Being Thankful

Hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving isn't about turkey, stuffing, or food coma. We should be grateful for the food we have, but that's not the focus. We should just be thankful for what we have, no matter how little it may be. Let's not only be thankful for our materials things, but also for the fact that we have life, that we have salvation through Jesus! Salvation through Jesus Christ alone is the most important thing to be grateful for.

When we pray to the LORD our God, we have to enter His presence with thanksgiving (Ps. 100:4). Praise Him in every situation as well (1 Thess. 5:18). And don't just be thankful at the end of Nov, but everyday be thankful for His grace & mercy, which is new every morning (Lam. 3:22-23). Take some time out everyday to thank Him for life, for love. It can be a simple prayer of thanks or it can be a song. The first song in the Bible was the Israelites praising YHWH for delivering them from the bondage of Egypt (Ex. 15). It was sung literally after the waters closed upon Pharaoh and his army. They simply couldn't help themselves after receiving this type of salvation. That was a foreshadowing of the salvation Christ would bring to the people of Israel. We were once oppressed and now we had been delivered from that oppression. What's not to be thankful for?

Abide in the Father

1 John 1:6-10 KJV

If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.  If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

2:15-17 KJV

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.  And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

I've seen a few times in social media that a Christian can't serve God while holding hands with ghr devil. I recently read the above passages and that's when I realized nothing can be further from ghr truth.

We can't say we love God while consciously living in sin. Let's put the phrase actions speak louder than words in this situation: if you're a Bible-believing christian, yet you're hitting up the clubs on Friday and Saturday, hooking up with a different person each time. What part do you have with God, living unrepentant? You're not walking in His truth when you're living for yourself.

You cant it both ways, as the righteous God, YHWH, the Light, mix with unrighteous darkness. Walk in the light, as we are children of the light.

Don't walk in your own righteousness, either. Don't think of yourself as above sin, like your sinless and/or have never sinned. Jesus is the only sinless person that has walked this earth, hence His qualification for being the perfect sacrificial lamb to redeem us from our sins. At ghr end of the day, we are imperfect human beings, prone to sin, saved or not. Christ is the only One who helps us overcome and avoid sin, as long as we walk in the Word (for He is the Word - read John 1).

I'll leave you with this note: 1 John 2:15-17 warns us to not love the world. Verse 16, in particular, describes the three types of sins:

1. lust of the flesh
2. lust of the eye
3. pride of life

Beware of sins as it'll come in either of these three forms. It was through these three sins that man fell in the garden.

Halloween for Christians: Yea or Nay?

God bless! I have a CBN profile and after looking at it again since two or three years ago, I found something I blogged that I also want to share with my Blogger audience :) 

As we are now in the month of October, you see department stores' seasonal sections filled with Halloween decorations, costumes, etc. Halloween is the second most celebrated holiday in the US (Christmas being the first). In a nation founded by Christians, how did this statstic come about? Why do so many parents allow their children to ring people's doorbells, after dark, and hold out small baskets or bags to get candy from strangers? Parents, especially Christian parents, I encourage you to NOT allow your children to trick-o-treat. Don't even dress them up. Halloween has a very pagan and demonic background, originating from the witches in England and pilgramming here, along with persecuted Christians. I have no children, nor am I married yet, but I know this is something I would not do with my children. Instead, I would like to teach them to pray on the 30th & 31st of Oct - praying for those children trick-o-treating, for their parents who may or may not be with them, and any youth who plan to reak havoc on their neighborhood.

I also encourage my brethren in Christ to 1) do research on the history of Halloween, because we cannot defeat an enemy we don't know much about, and 2) to gather with a few people in your church and pray for trick-o-treaters, children, parents, youth, belivers or not, that their eyes will be opened to celebrating this holiday of idolatry.

I did a little more research on Halloween, like does the Bible really condemn it. Well, within the Torah, it is forbidden to consult with mediums or those with "familiar spirits". That particular Scripture was pointed out to me while I was attending a Pentacostal church. I had stopped attending my original home church for a while and once I learned about Halloween, I looked at my original church much differently, knowing they hold alternative "harvest parties". I had also recently looked up Halloween on this site called gotquestions.org, which answers a lot of questions that seem to be often asked by baby & mature believers alike. So, when it comes to Halloween, we first have to understand its pagan origins and let the Spirit shows us what we should do.