Posted in Christian Living

Prayer: the Workhorse of Hard Faith

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Why do we pray? Because God listens. Because He is Sovereign over every life, whether we choose to submit to His authority or not. Because He is holy, most holy, and the one, true God. Because He is worthy of our praises, often and always. Because only God saves, allowing we who are stained with sin to be washed clean by the blood of His Son. Because prayer, along with study of His Word, shows us the way, even among the murky waters of daily living. Because the act of genuine prayer draws us ever closer to God.

The Bible is replete with examples of ways to pray, examples we can study as guides for our own prayers. Jesus tells us to pray like this:

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,
(we honor God as the Supreme Being of the Universe)

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
(we acknowledge God’s Sovereignty over heaven and earth)

Give us this day our daily bread,
(we take each day as it comes and trust in God to provide as we need, without worrying about future days’ troubles we don’t even have yet)

and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
(we offer our true repentance for our unforgiven sins and remind ourselves to forgive others just like we hope to be forgiven)

Lead us not into temptation,
(we show God our desire to walk along the narrow way that leads to true, Christian living and our need to submit our will to the will of God, our Sovereign)

and deliver us from the evil one.
(God is our protection from not just evil in general but also from the very real designs the devil has on us to distract us from our walk with God)

For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever.
(Again, we praise God for all the ways He blesses us and continue to acknowledge His sovereignty over all)

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.
(we acknowledge the ways the God-head supports us as we seek the path of righteousness: God, our God, our Father God, Jesus, our Savior King who lived as human and died for all of us sinners who acknowledge His Lordship, the Holy Spirit of God that dwells inside of and guides all those who accept Jesus as Lord and King)

Prayer is a muscle, and like any other muscle, it requires regular exercise or else it will atrophy. Just like an unexercised muscle becomes flabby, even useless, the less we pray, the weaker our walk of faith becomes. Please don’t be that person who waits to pray only when things get bad or scary. Yes, God listens when we speak to Him, but how will you learn to be patient, trusting in God for answers, even when the answer is no, if your prayer is rare and fear-driven?

Just like you might begin an exercise plan with a walk to the end of your street and back each day, your early prayers may be brief. You may feel stilted or lack words. But, eventually, you will become more comfortable speaking to God because you will have continued to pray. Reading prayers like those found in Psalms, offering other verses you love, and seeking prayer mentors among your church community are just a few of the ways you can practice prayer. These are also great ways to freshen your prayer-ability when you find yourself becoming repetitive instead of focusing on the words you offer God.

Prayer is more than a fair or foul weather friend. Making prayer an active part of your life will give you the foundation to cope with whatever this life throws at you, even when life throws you the kind of problems that seem insurmountable. Because God is the God who comes through when hard faith is the only thing you have left on which to cling, learning to use prayer daily in your life will serve you well, especially in your toughest times.

In Christ,

Ramona

Photo by Pixabay:

Posted in Christian Living

God’s Life-Map: Back-to-Basics

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

I know Jesus is, not was, not merely a great philosopher-prophet, but is. He existed with God before earth began. Well into the 20th century, much of the world delineated time itself by marking that which existed before Christ (BC) and that which came in the year of the Lord (AD for the Latin Anno Domini). That phrase, in the year of the LORD, offers another clue that Jesus is, for every year since His arrival on earth indeed marks a year of the Lord!

Just because our Savior is a living God, we should not confuse the contrary nature of we living humans with the true, unchanging nature of the Lord. Despite all the changes in our culture, God has not changed. As He admonishes us throughout the Bible, God expects us to follow the same “rules” now as always. Jesus sums up God’s life-map in two simple, but deep concepts:

  • Love God first. Acknowledge that God is King of your life, committing your whole self (mind, body, and spirit), to God’s life-map of Christian living. When you allow yourself to be led by your desire to serve God, you please Him and generally do not find yourself in messes of your own making.
  • Love others (and treat others) just like you want to be treated, which does not mean assuming everyone else thinks like you, but means to treat others with the patience and kindness and openness that we all desire. If we’ve learned nothing else in the last decade, it should be that people are driven to extremes when they do not feel that they’ve been heard.

God wants us to build treasures in heaven, not pleasures of the flesh that go against His teaching or that become more important in our lives than God Himself. If we want to be servants of God, we cannot prioritize the things of this earth over our pursuit of serving Him.

God’s basic life-map guide begins in the ten commandments, back-to-basics. If you want some practical steps to living God, you should write those commandments on your very heart, carrying them with you daily, sharing them and supporting other believers in their pursuit in doing God’s will.

Here’s what living for God looks like:

  • We make God our priority. We pray and study His Word. We take the time to consider our words and actions and how they align with God’s purpose before speaking or taking action.
  • We control our fleshly desires. God wants a man to choose a woman, that the two may become one flesh, bound to each other for a lifetime. He doesn’t approve of sex outside the bounds of marriage. He doesn’t like divorce, but wants us to be committed to working toward a strong marriage. He longs for us to succeed in our lifetime commitment to our significant others.
  • We stay in our lane. If we are each Christians, we should approach each other in love, studying His Word together and praying for the success of the other. When we are communicating with non-believers, we should concentrate even more on exhibiting the qualities of love and compassion and mercy that God infuses into our lives when we accept Him as Savior and live like we mean it.
  • We recognize God alone is our judge and realize how little progress in change we will support if we approach others in condemnation. Yes, it is a fine line between not wishing to condemn and yet upholding God’s truth, but speaking from a place of love should never involve bitter or bad words. If we remember that people embracing the things of this world don’t know God, how much gentler will our approach be? We want to show how positive a life can be when God comes first, not drive someone further from our Savior because of our words or actions.
  • We watch our tongues. We recognize that leading with our emotions/feelings instead of on the solid foundation of God’s truth goes against what God asks us to do.
  • We react in love instead of hatred. We take a moment to really put ourselves in another’s shoes. We pray for the needs of others and pay attention when God leads us to be part of someone’s solutions. We don’t honk rudely and gesture in traffic. We don’t make rude comments on social media, even if we disagree or get called names first.
  • We prioritize treasures in heaven, which means putting our thoughts in alignment with God’s Word. The Bible is not a book to be interpreted as each person sees fit, picking and choosing the parts they like with the sections they refuse to acknowledge. As a believer, the more often I read through His words to us, the more I see how God has always been the same. He has always loved. He has always been patient with us. He has always been honest. He does what He says, even if that doing sometimes means disciplining us, just as any loving father disciplines his child, preparing that child for adulthood.
  • We do not hate, steal, kill, covet, but seek to have a heart for God, which naturally spreads to love for others.

I know God clearly abhors sin, especially the sins of an unrepentant heart. Any sin makes us unclean. God doesn’t prioritize our bad deeds. Any bad deed makes us less than holy, so that only through the blood of Jesus may any of us communicate with our God. Not one of us is without sin. I should remember that whenever I am tempted to condemn others.

My life-map with God has good days and bad. By the grace of God, I am able to work toward improving my steps with Him, and that in itself is a full-time, lifetime journey. I pray that my life and words drive others toward God and not away from Him. In the end, each person must make that journey toward God for him/her-self, for we all will have our moment to stand before the Lord of Angel Armies and answer for the map we have created of our lives.

In Christ,
Ramona

Photo by Andrew Neel:

Posted in Christian Living, Christianity

Is God King of Your Life?

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

6 When Samuel heard their demand—“Give us a king to rule us!”—he was crushed. How awful! Samuel prayed to God.

7-9 God answered Samuel, “Go ahead and do what they’re asking. They are not rejecting you. They’ve rejected me as their King. From the day I brought them out of Egypt until this very day they’ve been behaving like this, leaving me for other gods. And now they’re doing it to you. So let them have their own way. But warn them of what they’re in for. Tell them the way kings operate, just what they’re likely to get from a king.”

1 Samuel 8:6-9 the Message

Am I a citizen of the kingdom of God, bowing to His will as my King? Or am I the king of myself, a victim of the tyranny only a human king can inflict, even if that human operates with the best of intentions?

Even though my prayer every morning is to do God’s will for my life that day, I know that I am incredibly practiced at holding on to things I am meant to hand over to God. One of my coping mechanisms for my generalized anxiety disorder is definitely worrying over all the possible scenarios of a thing as if my “control” will somehow affect the outcome. But that control is truly an illusion. And my mind, which is imagining all the things that can go wrong and what can I do to prevent them, isn’t being helped, but rather it is being put into a state of even more anxiety with this poor pattern.

Still, God has patience with me that I don’t understand but openly receive. How many times in my life has He proven to me that even the worst thing I can imagine happening does not end me? I may experience inconveniences and maybe even incredible pain, but when I look for my King-God, He is always there, ready to comfort me when I am at my lowest.

So many examples come to my mind, but perhaps the least maudlin of them involve my house. First, it took me almost three years to find the right house at the right time in the competitive Houston market. I have lived here for more than 20 years. Everything I ever worried about home ownership before taking the plunge into it, I have experienced and survived in this house of mine. And I mean everything:

Foundation cracked/repair–check
Roof leaks–check
Plumbing leaks–check
Washing machine water all over my floor–check
Termites–check
Carpenter ants–check
HVAC replaced–check
Etc., etc., etc.

In each of these instances, I spent more time worrying about how the problem would get fixed, even when God sent me just the right person to fix it. Picture me sitting in my chair worrying about the work the person who is trained is doing, as if I am the one doing the actual work! Fortunately, I am getting better at reminding myself that fixing the problem rests on the trained person’s shoulders, not my own.

Maybe better, but certainly not flawless.

The stories in Judges show us again and again how tragic life can be when we try to rule ourselves instead of submitting to the will of God. Samuel, the final judge in Israel, saw his share of this erroneous behavior. Despite his strong commitment to doing God’s will (he had spent his entire life in the house of God, dedicated to His service), he failed to raise children with the same commitment. In fact, his sons were so terrible at the prospect of inheriting one of them as a judge in part prompted the people to call for a king.

Even though Samuel goes into great detail to warn Israel about the tyranny of a human king, the people want to have one, convinced that a nation lead by a king just like all the other nations around them is what they require to finally conquer everyone and rule the Promised Land. Like me, they have conveniently forgotten all the times before when God showed up, literally, and saved them from enemies and even from themselves. He saved them from Egypt, fed them in the desert for more than 40 years, gave them Jericho and fertile ground for their crops.

What does Israel trade God’s kingship for? Instead of ending violence, Saul’s kingship puts Israel under the strain of preparing for it. His war engine includes chariots and weaponry that must be created and tended by men. His treasury requires taxes on a nation already oppressed under the tyranny of the Philistines, the latest enslavers God has allowed to conquer Israel because they have forgotten their covenant with Him. Saul subjugates them to reactive, irrational decisions based more on his impulses than any guidance sought from God.

Saul is so terrible as a king, that God quickly decides to choose another. And the man He chooses, a boy really at the time, is the kind of person we could all take a lesson from in terms of trusting God as King.

When he enters the Bible story, David is the runt of his father Jesse’s eight children, from the smallest family in the smallest clan in the smallest tribe, Benjamin. Because God can do all things, even using the lowliest of people, David’s descendants would one day include our Savior Jesus Christ, He who saved all the world from the consequences of our sin.

But before that, before God turned him into the greatest of Israel’s human kings, David served as a shepherd for his father’s sheep, honing his survival skills and his reliance on God’s protection to do his job well. “God delivered me from the teeth of the lion and the claws of the bear,” David declares, giving credit to God for every victory in his life.

Nowhere is David’s reliance on God as his King more apparent than when the lowly shepherd David took on the Philistine super soldier Goliath. Picture this. The armies of Israel and Philistine in all their glory face off on separate hills with a valley in between them. Every day for 40 days, a giant of a man, Goliath, standing over ten feet and decked out in 126 pounds of armor, stomped into the valley with his armor bearer to taunt Israel.

“Send me your champion,” Goliath says. “Let this be a contest between him and me and let the victor become master over the other.”

Every day, Goliath repeated this ritual, and every day, Israel looked on, quaking in their boots. One day, David is among the onlookers, but instead of their fears, he finds himself outraged at Goliath’s complete disregard for God.

“Who does he think he is, anyway,” David asks, “this uncircumcised Philistine taunting the armies of God-Alive?”

Just as God saved David from the hazards of watching sheep, He would also save him from the challenge of fighting the Philistine champion. David tells King Saul, “Don’t give up hope. I’m ready to go and fight.”

Not only did David feel a righteous rage on behalf of God, he so trusted in God to bring him victory that he entered the valley armed only with the tools he’d carried in his other dangerous encounters, a shepherd’s tools, including five smooth stones and a sling.

David answered, “You come at me with sword and spear and battle ax. I come at you in the name of God-of-the-Angel-Armies, the God of Israel’s troops, whom you curse and mock. This very day God is handing you over to me. I’m about to kill you, cut off your head, and serve up your body and the bodies of your Philistine buddies to the crows and coyotes. The whole earth will know that there’s an extraordinary God in Israel. And everyone gathered here will learn that God doesn’t save by means of sword or spear. The battle belongs to God–He’s handing you to us on a platter!”

(1 Samuel 17:46-49 the Message)

If God is truly King of my life, if I live in obedience to His Word and place my destiny in His hands just like David, what victories for His kingdom might I also experience? This is the focus that lays the firmest foundation for Christian living.

Is your God truly your God-Alive? Because He loves us so much, we have the opportunity to start each day anew, to choose to look to God instead of ourselves and to know the joy that is His alone to give.

In Christ,
Ramona

Photo by Allen Beilschmidt sr.:

Posted in Christian Fiction, Romantic Fiction

48 Hour Flash Deal Beginning Sunday, May 21

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

I began this blog many years ago because I wanted to write fiction novels, good, Christian-based fiction novels, and I thought a blog might be a good place to begin building an audience. Instead, my blog quickly became a place where I have concentrated on exploring what it means to live a Christian life. In a way, I have been refining my understanding of God and His Word in order to help me write better novels.

And I did continue to write novels. I now have nine of them published on Amazon. Some are pure romances, while others include mysteries in their plots. But they all strive to show what living and loving God looks like when you get down to the nitty-gritty.

Whether you’ve read one of my novels before or not, I’d appreciate you taking some time to check out my work at my website: ramonalevacy.com. The books there are linked to their Amazon pages where you can purchase them if you are interested. In appreciation to all my readers, I’m running a Flash Sale on most of them this Sunday and Monday, just 99 cents per title for the ebook versions!

Is God king of your life?

I want to say yes to this statement in earnest, but I know that I still try too hard to control all the aspects of my life and have not released control to allow God to do His job, to let Him be my king. I know I am not alone in this struggle. When I read about the time of the Judges and the subsequent push in Israel to have an earthly king like all the other peoples around them, I recognize some of that same stubbornness and backward thinking in myself.

In my next blog post, I hope to explore the value of God as my King and the chaos that ensues when I try to run my life all by myself. What does a life lived in such obedience look like? What victories ensue when one recognizes the ultimate authority of God every moment of every day, in every action and reaction that challenges and even just plain living require?

6 When Samuel heard their demand—“Give us a king to rule us!”—he was crushed. How awful! Samuel prayed to God.

7-9 God answered Samuel, “Go ahead and do what they’re asking. They are not rejecting you. They’ve rejected me as their King. From the day I brought them out of Egypt until this very day they’ve been behaving like this, leaving me for other gods. And now they’re doing it to you. So let them have their own way. But warn them of what they’re in for. Tell them the way kings operate, just what they’re likely to get from a king.”

1 Samuel 8:6-9 the Message

In Christ,
Ramona

Posted in Christian Living, Love, Uncategorized

Seeing Our Lives In God’s Story

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

I think the book of Judges is one of those parts of the Bible that people use for excuses to disdain or discard the Word of God. After all, if that is one’s intent, there seems to be plenty of horrible human behavior to choose from: strangers subject to assault in the towns they visit, people creating idol gods and pretending they are the God of Israel, a concubine chopped into twelve pieces and shipped across Israel, sparking a civil war. Everywhere you look in Judges, you find examples of improper living.

But those who feel that God somehow condones these wayward, even shameful, behaviors just because they are in the Bible to begin with are missing a very simple “clue” that emphasizes the position between these horror stories of human behavior and the sovereignty of God’s story. “At that time there was no king in Israel,” Judges explains. “People did whatever they felt like doing” (Judges 21:25–the Message). Other versions translate it as everyone doing what he thought was right.

When God says there was no king in Israel, He really means that Israel refused to accept Him as their king, which is why every person in Israel did what was “right” by human, and NOT Godly, standards. Remember, only God is holy, a perfection we humans cannot achieve without the intervention of Christ to wash us clean of our sins and mediate for us before the holy throne of the Almighty.

When we act on our own, we leave ourselves vulnerable to disrespecting ourselves as well as others, acting on our anger, lying, cheating, hurting the innocent, promoting the agenda of the evil one instead of the Great One. In other words, we get the kind of world that we see in Judges.

But even in a world where man denies God, God finds a way to continue His story of redemption and love. Thanks be to God, He is so patient, so slow to anger, lest we all be condemned to hell. Peter writes,

Don’t overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost. He’s giving everyone space and time to change.

2 Peter 3: 8-9 (the Message)

As we come to understand that our lives only attain importance (even to ourselves) when we see them in respect to God’s story and not the other way around, we discover an overriding theme that will help us read the Bible while learning practical ways to apply its lessons in our lives. We will start to see and think about the events of our lives as they pertain to God’s Story.

Ruth’s story begins without God being a part of it. A Moabite by birth, she has grown up in a pagan country, learning to worship manmade idols. But then she marries a Jew who has migrated to her country during a time of severe famine in Israel. She lives with her husband’s family, including his parents, his brother and his brother’s wife. Perhaps she would have spent many years like this, learning about the God of Israel from her new family, but the evils of this world intervene.

Having lost first her father-in-law and then her husband and brother-in-law, Ruth finds herself at a fork in the road. Her mother-in-law, Naomi, decides to go back to her homeland. Knowing she can bear no more children, assuming that her life is completely over, Naomi encourages her two daughters-in-law to return to their family homes and even to their idol gods.

Orpah takes Naomi up on her offer, heading back to Moab. But Ruth makes a two-prong decision that will change the course of her life as well as fit that life quite neatly into God’s story of redemption. She decides to never leave Naomi, and Ruth promises to make Naomi’s God her God as well.

Everything that follows reads more like a sweet romance than a story of “biblical” proportions, proving how even ordinary lives such as our own are important to the fabric of the grand tapestry God continues to create because of His love for us.

To feed herself and Naomi, Ruth goes to gather grain from gleanings, coincidentally in Boaz’s field. Without at first knowing who she is, Boaz treats her with great respect anyway. Imagine Ruth’s surprise when Naomi tells her Boaz is actually a relative of Naomi’s late husband! That means Boaz can redeem Naomi and Ruth by marrying the younger woman, saving them from their precarious position.

Living up to her commitment, Ruth continues to strive to follow her mother-in-law’s instruction as well as honoring God. When Naomi instructs Ruth in the art of letting Boaz know that she is ready for marriage, Ruth doesn’t hesitate. She goes to the grinding floor and stretches out at Boaz’s feet, just as Naomi has told her.

When Boaz awakes with a beautiful, young woman at his feet, he too acts in a way that shows he believes in and follows God. He admits to Ruth that one relative has the first right to marry Ruth and carry on the name of her father-in-law’s family. Boaz loses no time in confronting this relative with the offer of his redemption rights. When that relative refuses, Boaz marries Ruth.

And here is where Ruth’s ordinary life, lived in obedience to God, lends itself to the purpose of redemption in God’s story. It turns out she is the great-great-grandmother of King David, the man with a heart like God’s from whose lineage Jesus will enter the world to save it.

God’s story, as I have been emphasizing these past weeks, is a love story between Creator and that which He has created. Everything God does from beginning to end is because of His love for us. Who among us believers could want anything different or better than having our lives entwined in the greatest story of love ever to be told, a story that God continues to write because He is patient and abounding in mercy, a story that continues because of lives just like our own?

In Christ,
Ramona

Photo by Alexander Grey:

Posted in Christian Living

God Never Changes

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

I’ve been writing this April about God being the same from the beginning. He has loved us even before He breathed life into Adam. He freed the slaves from Egypt and led them in the wilderness to the Promised Land because He loved them.

From the beginning, God also wanted us to have the freedom to choose. This freedom meant Adam and Eve chose to make the mistake of eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Israel wandered in the wilderness an extra 40 years before taking over the Promised Land because despite all the wonders they had seen as God freed them from Egypt, despite knowing God’s ability to do mighty, miraculous things, they still lost faith and even built a golden idol to replace the real God!

God has always been holy, holy in a way that surpasses all our human ability to understand. He longs for our ability to be in His presence. For Israel, that meant God revealed in detail what He wanted and expected from them–the dos and don’ts of Godly living that all of us who believe should strive to follow. God lived among Israel, and yet they would not always obey Him. Imagine how lax the rest of us can get. That’s why Paul tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Breaking even one of God’s laws puts a person outside of the law and unable to stand in God’s Holy Presence. Before Christ, all sin and uncleanness required ritual and sacrifice to atone for the sin and to redeem the sinner. The life of a body, man or beast, lies in the blood, God tells Israel, which is why they were not to eat the blood of any animal. It is why, ultimately, Jesus had to spill His lifeblood in order to atone for our sins and redeem all who believe. Yet Jesus’ mercy and grace does not negate our need to come before God in purity.

God provided a path back to Holiness and obedience. He taught the Israelites how to atone for their sins and redeem their broken souls. Through sacrifice, through the lifeblood of a stand-in for the punishment they deserved, sinners might become holy again and draw closer to God.

Before Christ came, only one person in Israel, the High Priest, might enter the very inner sanctum of the tabernacle, where the ark of God rested. Even he could never be sure of his reception–did he have a sin he had not acknowledged? was he otherwise standing before God less than holy?–so that he would have a rope tied around his ankle to pull him out from the inner veil should he die upon looking at the power of God where it rested over the ark between the two cherubim. If he did not have the rope attached, no one could enter the sanctum and remain clean, since a dead body defiled any person who came into contact with it. Coming before God was/is a very serious proposition indeed.

Luckily for us, God’s love extends to His mercy and grace, as ultimately offered to us through Jesus’s perfectly-lived life and ultimate sacrifice once and for all to cover us in His holiness. For those who believe Jesus is LORD, we are able to come into God’s inner sanctum, His high throne, with Jesus as our High Priest and mediator. When we acknowledge our sin and truly repent, we can come before God in joy and without fear. Paul explains,

“Long before he [GOD] laid down earth’s foundations, he had us on his mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago, he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. . . . Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people–free of penalties and punishments chalked up by all our misdeeds. And not just barely free, either. Absolutely free!

(Ephesians 1:3-10 the Message)

Because Jesus had such a gentle approach, we tend to fall victim to thinking Jesus negates the God of the Old Testament. But close study of the Bible in total will reveal that God and Jesus are one in love and in their expectations. God as Jesus expects us to obey every bit as much as the God of Moses. Just because Jesus made a sacrifice of Himself so we might be redeemed once and for all does not mean we stop needing to ask for cleansing of our sins before we can expect to come before God. At the core of each covenant, the covenant Jesus made living and dying for us and God’s covenant with the people of Israel, is the idea of obedience to God:

As Moses went up to meet GOD, GOD called down to him from the mountain: “Speak to the House of Jacob, tell the People of Israel: ‘You have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to me. If you will listen obediently to what I say and keep my covenant, out of all peoples you’ll be my special treasure. The whole Earth is mine to choose from, but you’re special: a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.'”

Exodus 19: 3-6 the Message

Jesus’ gift of atonement once and for all does not release us from the need to be obedient. “If you find the godless world is hating you,” Jesus tells us, “remember it got its start hating me. If you lived on the world’s terms, the world would love you as one of its own. But since I picked you to live on God’s terms and no longer on the world’s terms, the world is going to hate you” (John 15: 18-19 the Message). Again, Paul puts it this way:

I ask — ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory — to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of his glorious way of life he has for Christians, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust in him — endless energy, boundless strength. . . . Wow God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.

Ephesians 1:15-19; 2:7-10 the Message

Despite all the ways this world keeps changing, we Christians can grasp onto the truth that God loves us. He loved us in the distant past. He loves us now. He will love us in the future. Making Him a priority in our lives only draws us nearer to the greatest love of all, a gift from God that may make us stand out from the ways of this world but that will lead us to store lasting treasure in the only place where treasure never tarnishes or goes away, the heavenly home God has prepared for all who believe.

In Christ,
Ramona

Photo by S Migaj:

Posted in Christian Living, Christianity

God, Who Saved His People Out Of Egypt

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

And Saves Us Now, Once And For All

For more than 400 years, Israel lived as slaves under the strict rule of Egyptian masters. Nothing they achieved was for themselves or their families. Tied to the whims of those masters, they didn’t even protest when Pharaoh ordered their babies to be slaughtered!

But God had a plan for Israel, a plan that would solidify His place as the One, True God. That’s why He let Pharaoh harden his heart against Him. Because of Pharaoh’s stubbornness in refusing to let God’s people go, the Lord showed His awesome power. He performed miracles the likes of which had never before been seen. He turned the great Nile red with blood, plagued the Egyptians with hordes of frogs, locusts and gnats, damaged crops and livestock, and finally killed the firstborn of every Egyptian family while Passing Over the families of Israel.

The miracles didn’t stop there. He parted the waters of the Red Sea, provided manna for sustenance as they wandered in the wilderness, 600,000 strong, leading them by a mighty cloud by day and a fire at night, His presence always there with them. For forty years, He provided for and protected them as He led them in the wilderness, and then He helped them conquer the Land of Promise.

Despite how He loved them, despite the power He displayed and the love He showed them, Israel stumbled just like the rest of us. They sinned against God, gave up hope in His promises, and even created a golden idol as God appeared in their presence, speaking with Moses up on the mountain, shrouding the mountain in cloud and fire so awesome that the people dare not go near it.

Still, God loved them and longed to seal His covenant with them forever. God longed to be their king, the only King they would ever need. Reading through the Exodus story, we hear God remind His people over and over again, “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt, My mighty powers displayed.” God uses the time in the wilderness to teach them how to live a Godly life.

Why was such a God-centered life necessary for Israel? God is pure in a way we humans can only try to perceive. As He led Israel to the Promised Land, God appeared to Israel through the veil of clouds and fire because no one could hope to look upon the full Presence of God and expect to live. When Moses spoke to God personally, shrouded in that cloud, he returned to Israel with a glow on his face, created by the mere reflection of the pureness of God, that literally scared them so, Moses had to wear a veil to shield them from his radiant glory.

The need for a veil separating sinners from a Holy God is further reflected in God’s instructions for His Tabernacle, instructions so that His Presence might dwell there as He lived among His chosen people. The Holy of Holies, the most inner sanctum of that tabernacle, is where only the High Priest might enter, as close to God’s Presence as any person was allowed to be. And to go beyond that veil, the High Priest must himself be pure, atoned for and redeemed by the sacrifices and rituals God dictated for just that purpose.

All along, God continued to remind His people, not only of His power as displayed on the exodus from Egypt, but also of the personal relationship He longed to have with them. The phrase, “God, your God,” repeats over and over in Deuteronomy as Moses instructed the people on God’s commands. And as they began to conquer the Amorites and Canaanites and more to finally settle in the Promised Land, God reminded them of His power, how He would go before them and give them strength, just as He had in the past. Not only was He a personal God, He also must be known as “God, the God of Israel.”

More than a thousand years after the exodus from Egypt, God, our God chose to become God, our Savior, once and for all atoning for the sins you make and I make through the sacrifice of Jesus, God Who came to us living in human flesh, living a life without sin, and innocent, dying on a cross, once and for all saving all who choose to believe and to call Him Lord.

Salvation’s first step is accepting that the best control of your life belongs to God’s Higher Power. Submitting to His will, a problem for Israel even after all they had seen, assures that we are seeds planted in that deeper soil, flourishing for the sake of our Savior and His Kingdom. And in that place where God alone is King, we may kneel before His throne because Jesus’ sacrifice tore the curtain that once was needed to separate us. Jesus’ blood makes us pure before God.

Of the many lessons I learn from the Exodus story, I am most struck by the privilege it is to bow my head in prayer before the One, True God. And I am most aware that I am just as susceptible to mistakes and sin as Israel. How vigilant we must be to spend time in prayer with God, my God, God, your God. Like Israel we should know the Word of God, write it on our hearts, sear it into our souls, and act upon it with regularity and conviction. Like Israel, we must be aware of our susceptibility to fail in that mission.

Christians still need to repent of sins. We still need to acknowledge the will of God in our lives. We need to remember that we have been allowed into that Holy Place where God alone belongs. We fallible humans need the intervention Jesus gives. Because we must understand that need and not get too full of ourselves, I think the stories in the Bible show the good and the bad to warn us how easily we can fall short of God’s glory, too.

How fortunate we are that God’s love means Jesus’ sacrifice has absolved us once and for all! Walking with God in that personal relationship established from Genesis to Revelation, we can be strong and courageous in our real struggles with the challenges of this world, knowing we are no longer slaves to our sinfulness, but freed by the grace of God, the One and Only.

In Christ,
Ramona

Photo by Axel Sandoval

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Love from God’s Perspective

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Often when I pray, I like to take a moment to ponder all that God has done to make it possible for me to come into His presence. I especially appreciate this privilege when I read about the journey God’s chosen people took from slavery in Egypt to the fulfillment of God’s loving covenant, first in the Promised Land and ultimately in the sacrifice Jesus made of Himself to free us all from our slavery to sin and tie us to the Reverent Holiness of God.

But I’ve jumped ahead of myself because God’s love for us, as well as His desire to be in relationship with us, has its roots in the very beginning, when He created man and woman to care for all that He created. In the beginning, God even walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve, conversing with them without having to shield them from His full glory.

Unfortunately, this privilege was short-lived, for once Adam and Eve broke their bond with God by taking from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, they lost the ability to walk in step with God, who is all Holy. Having partaken of the fruit that revealed goodness and evil to their innocent minds, Adam and Eve were no longer innocent, but rather sinners in need of redemption before an all-Holy God, sinners who could not enter into the presence of God and expect to live.

Banned from their perfect life because of their own choices, Adam and Eve learn the hard way that life without holiness, life that is enslaved to sin, is a hard, cruel life. One son slays another. Crops fail. Childbirth sometimes leads to death. And through it all, how much they must have longed for the luscious Garden and those cool, loving walks with their Creator God.

Once we took that step away from God’s holiness, the further we fell into darkness, that existence in sin that takes us farther and farther away from God. At some point, humans fell into such depravity and so far away from God, that He chose to destroy the planet and start all over again, washing away every living thing in a flood that covered the earth. Except for Noah, whom God chose because of Noah’s faithfulness to the Lord, all other families were wiped out. Only Noah’s family, gathered in the Ark God told Noah to build, survived the torrential rain lasting 40 days, as well as the many months it took for the earth to dry out again.

When animals and humans alike descended from the ark to begin human history on earth anew, God was there, loving us and longing for us to seek relationship with Him. The Bible tells us He makes a covenant with Noah, his sons, and every living thing on earth, promising never to flood the earth again. He even places a rainbow in the sky as a sign that He would never again use a flood to destroy us, the rainbow serving as a reminder to us and to God of this covenant.

God cements His love for all humanity when He makes a covenant with a faithful and devout man named Abram (later known as Abraham). God promises Abram, a childless man well past the prime of life, that God will make him into a nation whose descendants will number beyond all the grains of sand on the seashore. God also promises to bless all of humanity through Abram’s direct line of descent, a promise that comes to full fruition when Jesus, coming from the line of Abraham, gives His perfectly-led life as sacrifice for all the wrath humanity deserves, so that we all may enter into a Holy Covenant with God, one that frees us from our slavery to sin and offers us the gift of the Holy Spirit in us, to guide us and to open the door to that Holy Sanctuary where God sits enthroned, always ready to listen.

I find myself going back and forth between the Old Testament and the New, if you will, because as many times as I have read the Bible, this time reading through the Old Testament, I see the most clearly how much the theme of God’s love is there, in every part of the Bible, even in the Old Testament stories that might seem the most brutal.

As John tells us,

The Word was first,
    the Word present to God,
    God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
    in readiness for God from day one.

 Everything was created through him;
    nothing—not one thing!—
    came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
    and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
    the darkness couldn’t put it out.

(John 1:1-5, the Message)

then,

The Word became flesh and blood,
    and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
    the one-of-a-kind glory,
    like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
    true from start to finish.

(John 1:14, the Message)

God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, always there, always working together for the purpose of reuniting the One and Only, Most Holy God with the creations He loves despite all our flaws and failures. Only Jesus on the Cross made atonement for my sinful nature. I am redeemed when I choose to follow Jesus and submit my will to His own. Only by the Holiness granted to us because of our belief in and submission to Christ and His sacrifice for us can we come before God and open up the depths of our hearts. We can “look” upon the Most Holy God and live.

But that only touches the surface of the story of God’s love for us. Next time, I will begin where we have left off. The beginning of the story of God’s chosen people, how He uses Abraham’s descendants to establish Himself as the Most High God in the minds of all humanity, a jealous God who loves us so much He wants us to love Him alone, not the idols and things of this world that distract us from our only, true need: knowing and embracing the love of God.

In Christ,
Ramona

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When the Faith You Need is a Hard Faith Be Ready: Foundations

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Faith is what we choose to believe despite what we can or cannot see. It begins with a childlike acceptance that God loves us so much, He was willing to come to the earth as a Son, to walk among us as one of us, subject to the same temptations and doubts we all bear. He live a flawless, sinless life, a Son who gave up His life on the cross, bearing the weight of the wrath of God for each one of us who chooses to believe.

As we grow in faith, we practice obedience to God’s Word and Ways as we come to understand that Word more and more. We know that God shows up whenever we call to Him. We experience the answering of prayers, even when those answers are no. We learn the value of seeking and enacting God’s will in our lives, especially when times get tough for us.

The foundations of faith are this.

  • God alone is our perfect Creator. He cannot lie or be double-minded. He cannot be all good and allow what is evil in his presence. He will do what He says He is going to do. By studying His Word, we learn more and more about the things that God will and will not accept from us and about the times when God has kept His promises.
  • God wants a relationship with us. He formed the earth and created a paradise garden, in which He placed one man and one woman, a couple who walked with God in that garden, who had a relationship with God that He actively sought. Later, after the Garden, God selects Abram, promising to not only be Abram’s God, but to also make a covenant with Abram’s descendants, a nation larger than all the grains of sand on a seashore. Much later, Jesus comes to earth as God’s perfect Son, the promised descendant of Abram, Who lives a sinless life, and dies on the cross for all the sins of humanity, the ultimate step between our one and only Creator and we whom He has created, the most important relationship any one of us can accept and choose to obey.
  • God hates sin. God is perfect, omnipotent, holy. His one goal for us, evident in the Old Testament every bit as much in the New, is to become holy as God is holy. Books like Exodus and Leviticus are filled with laws laid down by God to help us achieve that holiness. So, to sin against His holiness is to sever oneself from the holiness of God. Once severed, the relationship can only be amended by an act of atonement, which in Old Testament times meant sacrifice, the spilling of the blood of a perfect specimen, to honor God when He had been dishonored.
  • Sin requires redemption. God wants to be in relationship with us, but He cannot be in relationship with anyone who has chosen to disobey Him, stepping outside of holiness. Christ came to earth to live as a human, knowing He would be tempted, knowing His purpose in living would be to act as the sacrificial offering, a more perfect Lamb than had ever been offered, to atone for humanity’s sin once and for all. That means that Jesus has also become the High Priest for us. He intermediates between us and God, and He is always there to serve that role. The Holy Spirit that dwells in all who believe in Jesus helps guide us as we pray and as we listen for God’s still, quiet voice. The Apostle Paul writes that we are slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. He concludes that living to sin is a heavy burden, but that freeing oneself from sin by seeking to obey Christ, we experience a much lighter burden, just as Christ promises.
  • To be redeemed is to be obedient to God and His Word. Following Jesus is so much more than saying one believes. The only way to become holy as God is holy requires submitting one’s will to the will of God. We seek that will by knowing His Word, God’s Holy Bible, and not just someone else’s interpretation of it. We also pray often, listening for the Holy Spirit in us, not the yearnings of our own hearts. We gather together to lift each other up, striving toward the same goal. Holiness.
  • The only way to salvation is through one’s atonement of sin through Christ’s sacrifice and our belief in His Godly Authority. All have sinned and fall short of the glory, the holiness of God.  When we accept Christ as our savior, we accept that His sacrifice on the Cross redeemed us all from our sinfulness. We also join in a covenant with Jesus that we will take on His yoke by being ready to do what He says to do.  We will love God as the one and only God and obey Him with all our hearts, and minds, and souls. And we will love and treat other people as we love and treat ourselves.

This time of year, when our stores are filled with eggs and bunnies instead of Crosses and lambs, it’s important to think about the real reason for the season.  Like the perfect lamb of Israel’s tabernacle and temple days sacrificed in the presence of God to redeem the repentant of his sin, Jesus, the perfect Lamb on the Cross, took on the wrath of God for us. He suffered the punishment for sin, the absence of God. His dead body went into a tomb as a heavy stone sealed Him in. 

But the good news we celebrate at Easter is this: He is risen indeed! Jesus lives. And as a risen Christ, He makes us holy, holy so that we can come before God and speak to Him whatever is on our hearts, including seeking guidance on the way that we should go. This is a gift almost beyond our understanding.  Before Christ made His sacrifice, only the High Priest could come before the holy presence of God. He met God in the inner sanctum, behind a curtain that separated the holy from the holiest of holies. This was such an important moment, that the High Priest never just walked behind the curtain. He prepared by cleansing himself, putting on a special, holy wardrobe, and finally tying a rope around his ankle in case he profaned the altar and died there, so others could pull him out and not risk dying themselves. 

I try to remember how precious it is that Jesus works as my intermediary every time I choose to bow my head.  I think hard faith begins in those moments when we find the courage to admit our failings to a holy God and accept that He will actually forgive us because of what Jesus has done for us. I think this precious communication is why Jesus instructs us not to pray with mindless repetition, but to acknowledge God’s holiness and our need for Him to accomplish anything at all. 

The first step toward hard faith is having any faith, even if it is a tiny, fluttering spark waiting to break into a flame.  And that small seed of faith, laid in good ground, can turn into a wonderful, lifelong relationship with God. 

In Christ,
Ramona
Photo by Pixabay: 

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Waste Not, Want Not

Posted on by Ramona Levacy Billingslea

Every morning in the Billingslea house, we wake up to the plaintive cries of our adorable Ragdoll cat, who does her best to herd us out of bed and straight to the kitchen, where she knows we will give her a special morning food topper to start her day off correctly.

This special treat comes in a tube. Opening one and sometimes both ends, we carefully empty the liquid wonder with its tiny chunks of fish onto a plate, rolling the tube so that we squeeze out all the good bits.

Inevitably, I do not finish the job of preparing my cat’s special treat soon enough. She meows and even stretches against the cupboards, trying to reach up to the counter, anything to make me hurry up.

Explaining the situation to her the other day, I told her, “Waste not, want not.” I was thinking about the idea of valuing what we have and not throwing out things that are perfectly good. But the old adage struck a different chord in me as well.

At Christmas time, we celebrate the birth of God-come-to-earth, Jesus, Who came to love the world and offer it the one gift it could never give itself: redemption.

How often do I waste the grace and the faith that Jesus offers me every day and in abundance? I let the fears and worries of this world weigh me down, even though Jesus promises me that His burden is light and His love never-ending.

But there is another thing I do, and that is try to earn my salvation, instead of practicing faith. I waste faith and wind up yearning for it.

In Romans, Paul explains, “Whereas Israel, [though always] pursuing the law of righteousness, did not succeed in fulfilling the law. And why not? Because it was not by faith [that they pursued it], but as though it were by works [relying on the merit of their works instead of their faith]. They stumbled over the stumbling Stone [Jesus Christ]” (9:31-32).

It’s important to recognize my tendency to subconsciously pursue salvation through my works instead of using my works to render me closer into the image of Christ. When I function in the former paradigm, I create a constant tension that actually keeps me from doing my best for Jesus.

But when I walk by faith, I trust that God is actively making His will come true in my life because I concentrate on following Jesus’ example, growing with the help of the Holy Spirit instead of condemning myself for not being perfect all the time.

Sin is. In any given moment, I can choose to lean on Jesus, or give in to the temptations of the flesh. But if I don’t want to waste the gift of grace that saves me, I will practice the faith-filled ways that keep me closer to Jesus. I will pray often. I will praise God at every turn. I will study His Word. I will show His love to others through compassion and hospitality. I will ask God for guidance and learn to be comfortable in the silences between answers.

24 hours. That’s all we have in a day, and one day at a time is all we get. “Let tomorrow take care of itself,” Jesus says. “Today has enough troubles of its own.” Squeeze as much Jesus as you can out of each day, hour, minute.

Waste not, want not. When it comes to loving Jesus, faith means never being in want. Believe it.

Photo by Arina Krasnikova from Pexels