The Fellowship Of His Sufferings

Check out the $50.00 Contest details of this book @ www.apprehended.ca

This Post is From The 4th Chapter of My Newly Released Christian Book 

"Apprehended & Apprehending"

Chapter Title: The Fellowship of His Sufferings

.......If you truly receive Him in your heart and you immediately die afterwards, then you are indeed saved, and at judgment time, God will judge and reward you according to His own sets Standards. Remember God is God, He said to Moses in Exodus 33:19,

“ … For I will show mercy to anyone I choose, and I will show compassion to anyone I choose”

It is not our place to corner Him by using the story of the thief on the cross. Besides, the event of the thief on the cross is so much deeper than meets the eyes.

The next big thing we should consider is that Scriptures teach us there is no such thing as being saved and having the pause button on our Christian life perpetually pressed until He comes. Christ had a lot of followers who did not really believe in Him but wanted something from Him. We also know from Scriptures that a relationship with Him is a dynamic one. Therefore, if indeed we have received Him, we need to do the next best thing He asks of us, which is taking up our cross and go on with Him as His follower. The choice is clear here. So, instead of examining God, I would suggest that we learn to examine our actions, motives, and attitudes first. It is incomprehensible to see how many professed Christians simply dismiss some of the examples we have in the Bible as to how God will be dealing with His own people who are not able to hold fast in the faith. In Matthew 25:1-13, we have the story of the 5 foolish virgins who did not have oil, which incidentally, represented the work of our faith, the faith that keeps you going forward with Him. We also have the Parable of the Seed in Luke 8:13, and what about the Parable of the Talents and the demise of the last servant in Matthew 25:30? Sadly most of us do not understand how important it is to live Christianity with a spiritual balance that is found solely through an exchanged life WITH and IN Christ (1 John 3:1-3 & Colossians 3:3-4.) the exchanged life simply means that He has become your whole life while your life is in Him. Strangely when this is known to your soul, you can see this paradox with your spiritual eyes and it all seems so simple.

Please visit us at www.apprehended.ca to download "free" 2nd chapter of this book 

All formats of this book are available on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Alibris, and online only with Smashwords

Please visit my site www,apprehended.ca to see my  6 months personal guarantee. If you do not like this book you are refunded, no questions asked.  Plus there is an opportunity to win $50.00 Cash through Paypal or Amazon gift certificate

Holidays Contest - $50.00 Gift Certificate From Amazon

Holidays Contest  Visit the Website for details on how to enter

Please Share this Post!

Details at www.apprehended.ca

Contest ends December 20, 2012 @ 11:59

Happy 

tweeting! 

Life On Earth Has Never Been About Us!

When God deemed you privileged enough to experience what it means to live a life on earth according to his purpose, it is something personal and powerful. I remember in 2005 when I began to go though the wilderness torments, just for a moment which even today seems a life time flashed before me, He showed me how that everything He was going to put me through had nothing to do with me and it was not about me. That was the strangest thing to see how all the pain, the loss, the hardships, and all the adversities even though they were happening to me were not about me. Of course back then I assumed that the episode that I was going through was going to last only a few months. I am glad God did not show me the whole path that I was going to go through for seven years in the wilderness. I would have been spooked and miss out on righteousness, knowledge, wisdom, patience, Agape love, intimacy, faith and all that I have found through going  forward with Him.

I still remember how baffled I was to live out the beauty of being born for a purpose, yet I was puzzled as to how did we manage to make things so much about us. This vision God showed me was not meant just for me. Through it, I understood that God was totally misunderstood by us. I felt like a human being was more like an experiment that has gone wrong. Through the capabilities He put in us, we used them to turn against Him. Each one of us was meant to be a tiny part of a much bigger picture. We are like the tiny pixels that make up the element of a digital picture. Or another comparison would be the tiny fibers of a thread that is used to put together and weave a canvas

We have nothing; absolutely nothing we can offer God that would satisfy Him. The reason is that nothing that we possess belongs to us. Every breath we take, our finances big or small, our possessions, our children, our knowledge etc, all belong to Him. Even the first commandment that is so dear to His heart, we cannot even come close to loving Him if He does not put His Agape Love in our heart, He cannot accept our love because our love is not a selfless love. The only prize possession we possess and that He is after is us coming back to Him so that we can be put back into a relationship where once again He is the Master. The only way possible to do that is through a surrender of the self back to Him.  He wants us to do it, because we recognize who we are in Him. In our helplessness we have come to realize that without Him we are incapable of taking care of ourselves.  He alone has the schematics of our lives. Anything else we create on our own is apart from Him and His vision for us.

Through this revelation, God wanted to impart to me the fact that my life was not about me at all. He succeeded. It is funny, all these years I have been so busy focussing on learning to live a life where He was given His proper place (my Creator) and role (my Master) that I forgot to look at this experience in any other way. That is until this morning when I started reading Oswald Chambers devotional

Go to my website for details on the Holiday Contest!

Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost for His Highest"

Devotional for November 5

Partakers Of His Sufferings

"Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings." — 1 Peter 4:13

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all, they are meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be surprised at what you come across. Oh, I can't deal with that person. Why not? God gave you ample opportunity to soak before Him on that line, and you barged off because it seemed stupid to spend time in that way.

The sufferings of Christ are not those of ordinary men. He suffered "according to the will of God," not from the point of view we suffer from as individuals. It is only when we are related to Jesus Christ that we can understand what God is after in His dealings with us. It is part of Christian culture to know what God's aim is. In the history of the Christian Church the tendency has been to evade being identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; men have sought to procure the carrying out of God's order by a short cut of their own. God's way is always the way of suffering, the way of the "long, long trail."

Are we partakers of Christ's sufferings? Are we prepared for God to stamp our personal ambitions right out? Are we prepared for God to destroy by transfiguration our individual determinations? It will not mean that we know exactly why God is taking us that way, that would make us spiritual prigs. We never realize at the time what God is putting us through; we go through it more or less misunderstandingly; then we come to a luminous place, and say - ' 'Why, God has girded me, though I did not know it!"

Copyright Statement
Taken from 'My Utmost for His Highest', by Oswald Chambers. © l935 by Dodd Mead & Co., renewed © 1963 by the Oswald Chambers Publications Assn., Ltd., and is used by permission of Barbour Publishing, Uhrichsville, Ohio. All rights reserved.