created to love Him...

In Him you also, when you heard the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee (down payment) of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory.     ~Ephesians 1:13-14 Anything we encounter through the Holy Spirit is but a taste, a down payment, a fraction of the riches we'll receive when we are face to face with our full inheritance in Christ. What blessings and riches has the Holy Spirit poured out in your life? However beautiful and magnificent His work in your life may be, it is but a fraction of what is to come. What is the worth you would attribute to the inheritance God has coming for you? Whatever that amount of worth is makes Ephesians 1:18 all the more sweet...what are YOU worth as the inheritance of Jesus??! Holy Spirit, you can come deposit as big a down payment into my life as you can possibly make! I'll take it! And may my life be a reciprocator...one who giv...

This morning I slept in past 11:00! Beautiful day off!  I woke up thinking about inheritance, so I decided to get my thoughts down before jumping out of bed to start my day. In Ephesians 1:11 Paul writes, "In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will." When I think about the truth that I have been given an inheritance in Jesus, my imaginative wheels start spinning wildly. What riches are included in this inheritance? What doesn't belong to Jesus, the King of kings? The Psalms declare that all of heaven and earth are His footstool. In Psalms 2:8, the nations are Jesus' possessions. The beauty of heaven, the glory of the throne, the angelic hosts, the weird creatures with the eyes...the list in endless! Paul even tries to give us a glimpse of what our inheritance in Christ looks like in earlier verses in Ephesians 1: *every spiritual blessing in Chris...

Today I feel overwhelmed with thankfulness that I belong to God. I'm so thankful that I have been given knowledge of who He is...not the knowledge that puffs up, but the knowledge that renews my mind to live the way He lives. It's knowledge that renews my mind to think the way He thinks. What a gift! What kind of stinking evil would I be without His transforming kindness? It makes me feel hungry to know more about Him. It makes me hungry to have more discernment. If His ways are higher than mine, than I desire to know His ways better than I know my own...to spend more time in His ways than in my ways. If His thoughts are truly higher than mine, I want to dwell on His thoughts more often than I dwell on mine. It seems that His ways and His thoughts are a higher reality than my simple, faulty ways and thinking. I want to live out of His reality. It's a high goal. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says, " For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him? But WE HAVE th...