Live Like Enoch

1 John 1:9 "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (ESV). The nature of the God we serve is holy and perfect, "God is light and in him is no darkness at all" (1 Jn 1:5 ESV). Despite this holiness, this purity, God chose to love me, a dark impure being. While the nature of God is pure and good, the nature of man is sin. And the nature of sin is that it thoroughly, and methodically corrupts until the vessel is full of darkness with no light, standing in direct opposition to God. That is the nature of the flesh, of my flesh. However, despite my sin and my evil, God came and died for me. 1 John 1:9 makes receiving forgiveness sound easy, after all, all we have to do is confess. But what are we supposed to do with this boundless, infinite forgiveness? When we sin again and again and we view the forgiveness of God as being cheap, costing only a moment of our time, forgiveness begins to feel tr...

Psalm 51:1-2 "Have mercy on me, O God, According to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions." I am a recipient of unfair treatment. Every second that I am not struck down, instantly cast into hell and made to feel the full wrath of God he has not dealt fairly with me. He has shown a mercy that I have not earned. I can not make a sacrifice, nor offer anything remotely valuable in return. There is nothing I can do to deserve it, there is nothing I can do to begin to pay off the debt that my sin has incurred upon me. Isaiah 64:6a says " Your righteous deeds are like polluted rags..."  Any righteousness of my own is an insult to this abundant and unfair grace. My pride when I think that I have done something that makes me more deserving of salvation than the next man is naught but an example of how desperately I need salvation and how incapable I am of providing anything to it. Jonathan Edwards phrased it this way,  I hav...

Doubting God is such a universal Christian experience, at some point in their walk almost every single christian has doubted. And yet when we doubt its still so difficult to get out of it, we read books and blogs about how to stop doubting God and yet its still so hard, well, here's yet another blog post about it, hopefully it helps. In Matthew 14:22-33 we get the story of Jesus walking on water out to the disciples who he sent on ahead, a storm kicks up. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night the disciples see a figure walking on water. They think he's a ghost but Jesus just calmly says, "Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid" and then in verse 28 it starts getting wild. "And Peter said to him, 'Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.' He said, 'Come.' So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink he cried out, 'Lord save me....