3 of 4 verses in the Bible are about what God has done for you. How God loves you. Then 25% of it is; now that you have been baptized, saturated and bombarded by the love of God, shouldn't you want to love Him back.
We serve a jealous God. He wants our love. He pursues our love. It is only to the degree I'm pursued that I understand my worth. We possess worth beyond our wildest dreams. We know it because Gos pursues us.
What can we give to God? What does He want? Some say God wants obedience, sacrifice or for us to believe the right doctrines. But none of these is why God finds you so beautiful. God wants our hearts.
We are the beloved of God. We are comatose like Sleeping Beauty. We need to be awakened by the kiss of our lover from heaven. Becoming more spiritual is simply coming out of your coma.
God gave us a free will. He said if you love your sin more than you love Me, I'll let you have it. I won't force you to adopt My righteousness, even though you were made for it.
The Bible tells us we serve a jealous God. Pastor Ray says that we can give Him all of our lives or don't bother at all. Ask yourself is there something I've kept back from God? God wants all your heart.
We all know we are sinners but we get comforted when we read about the bad people in the newspaper. We say I'm not that bad. I'm no Billy Graham. I'm no Mother Teresa. I'm somewhere safe in the middle. This is a false sense of security.
We have a tendency to rename sin. Others lie and cheat. We simply stretch the truth. Others steal. We merely borrowed and intended to give it back at the appropriate time. When you judge another, you condemn yourself because you do the same things.
Pastor Ray says what scares him is that there are some who are outwardly doing Christian things but who inwardly do not know the Lord. They will be surprised to stand on that day saying, "Lord, Lord!" and not be allowed entrance within.
Jesus takes the Word of God like a 2-edged sword and says I'm cutting into your immorality. I'm cutting into your love for the world. What the church today needs is more people who have hearts circumcised by the Word and by the Truth.
Tolerance is the new philosophy of the day. If you're ok with it then I'm ok with it. If you're cool and smart you're tolerant. However, the problem is that while the world summarize it as tolerance, the Bible summarizes it as sin.