Faith X Deeds

Hi everyone! I gotta confess that what I'm about to share with you guys is something that is somewhat polemic and in fact I can't quite answer this question myself:
Is your faith valid if you don't do any deeds for the kingdom of God?
As we read Romans 10:9 , it is clear to us that " if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved".

But somewhere along my meditations and reading of the bible I also read this verse found in James 2:16-19 "If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. "
And then it the last verse it says , "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead."

I gotta say that this really placed a lot of questions in my heart as to what "having faith" really means!
So, I'll probably place more questions than comments on this specific post.
You see, nowadays people are going to "church" for all sorts of reasons , except for the right one. As we read back in Acts we start realizing that the "church" we are used to experience today is totally different from that of Acts 4:32-35. People believe in Jesus not for Who is but What He can offer to them and definetely the last word people want to hear is "sacrifice" and " Serve".
I mean, I'm not putting into doubt here the grace and the love of Christ , because once you confess that He is saviour and Lord of your life, our lives are changed. However, what James is literary saying is: " Your words help you, your actions help people".
In my mind, authentic faith comes by actions and if we are not willing to serve and reach out/ serve other people , I really don't think we much faith at all. Because we won't be able to be so close to this Wonderful,graceful, loving God and still not have an urge in our hearts to serve and love others. It may seem a little radical, but I'm guessing here that if you are not able to serve and to help others in need , than your "faith" is a corpse. It's dead , it's useless. What James is telling us is, you are not a Christian by the things you say but by the things you do! We have to stop bragging about how awesome we are at playing an instrument at church, or how well we can memorize bible verses or how many bumper stickers we have in your car with little fishes , brag about how much we believe in Jesus , when even demons believe(but that doesn't mean they are saved) and in the end your actions are meaningless, you don't have any God-like actions. You see, I'm not really sure how God will judge people once we awake from this world, I don't know what standards He will use to judge us, but if you wanna take the risk of sitting at church and "appearantly" be a christian and just because you made a confession once in your life that Jesus can save , go right ahead! I rather go along with this song from Cating Crowns and not take this risk!

New Topic

Hi Guys,

In the next few weeks in my posts, we will be taking about the men of the bible , from Adam to Jesus and how their roles relate to our lives and what lessons we can learn from them.I pray it may be a blessing for your life!

Spiritual Battle

It's kind of akward to to talk about SPIRITUAL BATTLE and how this is frequently ignored by Christians on our day to day. In Ephesians 6:12 we read that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the forces of evil. We tend to believe that everything that goes on our daily lives is part of something natural, it just happens, it’s ok, you know, people are just mean!

We see this everyday on the 7 o’clock news, it’s all around us, it’s happening all the time; and we as Christians should not see this simply as something natural, because it’s not! At least it's not always like this! When we decided to accept Jesus as our Savior we also decided to take part in a war that is far more complex than a war made by men’s hands.

We need to realize that we are warriors of Christ, we have weapons, armors and we need to be constantly watching out for what’s going on in the spiritual world. Remember that once you’ve decided to be a follower of Christ the devil will pursue you , he will condemn you , he will do everything to take your focus off Jesus.

But we are men of God, we have to know that we were given these weapons so that we can pray, we can fast , we can give and we can sacrifice ourselves in order to reach out to people who haven’t gotten a chance to know Jesus. And for all you married men, remember , you are the spiritual leader of your family, you are in charge of doing all these things that I mentioned, for your family. God will question you about your wife, your children and the responsibilities He gave you as a spiritual warrior of your family.

Of course we shouldn’t assume that everything is due to the Devil’s influence, some of the bad things that happen in our lives is just part of our sinful nature. You know, those peole who blame the devil for everything ( I've already seen people blaming the devil for tripping on a rock) However, be sure that the devil will use each and every gap that you give him, be sure that he will be waiting for you to slip and devour your faith. Be strong, focus on Christ and be the Spiritual warrior that God created you to be.

Our Heavenly Dwelling

Today I was reading and meditating on 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and God reminded me of our purpose here and that we tend to forget when we get so ditracted by the things of this world. On verse 1 Paul tells us that the "tent" that we live nowadays will be destroyed. It's funny to see Paul refering to our earthly house as "tent". You see, here Paul picked out a word which could best represent what our house here on earth is similar to. If you've been camping before you probably know that we use the "tent" for the time we will be in camping ground it's something temporary , it's something that won't be forever. So Paul here is telling us, don't be so fixed to your "tents" here on earth because they will be destroyed, we have a an eternal house in heaven made by God and not built by the hand of men. What worries me is, have we really been depositing our efforts , our hope, our entire life for this "tent" we have nowadays or for the eternal house made by God? Have we been living for today like there's no tomorrow, have we been living for the things here, because if we have , we are losing our time, we are losing our energy , we are losing our life! No matter how strong you have built your house here , no matter how rich you are, no matter how great is your status, you gotta keep in mind, it will vanish, it will be destroyed. Don't accumulate riches here, don't invest your life in the things that are temporary "tents". Instead, accumulate treasures in heaven,invest your time in relationships, invest your time in knowing Jesus Christ more intimately. Because in the end only these things will matter , only these things will remain.

If God is so powerful, Why do bad things Happen?

Hi everyone! This post will be shorter than the last ones , but I will talk about a question that probably has been in everyone's mind: "If God is so powerful, Why do bad things Happen? ''
Now, let's think about some points here.
1- He is powerful indeed, and above all He is omnipresent, great, wonderful, marvelous and everlasting loveable and in His great love for us He gifted us with free will , to do what we "thought " was best for our lives. See, His love is so great for us that He choose to make free willing people, peole who would have choice, people who would have natural desires. But instead of using this free wil and desire to hand over our lives to his care we decided to be independent of God, (men's biggest mistake ever) as a result we ended up being selfish people, egocentric people and detestable people.
2- We are all sinners, stained by the things of this world , undeserving of God's love and care, but still His love is extended to us day after day.
3- I don't think that we are asking the right question. The right question is :
" Why God being so powerful that even when I fall into sin and make awful mistakes does He not destroy me with His wrath? Him , being so good and me being so full of stains and mistakes, why does he remain Merciful and good?
So, when we ask this second question , we will start understading why...
You see when we ask the first question, we believe in the supremecy of men, "how dare God not imploy His power on behalf of all mighty men?" You have to change the question around, "how can I so sinful in nature , still come in the presence of all mighty,all holy God?

Are you Courageous?

Often times we man see ourselves as the strong sex in the gender world, we are the one's who will stand up for what we think it's right and pitty of the people who will comfront us. Once I listened to a Pastor's sermon where he was telling a story that one day he was driving up a street where he lived and in front of him was a 75 year old man who at a certain moment accidently hit a cyclist and kncked him down to the floor. Well, this cyclist got up and just pounded on the old man's car (on the hood) with both hands , walked to the drive'rs side, opened the door and pulled out this 75 year old man and started hammering him in the middle of the street. Meanwhile this Pastor was in one of those moments where you think: " What should I do now?"
Well, he got out of his car and tried to stand in between the old man and this furious cyclist , who had one thing in his mind, "to kill this old man". Suprisingly enough, the pastor also started getting hit and out of the blue the pastor just took a swing at the guys jaw and knocked him out cold. Now although this story may sound to you a little bit out of the ordinary, I confess that I had this dream before ( me being a courageous man,lol) , just taking one swing and knocking somebody out. Imagine that, these things you can only see in Hollywood movies. I guess, any of us man would have the courage to do that in that moment and stand up for someone, you getting beat up and getting pounded by this guy, you would feel as if you were a Hollywood actor and take a swing. Now, let me reset the scenario!
Let's supposed one day you're sitting across a 75 year old man in a train and my question is :
Would you have the courage to stand up and go over to this man and tell him about Jesus?
Hard question ,right? It's funny that we men can be so courageous when it comes to physical strentgh but when the deal is telling someone about Jesus....that's sounds too risky, they may mock me, this may mess up my reputation...Let me appoint a verse that is in Revelation 21:7-8
He goes saying that the one who overcomes will inherit all this , He will be our God and we will be His sons. But the cowardly, the unbelieving , the sexual immoral , etc . These will have their place in the fire of Hell. Now, if you look closely , you will see that the COWARDLY is the first in the list, you may be saying, come on, couldn't it be the sexual immoral first or the liars, I mean I have no problems with that. But no, the cowardly, the cowardly.
Our purpose in this part of eternity is to be disciples of Christ, to tell peole the good news. He died for us, He reedemed us, He suffered in our place and we don't even talk to our next door neighbor about what He did for us. So, my prayer to every men or every person that may read this post is to have a courageous heart, such a passionate love for Jesus that you won't be able to keep this news only to yourself.