Jesus put into it. The centre of the Christian conception of God is that he is like Jesus, that he is as kind, as loving and as merciful as Jesus was. It was always in terms of Jesus that Paul thought of God.

2. The Father We Can Access

God is the Father to whom we have access (2:18, 3:12). The message of much of the Old Testament is that God was the person to whom access was forbidden. When Manoah, who was to be the father of Samson, realized who his visitor had been, he said: ‘We shall surely die, for we have seen God’ (Judges 13:22). In the Jewish worship of the Temple, the Holy of Holies was held to be the dwelling place of God, and into it only the high priest might enter, and that only on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement.

The centre of Christian belief is the approachability of God. The folklorist and short-story writer H. L. Gee tells of a little boy whose father was promoted to the exalted rank of brigadier. When the little boy heard the news, he was silent for a moment, and then said: ‘Do you think he will mind if I still call him daddy?’ The essence of the Christian faith is unrestricted access to the presence of God.

3. The Father of Glory

God is the Father of glory, the glorious Father (1:17). Here is the necessary other side of the matter. If we simply spoke about the accessibility of God, it would be easy to sentimentalize the love of God, and that is exactly what some people do. But the Christian faith rejoices in the wonder of the accessibility of God without ever forgetting his holiness and his glory. God welcomes sinners, but not if they want to trade on God’s love in order to remain sinners. God is holy, and those who seek his friendship must be holy too.

4. The Father of All

God is the Father of all (4:6). No individual, no Church, no nation has exclusive possession of God; that is the mistake which the Jews made. The fatherhood of God extends to all men and women, and that means that we must love and respect one another.

5. The Father We Thank

God is the Father to whom thanks must be given (5:20). The fatherhood of God implies our debt to him. It is wrong to think of God as helping us only in the great moments of life. Because God’s gifts come to us so regularly, we tend to forget that they are gifts. Christians should never forget that they owe not only the salvation of their souls but also life and breath and all things to God.

6. The Father of Fatherhood

God is the pattern of all true fatherhood. That lays a tremendous responsibility on all human fathers. The writer G. K. Chesterton remembered his father only vaguely, but his memories were precious. He tells us that in his childhood he possessed a toy theatre in which all the characters were cut-outs in cardboard. One of them was a man with a golden key. He could never remember what the man with the golden key stood for, but in his own mind he always connected his father with him, a man with a golden key opening up all kinds of wonderful things.

We teach our children to call God ‘father’, and the only concept of fatherhood they can have is the one that we give them. Human fatherhood should be moulded on the fatherhood of God.

Learn More!

The above is from the New Daily Study Bible (17 Vols.)! Get a copy by clicking here.

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See the article: How To Grow in Our Prayer Life that I shared, which is the continuation of this post. I hope you enjoy it. God bless.

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Love this❤ Shared from Bible Verses: Daily Devotional app – https://bibleverses.app

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Sin may bring you pleasure. Sin may bring you wealth. Sin may even bring you a certain degree of satisfaction. But ultimately sin will only bring you death.

As the pastor James wrote these words of warning, he no doubt knew how easily we forget the consequences of sin. We are often tempted to violate God’s law, which is for our own protection, in order to receive some promised gratification. But James shines the light into the future and reminds us that the end of every sin is death.

Are you flirting with a person other than your spouse, or committing mental adultery repeatedly in the privacy of your imagination? The pleasure of a forbidden relationship may seem tantalizing, but…

“Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.”

Are you tempted to put your service to the Lord on hold in order to accept a much-desired promotion? The pay, the prestige may feel exciting, but…

“Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.”

Have you been holding a grudge against another person, refusing to forgive them for some offense or injury? No matter how right or justified you may have made yourself out to be in your own mind…

Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.

It is no accident, no wonder, then that James’ next words are simply, “Do not err, my beloved” (16). If sin is truly so serious, so dangerous, so deadly — why would we ever toy with it at all?

God is good everyday. We have a new life in Jesus Christ when we accept Him as our Lord and Savior. Our old lives are dead, and we no longer are the old person we were; we are made new in Him. We have the Scriptures to tell us the complete truth about being new in Christ. We no longer want to do the things that we once did when we were living in sin. We only want to do what is right and acceptable in the eyes of God. We only want to please Him. Let us always go to the Scriptures when we don’t understand something.

Life isn’t always going to be easy, the sun may not shine everyday, but when we think about the treasure we have in heaven with Jesus, it makes us want to enjoy life even while we are going through difficulties. Why? Because He knows all about our troubles. He knows all about our life and what we will face on this earth even though we are saved, and the unsaved. There is not anything that God doesn’t already know.

I heard a preacher say that everyone who talks about heaven isn’t going, but according to John 3:16 God sent His only Son into this world that the world might be saved through Him, so everyone who repents and accepts Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior has a chance to go to heaven. This is why Jesus died for our sins. God does not want anyone to perish in the end. This is why He gives us chance after chance to get our lives right before His Son returns. No one knows when Jesus will return except the Father, the angels doesn’t even know. The Word tells us that He will come like a thief in the night, so according to those words, we must be watching and sober at all times. No one knows when a thief may come; just as we don’t know when Jesus may come, but we do know He is coming just as He said He would. The question is this: WILL WE BE READY?!?

Will we be ready to make that journey with Jesus to the other side of heaven? There’s no turning back when that day comes. Make things right while the blood is running warm in your veins, while you have your being. Don’t wait until it’s too late because you may not have time.

Jesus loves all of us equally. He doesn’t love one no more than He loves the other; He is no respecter of persons. He laid down His life for every human being to save our souls from a devils hell. Think about your soul and how important it is to God. Think about where you want to spend eternity. Eternity is forever; never ending. It doesn’t matter what you have done, where you have been, where you are from, nor the color of your skin, God loves you unconditionally and that will never change. Come to Jesus and live. God bless everyone. He is waiting to hear from you today.

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