Joined to Jesus

 Joined to Jesus

 

If you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it.

JAMES 1.25

Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives.

COLOSSIANS 3.16

The word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable.

HEBREWS 4.12-13

 

When two people get married, it’s usually because they want to be together. They want to spend the rest of their lives talking and listening to each other, spending time with each other, and caring for each other. Can you imagine two people who go through a marriage ceremony and never talk to each other again? Would that even be a real marriage?

When we join ourselves to Christ, we’re not just going through a religious ceremony or one-time experience. We’re entering into a personal relationship, a love relationship. And if we want to have a real connection with God, then we will spend the rest of our lives talking to him, enjoying being with him, and listening to him. It’s not that we expect to hear an audible voice when he speaks to us. We listen to him by reading, thinking about, and memorising his Word, the Bible. We draw strength from it and rely on it to help us make decisions. It makes us happy, and we like to listen.

If you were married to Mr. Smith, you might call yourself Mrs. Smith to show you were connected to Mr. Smith. Calling yourself a Christian is the same idea. It means that you are intimately connected to Christ. And the ways we relate to Christ day by day are through his Word and prayer. These are the ways we stay connected to him in an authentic and not just a ceremonial way. We get close and stay close to God by talking to him through prayer and listening to him as we read the Bible.