Bragging Rights

This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture that rejects fear and champions faith in God. It emphasizes that God sees us for who we can be and celebrates our worth. We are reminded to see others in the same way and to remember that God loves us unconditionally. We are covered by the blood of Jesus and forgiven for our sins. The Lord corrects and guides us with love. By abiding in Jesus and focusing on the Word, we can experience blessings and prosperity. God's love casts out fear and we are encouraged to declare our worth and remember that the Lord loves us just as we are. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Ruth 3.11 Now, my daughter, don't be afraid. I will do to you all that you say, for all the city of my people knows that you are a worthy woman. Often, people can't see squat beyond what's in front of their faces. We deal with people day in and day out, but do we know them? Next time you're out and about, sit down and watch the people going past. On foot, in their cars, on the bus, it doesn't matter. Just think, each and every one of them is the center of a story like yours. The featured hero in an epic journey through life. What triumphs, wants, desires, and dreams. Do we relate to them the way they deserve to be related to? No. With some we try, but with most, how can we? We cannot see into their hearts. We don't really know them. It can be the same with closer people, our families, for example. How often do we learn of something later in life that makes us pause? It either completely changes how we see an event, explains the event, or we're shocked because we had no idea that was going on. And these are people we lived with for years. How do we know the true mental landscape of our siblings, of our children, of our parents? These human bodies around us have the same interior lives that we do. They're full of hopes and dreams, thoughts and ideas, wonderings and what ifs. Yet we tend to see them only as the tools and characters that operate in our lives as cogs in the machine of our existence. Not so with God. God said to him in the dream, Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also withheld you from sinning against me, therefore I didn't allow you to touch her. But now your kingdom will not continue. Yahweh has sought for himself a man after his own heart, and Yahweh has appointed him to be prince over his people, because you have not kept that which Yahweh commanded you. But Yahweh said to Samuel, Don't look on his face, or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For I don't see as a man sees. For a man looks at the outward appearance, but Yahweh looks at the heart. I know also, my God, that you try the heart and have pleasure in uprightness. As for me, in the uprightness of my heart, I have willingly offered all these things. Now I have seen with joy your people who are present here offer willingly to you. 1 Chronicles 29.17 O let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous their minds, and hearts are searched by the righteous God. Psalm 7.9 The Lord can see into our hearts. Jesus dwells in our hearts. The Holy Spirit is upon us. They know our worth. Our real and true worth. Not the worth we think we have. That's right. We don't know our own worth. We see everything we've done, because we did it. We see every thought we have, every attitude in everything we do. But God doesn't see that. He sees the person he made us to be. He sees the person we are in Jesus. He sees the righteous us. Want to know a secret? He's terrible at this kind of secret. God proclaims our worth and excellence to everyone he comes across. You know why? He's our Father, and he is stupid proud of us. He parent brags on us to every angel, every principality, every power, and every redeemed soul that comes within a million leagues of the throne. He is so proud of you. Try and escape his joy and his love in you. How dare you? Because you can't. You can't run from him, avoid him, or keep him from seeing the you that exists in Jesus. The you that is awesome. He knows it, and he celebrates it. Have you sinned? Of course you have. We all have. Romans 3.23. But read further. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God sent to be an atoning sacrifice or propitiation through faith in his blood for a demonstration of his righteousness through the passing over of prior sins in God's forbearance to demonstrate his righteousness at this present time that he might himself be just and the justifier of him who has faith in Jesus. Verses 23 to 26. Know what that means? You're covered by the blood of Jesus. No, not covered. Redeemed. Made to be as if there was never anything wrong. Restored. Acts 3.19. Whole. Clean. The merciful Lord God Almighty remembers nothing of your sin. It's gone as if it never was. You're a clean child of God. Worried about it still? Don't. Because the Lord corrects us. Hebrews 12.7 to 11. Not meanly. Not as a dictator. Not as a wrathful smiter. God only has wrath towards sin because wrath is the instant and constant response of righteousness to sin. But we aren't sinners. We're believers. But we don't get to do whatever we want if we want to be obedient. And we are called to obedience. Romans 1.5. The Holy Spirit was given to us to comfort us. To counsel us. But also to guide and correct us. 2 Timothy 3.16. No one likes being called on the carpet. No one enjoys being taken to task. But the Lord does it in order to get us to where we need to be to do what we say we want to do. Follow Him. Jesus didn't get to do everything He felt He wanted to. But He always did what His Father wanted. Jesus chose obedience, not feelings. Jesus chose to take joy in His Father and in obeying His Father. We will be corrected if we stray. We will be forgiven if we repent. Through it all, He loves us. But there is iron in the warmth of His love. The Lord God is righteous and holy, and we need to never forget that. Yahweh is a God of covenantial love, not of compromise. God sees us, and He sees us as who we can be. He sees what we do, but also what we could do. When we abide in Jesus, He sees us as Jesus. As spotless, as holy, as righteous. This isn't rose-colored glasses, but the mystery of abiding in Jesus. When we put the Lord above all and focus on the Word, rejoicing and praising Him, we allow the Lord to move in our hearts and our minds, to imprint His laws on our hearts, to renew our thinking into Him, to make us more and more like Him. The Father doesn't ignore what you are at this moment in time, but He also sees you as you are going to be, the perfect creation He made you to be. God is timeless, and His perceptions of us are also timeless. The Father celebrates you. Jesus celebrates you. The Holy Spirit celebrates you. And believe me or don't believe me, you are going to get such a hugging when you get to heaven. In the meantime, you get to abide in Jesus. Get renewed by the Word. Get corrected and placed back on your feet in the correct direction. Stand under His wings and make the Lord your refuge and fortress. Walk the sanctification journey of being always moved into His ways and off of yours. You'll be in a place to get all the blessing, all the love and all the prosperity that He can possibly pour out on you through the doorways of heaven in every way that He can pour it out. Trust the Word. Have faith. Stand on this. Believe it. And receive it. God loves you. And our daily affirmation of God's love is Jeremiah 31. God loves you. He never likes it when you were in defeat. He never likes it when you suffer. He never likes it when you were not walking in His victory. What does He like? He likes it when you step back into His victory. He loves to shower you with gifts, promises, prosperity and rest. That's why Jesus came. He came to overcome because we couldn't. He came to wash sin away so that we can stand in Him. He came to allow us to be overcomers in Him. He came so that we could stand before the Father and worship Him. He came so that He could send the Holy Spirit to us, to indwell us, to give us back the relationship we lost in the garden, to fellowship with us, to arm us with His presence and power, to give us armor to wear, weapons to use, and guidance to acquire the wisdom we need to wield them. We want blessing upon blessing, prosperity until we can't give it away to help others fast enough. We need to abide in Jesus and walk in His ways. We want to abide in Jesus. We can't do that until we are broken before Him, recognizing our abilities and their inability to help us on an eternal scale, to see that we are nothing without Him, that only in Him can we overcome, stand, fight and win, that in Jesus, through Jesus, by Jesus and for Jesus we are saved. When we turn to Him in truth and honesty, we return to the things He planned for us before time began. Without Jesus we'll never make it, but in Jesus we are able to stand as adopted children before our Father and praise Him for His mighty works both in us and in the world around us. His everlasting love lives to bless us, correct us, save us, uplift us, and form us into the us He always wanted us to be. Why not? He loves us. As we close, remember that you have worth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today, God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love and no end to the things about you that He loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4 9-10 tells us, By this God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent His only-born Son into the world, that we might live through Him. And this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin, and it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because He first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.