JUNE 26 THE JESUS QUESTIONS JQ#20 “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” (Matthew 17:17)

 JUNE 26  THE JESUS QUESTIONS   JQ#20  “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” (Matthew 17:17)

LIVING FOR JESUS  Daily Prayer   

JESUS, Precious Jesus, Lord where would this wretched soul be without Your Salvation? Lord Jesus if You had not changed the direction that I was going, I shudder to think where my deceitful heart would have led me, I just know that it would have been destruction and darkness and not Your Glorious Peace and Light. Lord I also thank the Holy Spirit for daily reminding me that I am always just one wrong decision away from the broad way that leads to that place of destruction where I once was headed ——— but the Holy Spirit reassures my spirit that the Father has me in the palm of His Hands and there is no power able to remove me from His Protection — no power that is except my own Free Will and my personal decision to leave the Path of Light that leads to the Narrow Gate — so Lord I thank You that each sunrise is a reminder that without You we choose the darkness but with You changing our hearts and comforting our souls, there is True Peace and we can enter into Your Rest.     AMEN

THE JESUS QUESTIONS

Jesus with this JQ#20 Question is pointing His disciples to what they must do to be successful in doing kingdom work after Jesus departs and returns to the Father. Jesus is telling the disciples that the Power of God is available to us and that His Life on earth has been an example of how to live our daily lives in such a manner that God will accomplish His Work through us. Jesus was equally Teaching about the Power of God with His Death as well as with His Life because after the world took its best shot and had Jesus crucified, dead, and buried that God would demonstrate His Great Power and Glory and give Jesus Victory over death and the grave and raise His Only Begotten Son on the Third Day, just like Jesus had been Teaching and Prophesying all along! Also with JQ#20 Jesus draws our attention to the Truth of God that what He has been Teaching us about the “Spirit of God” will remain with us after the “physical” Jesus returns to His Spiritual form and that the Truth of God is ETERNAL. The Holy Spirit has led me to conclude this JQ#20 Lesson with a commentary from Oswald Chambers written for JULY 24 in his “My Utmost for His Highest Daily Devotional Journal”. Oswald uses Matthew 5:20 “…unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” and then Oswald writes: “The characteristic of a disciple is not that he does good things, but that he is good in his motives, having been made good by the supernatural grace of God. The only thing that exceeds right-doing is right-being. Jesus Christ came to place (within anyone who would let Him) a new Spiritual Heredity that would have a righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus is saying, ‘If you are My disciple, you must be right not only in your actions, but also in your motives, your aspirations, and in the deep recesses of the thoughts in your mind.’ Your motives must be so pure that God Almighty can see nothing to rebuke. Who can stand in the eternal light of God and have nothing for Him to rebuke? Only the Son of God, and Jesus Christ claims that through His redemption He can place within anyone His own nature and make that person as pure and as simple as a child…no one can make himself pure by obeying laws. Jesus Christ does not give us rules and regulations — He gives us in His teachings those truths that can only be interpreted by His nature which He places within us. The great wonder of Jesus Christ’s salvation is that He changes our heredity. He does not change human nature — He changes its source, and thereby its motives as well.”  Jesus knows we will remain a “perverse” and “faithless” generation until we learn the Lessons that He has been Teaching by His Life and is about to Teach with the ULTIMATE Lesson: His Death, Burial, and Resurrection! The only way we can see the kingdom of heaven is to accept the Gift of Righteousness offered to us by Jesus Christ who proves the Love of God by sacrificing Himself for our sins. The only way to have the Righteousness of Christ is to have Christ Himself and the change that He imparts with His Holy Spirit which will dwell in us “eternally”. Only through Jesus can we have True Eternal Security and that seems like a pretty good thing to take and present to God at the Final Judgment don’t you think?!?!?