Week 8

H is for Heaven

Heaven is where we’ll spend eternity with God. Jesus said in John 14:3 “if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, [there] ye may be also. This is what we all look forward to as Christians, eternity with God. Because of our sins we deserve to be punished. I can at least speak for myself; I’m a lying, thieving, blasphemer. Because of this we must be punished. I know I’m not the only one, because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, Romans 3:23. We deserve Hell, but God in His wonderful grace paid that penalty for use that we may be saved and enjoy eternal fellowship with Him. WOW! In Romans chapter 5 it talks about how it is very rare that someone give there life for another; maybe even more likely will someone give their life if the person is righteous, but God commanded if love for us, in that, while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

Heaven starts now with Christ. We don’t have to wait to experience heaven, heaven is here and now. Jesus said in John 10:10 “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have [it] more abundantly”. This doesn’t mean that we wont have any problems when we begin to follow Christ or that we’ll become wealthy. The Bible doesn’t promise that. When we are saved the Holy Spirit dwells in us and we can enjoy a wonderful fellowship with Christ. We’ll have hope and piece that no matter what happens we understand that God is in control. God is great right now, but can you imagine how great He will be when this distraction of the sinful flesh is removed.

H stands for Heaven, but it can also stand for how. How can we have eternal life and Heaven. Throughout the past weeks we’ve been spelling out the meaning of the word FAITH. FAITH can also stand for Forsaking All I Trust Him. That can be summed up with two words: Repentance and Faith. Forsaking, Repent, or Turn from our sins and believing that we don’t have anything to do with making ourselves right with God. And Trust Him. Put our faith in Jesus and Him alone for our salvation. We know for sure that He will save us remember Romans 10:9 “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

If you haven’t repented of your sins, not just ask for forgiveness but turning from those sins; and put your trust in Jesus, then I plead with you today to do that. We don’t know how long we have in this life. Life is short, like a vapor that is here at one moment and gone the next.

Our Visit

We didn’t have any visits this week. It was raining and we don’t want to track water and mud everywhere. We had an extended class, had some singing to praise the Lord, and group prayer. The prayer time was awesome.
The prayer time was an answered prayer in itself. My wife has been discouraged and has been praying that God would do something awesome this Tuesday. She was expecting something on a visit, but it ended up being right there in our FAITH groups. God taught us that He is faithful. We may be expecting one thing, but He’ll answer prayer in is own and even more powerful way. When doing God’s will of going out and spreading the Gospel, Satan tries to hit hard. We had a few people experiencing that. One of our members needed to stay home. We got her on speaker phone and included her in the prayer. When Gods people get to gather and pray it is an awesome experience and something great is going to happen.

Payer Request

Pray for our FAITH members and their struggles. Pray for a friend Daniel that is trying to get away from drugs that has been an everyday habit for over a year. Pray that I will be more bold in my sharing the Gospel. Pray for the safe return of our pastor and the group from our church that are in the Philippines. The small picture above that I used since we are talking about Heaven, is a shot from the Philippines on Monday.