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Choices

Your Life is Your Own
 It is you that make the choices that govern your life.
You can make good choices and bad choices, but hopefully you won't be making choices that you will regret.

1. Attitude of leaving home. When you reach an age that you think you want to take control of your own life, don't leave home angry and breaking ties to your family if at all possible, because when you reach an age where family becomes more important to you, you may not be able to mend the break.

2. Ethical choices. No matter what your faith is, or how you are reared, there are ethical choices that even the cultures of the world have standardized, but unfortunately don't seem to follow their own ethics. If we could all learn to set our ethical goals and stand by them, we could better learn to cope in this world and have better relationships with each other. And if you are Christian, your ethical goals should be based upon scripture. The Bible teaches and lists the best ethics that the world has ever considered.

3. Choice of vocation.  If you make a choice early enough in life, you can work toward a goal with determination for a life of enjoyment in your choice. Make it your own choice and not a choice to please someone else, or you will soon regret it. If you make a choice that becomes a burden to you and pulls you down, then it is better to try to acquire better situations that will help.  Better education and understanding what is involved with the choices you make will help you stay healthy and emotionally stable.

4. Choice of a husband/wife. This is probably the hardest choice you will make in your lifetime. Respect and earning an understanding relationship before you marry is a must for a lasting and happy marriage. This should be a lifetime choice, and the better you know that person, and the better you have understanding all that can be involved, the better that marriage will be.  You cannot base your future on romantic feelings because after those feelings are satisfied, you begin to see and understand all the problems of misunderstanding and what they can mean to your life.  If you go into a marriage with the attitude that "if I am not happy, I can always get a divorce", your life will end up with one regret after another, for you cannot exchange one situation for another that will be another burden to you, which is the usual way divorce ends up.  So rarely does one find another marriage to be a happy choice.  And divorce is certainly not the Christian way of life.

But if you make a wrong choice that becomes a bitter entrapment to you (in whatever phase of your endeavors), some of them must be endured or pay the regretful consequences. Some choices that we try to reverse can only bring about another bitter entrapment.

Christian or not, your choices have to be made, and hopefully with wisdom enough to see what the choice will mean to your future happiness.

PARABLE OF THE SALT

When Salt is Tastless
by Mary Esther Wacaster

When cooking, I am a person that doesn’t exactly follow “the recipe” like I was taught to do. One good lesson I learned – to follow the rules, and also how salt can “lose its savor” – came one morning when I got up and went in to make breakfast before I was fully awake.
I put water in the pot, and set it on the heat. I added salt and cinnamon. When the water was steaming, I added oatmeal. Oooops! too much! So I added water. Oh, no, now too much water! So I added just a little bit more oatmeal. Now!

When I brought it to the table, blessing said, we put in milk and butter, and began eating. My husband made the remark: “Did you salt this?” I replied – yes – but then realized if I added or detracted I had to be sure the salt was in its right proportions

Grace

What is it about God's Grace?

05 Jun 2010
Grace was that unconditional part of God’s love that gives us the opportunity to return to Him and keep the conditional part of His love, by the debt that was paid by His Son since it is not in man to be capable of earning his own salvation.

I. God made man and gave him the command to choose to obey or die.
II. Man chose to disobey.
III. Man was barred from Eden and sent into the world.
IV. God’s plan to bring man back into a working relationship.
V. God’s mercy involved in bringing man back to Himself.
    a. God gave “The Law” to show man that he is not capable of keeping it perfectly (and thus cannot earn the right to God’s favor). God wanted obedience from man, and “The Law” was the “boy leader whose office it was to to take the children to school”, teaching what God wanted and expected of man in order to please Him.
    b. Once man understood his inability to save himself, then God finished His plan by sacrificing Jesus, so that all who joined themselves to Him would be saved vicariously through Him.
His Grace was the unmerited gift of His Love for man; the gift of Christ for Forgiveness, and only through His blood.
   (1) To “earn” salvation would be to fulfill the law, not in “being a good person and doing good things that makes one feel good about himself”, even though the law requires just such action on the part of man as part of fulfilling the law. But the obedience must come from the heart since God wants man’s obedience to be done because he wants to please God. And to please God, man must keep His commandments.
    (2) The commandments Christ gave — He told the diciples to go into all the world, teaching them and baptizing them “into Christ”; He told them that the two greatest commandments were to “Love the Lord God with all you heart, all your might, and to love each other even as He loved us”. Everything we do hinges upon this, even being baptized!
We are hard put by “the world” who wants to say that Grace was the gift of God to allow people to be saved unconditionally — that would even include the demons since they believe and tremble. The grace that God proffered (offered for acceptance) to us, was that, in spite of our sinful nature and inability to “earn” our salvation by our own merit, He allowed us the condition by which we could return to a working relationship in Him through His Son, Jesus.

Grace is not the “saving” element.
Grace is extended to all men.
The “actual saving” element is Christ’s blood.

Christ’s blood is limited to those who are “in Him”, and without it all the grace and all the faith in the world will not save mankind.
Yet Christ’s blood cannot be except by the Grace of God through our faith in Christ as the son of God, and His enduring promises.
Consider this then:

Grace is that effort of God to justify man and get him to return to a working relationship with Him in spite of man’s inability to earn salvation (fulfill the law) for himself. If man sinned in ONE POINT of the Law, he was guilty of the whole Law. It is still man’s choice to return, and the only way he can return is to be “in Christ” through obedience by baptism, and by observing all that He taught us in His teachings and by His exemplary life to the best of our ability and perseverence. His Grace was the unmerited gift of His Love for man; the gift of Christ for Forgiveness, and only through His blood.