Getting to know JESUS

What must be emphasized is all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through Him-trusting only His role as a guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus, is to have confidence in Him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that He is right about and adequate to everything.(quote from DW)

My heart-For so long (my whole Christian walk really) I have focused on the relationship I have with Jesus as one of need, I need forgiveness and He provides it. His death and covering of my sins has always been forefront in my heart and thoughts. Of course these things do matter...but is that all there is to it? I am learning the answer is no, there is so much more. Jesus wants me to have life now with HIM! Yes HE has paid the penalty for my sins and HIS death does cover my sins but the story continues, the cross is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning. My focus is changing, I am seeing more that JESUS is alive, He is a Person, really and truly(not just words or things to say)...He is everything that I need. My relationship with HIM does not begin when I die and leave this body, it begins now when I take HIS hand and trust HIM completely with "ALL" my life.(every aspect) Its not about fitting HIM into a box of my making but realizing and seeing, truly seeing that HE is now living, that I can have an intimate, personal, interactive relationship with HIM now!

This changes so much!!

Amen sister!
Jesus said: Come unto Me...all who are heavily laden NOT come unto my teaching or follow My way. He must have known without Him being our very Life we would nor be able to follow His teaching anyway! :)

Blessings

Greetings Bear

Thank you for your kind words in welcoming me. I have been away for awhile but GOD is so good and right now HE is really changing my understanding of who HE is. I am getting to know JESUS and its amazing, wonderful and freeing all at once!

God bless
maryjane

Greetings William

You are so right, JESUS did say, "Come unto ME" I read that and wonder how could I have missed it for so long. JESUS is a person and HE is talking to us now. "Come unto ME"! how wonderful, what an invitation that is! Its not about gaining head knowledge or struggling to do right, cross T's and dotting I's, its about living abundantly with HIM now!! Awesome really:) and your right only with HIM can I see these things or even begin to understand.

God bless
maryjane

the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.

Think of someone whose every action, whose slightest thought or inclination, automatically assumes the reality of the God Adam Clarke describes above. When you do this you will have captured nothing less than the thought of Jesus himself, along with the faith and life he came to bring.

My heart- Jesus showed us how to live the Christian life. His view and understanding of God directed His every step and action. His heart was to please the Father! To know Jesus, is the answer to living the Christian life here and know.

Jesus did not say, "Blessed are the poor in spirit because they are poor in spirit.” He did not think, "What a fine thing it is to be destitute of every spiritual attainment or quality. It makes people worthy of the kingdom.” And we steal away the much more profound meaning of his teaching about the availability of the kingdom by replacing the state of spiritual impoverishment””in no way good in itself””with some supposedly praiseworthy state of mind or attitude that "qualifies” us for the kingdom.

In so doing we merely substitute another banal legalism for the ecstatic pronouncement of the gospel. Those poor in spirit are called "blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.

Alfred Edersheim is therefore exactly right in saying that in the Sermon on the Mount…the promises attaching, for example, to the so-called "Beatitudes” must not be regarded as the reward of the spiritual states with which they are respectively connected, nor yet as their result. It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result; still less is the one the reward of the other. The connecting link is in each case Christ Himself: because He…"has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.”

(Just considering how truly amazing our Lord is! As I read this it's with knew understanding and thankful to have Jesus as my teacher here and now!)