God loves you more than just solving your problem...

We all know that God is Almighty, God is able and there is nothing impossible with God.
We know if we pray to God, God will answer our prayers.

Then why is there unanswered prayer?

I believe God is not just wants to solve our problems, God wants to transform the hearts and turn hearts toward Him.
In His good timing when everything is in place, the transformation will take.
His glory will come and every knees shall bow and every tongues shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Wow... it will be amazing!!!

For those who doubt, the wall of Jericho. Has any war won in that manner if God is not battling for them? All they have to do is obey by walking around the Jericho for 6 days without saying anything and on the 7th day, they circled it 7 times and with a loud shout, the wall came down.

Believe your 7th day is here soon...

When situation look so bad that there is no hope, hang on there because you do not know in that corner is your breakthrough...

When Jesus is crucified on the cross, all the believers were in despair what future will hold for them. They were confused, felt hopeless as unable to do anything, the overwhelming sadness and hurt... Even satan thought he won.

Have you ever wonder when satan know he is defeated?

I believed it is when Jesus gave up his spirit into His Father's hand.
Luke 23:46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last.

Satan must have waited for the glory to come to him... but none came. Then he knew Jesus is glorified.

Wow... Jesus did that so that we can have his victory. Satan is a defeated enemy. Do not be afraid for death has no power over you.

The question is, Jesus did that for you so that you can have life in eternity with him, so that you can return home to God.

What are we going to do with that gift of life?

Do not waste it... do not let Jesus die in vain.

Like the story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31)

The Rich Man and Lazarus

19“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

22“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

25“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

27“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, 28for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

29“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

30“ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

31“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”

A lot of people will state the obvious - hell is a place of torment and agony in this fire...

But a lot fail to see this... the memory of the rich man and Lazarus is still with them even after they died. The things that you do while you are still alive and who you are.... you still have the memory of that.

According to some who visited hell and back, you still have the same senses and feelings as when you are still alive but it is more sensitive when you died.

One will ask what is the torment that is in Hades? Then we should ask why we still have memories and the sensitivity of the senses?

Why when we died it don't get erase? I thought when people especially those committed suicide want to end their lives because they are done with this life and the torment they felt in this life?

Imagine... your memories follow you even after you died.

I believe the torment that is in Hades are the torment of the wrongdoing that we done while we were still alive... the wrongdoing where Jesus already paid the price for it and ask us to repent before God which we did not...

The whole sensitivity of our senses magnified the feeling of regret.... the evil that was not pardon for which could have.... forever nonredeemable.

Imagine that feeling forever, the hopelessness...

Jesus said it before "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near". Some may say ai yoh.... already more than 2000 years and still this ah?

Each is given a freedom of will. Freewill is God's gift to mankind. Choose wisely.

If you cannot say God is the one that ask me to do this..... then you know it is not of God.

God is more interested in you than your problem. God wants to transform you not just solving your issues.

Trust Him. "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near".

Imagine if we are in heaven with Him... our senses magnified the glory of God. Confirmation in our hearts that we choose wisely and the righteousness feeling of thankfulness and of love. And live in that forever glory where there is no hurt, pain and suffering.

Wow!!! That is why it is worth dying for. For those who are martyr, Jesus said in Luke 9:24
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

Be brave and live in victory for Jesus.

Article: Redemption: Rescued from wilful sin By Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Unbelievers don't "struggle" with same-sex attraction. I didn't. My love for women came with nary a struggle at all.

I had not always been a lesbian, but in my late 20s, I met my first lesbian lover. I was hooked and believed that I had found my real self. Sex with women was part of my life and identity, but it was not the only part—and not always the biggest part.

I simply preferred everything about women: their company, their conversation, their companionship and the contours of their/our body. I favored the nesting, the setting up of house and home, and the building of lesbian community.

As an unbelieving professor of English, an advocate of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and an opponent of all totalizing meta-narratives (like Christianity, I would have added back in the day), I found peace and purpose in my life as a lesbian and the queer community I helped to create.

Conversion and Confusion

It was only after I met my risen Lord that I ever felt shame in my sin, with my sexual attractions and with my sexual history.

Conversion brought with it a train wreck of contradictory feelings, ranging from liberty to shame. Conversion also left me confused. While it was clear that God forbade sex outside of biblical marriage, it was not clear to me what I should do with the complex matrix of desires and attractions, sensibilities and senses of self that churned within and still defined me.

What is the sin of sexual transgression? The sex? The identity? How deep was repentance to go?

Meeting John Owen

In these new found struggles, a friend recommended that I read an old, 17th-century theologian named John Owen, in a trio of his books (now brought together under the title Overcoming Sin and Temptation).

At first, I was offended to realize that what I called "who I am," John Owen called "indwelling sin." But I hung in there with him. Owen taught me that sin in the life of a believer manifests itself in three ways: distortion by original sin, distraction of actual day-to-day sin and discouragement by the daily residence of indwelling sin.

Eventually, the concept of indwelling sin provided a window to see how God intended to replace my shame with hope. Indeed, John Owen's understanding of indwelling sin is the missing link in our current cultural confusion about what sexual sin is—and what to do about it.

As believers, we lament with the apostle Paul, "For the good I desire to do, I do not do, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who does it, but sin that lives in me" (Rom. 7:19-20).

But after we lament, what should we do? How should we think about sin that has become a daily part of our identity?

Owen explained with four responses:

1. Starve it. Indwelling sin is a parasite, and it eats what you do. God's Word is poison to sin when embraced by a heart made new by the Holy Spirit. You starve indwelling sin by feeding yourself deeply on his word. Sin cannot abide in his word. So, fill your hearts and minds with Scripture.

One way that I do that is singing the Psalms. Psalm-singing, for me, is a powerful devotional practice as it helps me to melt my will into God's and memorize His Word in the process. We starve our indwelling sin by reading Scripture comprehensively, in big chunks and by whole books at a time. This allows us to see God's providence at work in big-picture ways.

2. Call sin what it is. Now that it is in the house, don't buy it a collar and a leash and give it a sweet name. Don't "admit" sin as a harmless (but un-housebroken) pet. Instead, confess it as an evil offense and put it out! Even if you love it! You can't domesticate sin by welcoming it into your home.

Don't make a false peace. Don't make excuses. Don't get sentimental about sin. Don't play the victim. Don't live by excuse-righteousness. If you bring the baby tiger into your house and name it Fluffy, don't be surprised if you wake up one day and Fluffy is eating you alive. That is how sin works, and Fluffy knows her job. Sometimes sin lurks and festers for decades, deceiving the sinner that he really has it all under control, until it unleashes itself on everything you built, cherished and loved.

Be wise about your choice sins and don't coddle them. And remember that sin is not ever "who you are" if you are in Christ. In Christ, you are a son or daughter of the King; you are royalty. You do battle with sin because it distorts your real identity; you do not define yourself by these sins that are original with your consciousness and daily present in your life.

3. Extinguish indwelling sin by killing it. Sin is not only an enemy, says Owen. Sin is at enmity with God. Enemies can be reconciled, but there is no hope for reconciliation for anything at enmity with God. Anything at enmity with God must be put to death. Our battles with sin draw us closer in union with Christ. Repentance is a new doorway into God's presence and joy.

Indeed, our identity comes from being crucified and resurrected with Christ:

"Therefore we were buried with Him by baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in the likeness of His death, so shall we also be united with Him in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man has been crucified with Him, so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we should no longer be slaves to sin" (Rom. 6:4-6).

Satan will use our indwelling sin as blackmail, declaring that we cannot be in Christ and sin in heart or body like this. In those moments, we remind him that he is right about one thing only: Our sin is indeed sin. It is indeed transgression against God and nothing else.

But Satan is dead wrong about the most important matter. In repentance, we stand in the risen Christ. And the sin that we have committed (and will commit) is covered by his righteousness. But fight we must. To leave sin alone, says Owen, is to let sin grow—"not to conquer it is to be conquered by it."

4. Daily cultivate your new life in Christ. God does not leave us alone to fight the battle in shame and isolation. Instead, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the soul of each believer is "vivified." "To vivicate" means to animate, or to give life to. Vivification complements mortification (to put to death), and by so doing, it allows us to see the wide angle of sanctification, which includes two aspects:

a. Deliverance from the desire of those choice sins, experienced when the grace of obedience gives us the "expulsive power of a new affection" (to quote Thomas Chalmers).

b. Humility over the fact that we daily need God's constant flow of grace from heaven, and that no matter how sin tries to delude us, hiding our sin is never the answer. Indeed, the desire to be strong enough in ourselves so that we can live independently of God is the first sin, the essence of sin and the mother of all sin.

Owen's missing link is for believers only. He says, "Unless a man be regenerate (born again), unless he be a believer, all attempts that he can make for mortification [of sin] ... are to no purpose. In vain he shall use many remedies, [but] he shall not be healed."

What then should an unbeliever do? Cry out to God for the Holy Spirit to give him a new heart and convert his soul: "Mortification [of sin] is not the present business of unregenerate men. God calls them not to it as yet; conversion is their work—the conversion of the whole soul—not the mortification of this or that particular lust."

Freed for Joy

In the writings of John Owen, I was shown how and why the promises of sexual fulfillment on my own terms were the antithesis of what I had once fervently believed. Instead of liberty, my sexual sin was enslavement. This 17th-century Puritan revealed to me how my lesbian desires and sensibilities were dead-end joy-killers.

Today, I now stand in a long line of godly women—the Mary Magdalene line. The gospel came with grace, but demanded irreconcilable war. Somewhere on this bloody battlefield, God gave me an uncanny desire to become a godly woman, covered by God, hedged in by His Word and his will. This desire bled into another one: to become, if the Lord willed, the godly wife of a godly husband.

And then I noticed it.

Union with the risen Christ meant that everything else was nailed to the cross. I couldn't get my former life back if I wanted it. At first, this was terrifying, but when I peered deep into the abyss of my terror, I found peace.

With peace, I found that the gospel is always ahead of you. Home is forward. Today, by God's amazing grace alone, I am a chosen part of God's family, where God cares about the details of my day, the math lessons and the spilled macaroni and cheese, and most of all, for the people, the image-bearers of His precious grace, the man who calls me beloved, and the children who call me mother.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is a former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University. After her conversion to Christianity in 1999, she developed a ministry to college students. She has taught and ministered at Geneva College, is a full-time mother and pastor's wife, and is author of Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert(2012) and Openness, Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (2015). Rosaria is currently writing a book on this theme, titled Openness, Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (Crown and Covenant), due out this summer.

Jesus said "Follow Me..."

Jesus said "Follow me and I will make you fisher of men".

Jesus is the only one that asked people to follow Him. Most will ask to follow their teaching only Jesus said follow me.

My father used to say, follow what I said but don't follow what I do. This is basically saying I cannot be accountable to what I said because I myself cannot do it even though I know it is good. Therefore I can give you sound and good advice but I cannot be an example for you to follow or show you how...

Does it sound like most of us?

Thank God my heavenly Father is not like that. Instead He shown us all who He is. He said the word and His word never return to Him in void.

Therefore my Father in heaven is trustworthy and whatever He said is the truth.

Philippians 2:7- 11 (NKJV)

but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knees should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus is fully man while he was on Earth.

Therefore we are able to live like Him, walk like Him and hold ourselves in obedient to God even to the point of death like Him.

Don't ever sin and expect God to understand...

Jesus did not die so that we can live in sin.

His abundant grace and mercy will convict us of our sin.
He came so that we can have life and life abundantly.

By His grace, we can live as sons and daughters of God.
By His mercy, our sins are forgiven.

Come to repentance and change your ways by obeying God first and not your flesh.

John 14:27 (NKJV)
Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

Let God's peace be your guide.

Numbers 6:24-26 (NKJV)

"The LORD bless you and keep you;
  The LORD make His face shine upon you,
  And be gracious to you;
  The LORD lift up His countenance upon you,
  And give you peace."

God bless :-)

So you would come...

Someone wrote... to know is to know that you know nothing and that is indeed true knowledge. What an ignorant comment.

Imagine, you know God and you claim that you know nothing about Him and that is true knowledge? How deceitful is the heart.... excuses for one to continue in willful sinning... For one to justify himself/herself.

People that deceive themselves are those who do not know how much God loves them. God is love and His way is just. Why we cannot judge well...because we do not love like His love. Because He loves perfectly, His judgement is always trustworthy. He is Holy and Righteous.

Therefore, after all He had done for us... there is no more excuses. That is why the judgement is forever...
It is futile to say God will understand, I cannot do the right thing.... He knows me and He loves me therefore I will be forgiven. Think again...

After all He had done...



So You Would Come - Hillsong

Before the world began
You were on His mind
And every tear you cry
Is precious in His eyes
Because of His great love
He gave His only Son
Everything was done
So you would come

Nothing you can do
Could make Him love you more
And nothing you've done
Could make Him close the door
Because of His great love
He gave His only Son
Everything was done
So you would come

Come to the Father
Though your gift is small
Broken hearts, broken lives
He will take them all
The power of the Word
The power of His blood
Everything was done
So you would come


John 14:23-24
Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent Me.

Think again... Obedience is a must.