I'm on a roll with all these guest posts! I'm kind of glad. I feel like I have more to write, but I don't know what it is right now. So here is a guest post from my littlest (and youngest) sister, Kristen. :)
Joyful Waiting. Waiting Joyfully. Filled with joy in the process of waiting. Joy. Wait.
After Valerie asked me to write a guest post I got really excited but then also apprehensive. I’m not much of a writer. But here it goes!
While thinking about the topic of joyfully waiting many different scenarios came to mind. However, they all have something in common. Waiting, waiting, waiting…
There is something that needs to be broken off of our culture. We have to stop waiting for our “life” to start. We go from “once I’m in high school, then I’ll feel grown up”, to “once I graduate college” to “once I have a real job” to “once I get married” to “once I have kids” to this to that. We continue to wait to grow up and wait for life to start. What if we lived with the mindset that our life is NOW. Not tomorrow, not two years from today, but now.
Our life is now and our life is for Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven. In that we can find JOY. We have to model our lives after Jesus, after all we are Christ Followers. What did his daily life look like? He lived in the moment and for the people. And he wants us to do the same. John sums it up for us, check out 1 John 4 7-21 ::
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
How did Jesus keep his focus on loving people? He had an eternal mindset, He knew the Father’s heart, and He had a sense of urgency for the hour that He lived in. We should model our lives after Jesus and do the same. In this we will find JOY. For there is no truer joy than to see…
Someone FOUND who was once lost
Someone FREED who was once bound.
Someone DANCE who was once lame.
Someone HEALED who was once sick
Someone ALIVE who was once dead
they had an encounter with the King of Kings because someone was Jesus to them.
“Freely you have received; freely give”
To see more posts in this series just click on the label "31 Days" under the title of each post in this series, or go back to Day 1 here and choose from the list of days listed at the bottom of the post.
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