MARCH 28 The Jesus Questions

LIVING FOR JESUS --- Daily Devotional

March 28 / Day 29

365 Prayers to JESUS

Jesus, this time of year, as I celebrate Your victory over death and the grave, has become to mean as much to me now as Christmas and summer vacation was for me in my youth and I praise You for Your Great Sacrifice that I can experience the joy that You promised.  Lord as I contemplate another year of serving You, I pray that You would fill me daily with that desire to do those things with my life that truly serve and honor You and Glorify the Father.  Lord I pray with my heart of hearts that I become one with You and the Father and that my life will be lived totally “in Christ alone”.  Forgive me of my many shortcomings and guide me in Your Truth.

The Jesus Questions

JQ#7 - Before we begin back with this study on the teaching questions Jesus used in the Gospels to reveal the Father to us, I would like to take just a few minutes to dwell on the lessons that we learned of the Father from Resurrection Sunday and use these thoughts as an intro to JQ#7: “Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 8:26).  As I was studying the verses around this next question the Holy Spirit made me pause and think about “faith” in general. How I teach “faith” to my third graders in Sunday School is to get them to thinking about how to define “faith” and then to take those definitions and show them how phrases like “belief in God” and “trusting in God” points to the basic Truth of “FAITH” and that is taught by the question “What do you believe about God and why do you trust Him?” Faith can be in just about anything. We can believe in whatever we chose to believe so I move to the simple question about faith which is “What causes you to ‘believe’ and what causes you to ‘trust’?”  When we think about faith and trust we must admit that both can be applied to anything or anybody that we chose to have faith in or trust.  The degree to which we trust can be a measure of our belief, for example each time you go to sit down is an expression of trust in the ability of the chair to hold your weight. Some of us look a little closer at the particular chair we are going to “trust” with our additional weight but over time our “faith” in chairs has been built upon exercising that faith by sitting in different chairs and  having that chair hold us up.  Our faith in God can only be strengthened by exercising that faith in Him by trusting Him with various areas of our lives and letting Him prove Himself to us. Resurrection Sunday is one of those great times in our spiritual lives that we can build our faith because of all the great things God proved to us when He raised Jesus from the tomb, gave Jesus victory over death, and completed the Divine Plan for the Salvation of a lost world of sinners! God has done many things to show us that if we will study His Word that we will see time after time some basic truths about God that will develop great TRUST in God. First thing God showed us with the Resurrection is that He had planned from the beginning to do whatever was necessary to free us from sin, even if it meant Sacrificing His Only Begotten Son. The fact that God had committed to this course of action for our Salvation was seen in first in the garden of Eden where God told us plainly that the penalty for sin is death. Then God said in Isaiah 53:5 that Jesus would be crucified in our place and by His stripes we would be healed. God then sent His Son to earth and the Divine became flesh in order to live the perfect sinless life and die the perfect death on the cross which was the ONLY acceptable Sacrifice which God accepted by Resurrecting the Son whose last words on the cross was “It is finished”. Jesus trusted God with His life — we should to!