Guest post by Neely Beattie
I think that sometimes in life we feel like we’re just surviving. I know that I have definitely felt this way. Sometimes it feels like I’m seriously just living day to day, hoping to make it through to the end in one piece.
When you’re out in the wilderness, the first thing you need for survival is fire. Pretty much everything hinges on it. You need it for warmth, light, food, for fresh water… you need it to sustain and thrive. Jesus is our campfire. He is our campsite. He’s the Living Water, the Bread of Life. He’s our shelter. He gives us every single thing we need to survive the wilderness of life.
Without His light, the world can feel very dark, cold and empty. We are left with a hunger in the pit of our stomachs that cannot be satiated. We are left with a thirst that can’t be quenched. We feel vulnerable and lonely.
Sometimes we can feel like we’re on the brink of giving up. Jesus says in John 8:12,
“I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in the darkness but will have the light of life.”
He is necessary for us to survive. Everything in life and our survival hinges on Him. With Him, our hunger can be satiated, our thirst quenched. He makes life not so dark and cold. He provides us light and warmth. In Him we have a constant companion, who always roots for us and tells us we CAN keep going.
With Jesus burning for us, we can see. We can thrive. We can survive.
Set up camp with Jesus, friends. Let him be your campfire. Let Him give you life. Let Him light your way. Let Him sustain you.
The most important thing to understand about the plan of salvation is that it is God’s plan and not the world’s plan.
The world’s plan of salvation would be about being a good and moral person. It believes if you can just be good enough, do enough good things, and try to be kind and loving to others then you will be saved. But none of these things are part of God’s plan of salvation.
The microwave has ruined us.
Seriously.
I’m showing a little of my age right now, but stay with me.
When my mom was growing up, they didn’t have electricity. My grandmother, with seven children, washed the laundry over a wash basin. And, she cooked. From scratch.
By the time I was a kid, from scratch cooking wasn’t really a ‘thing.’ The microwave cooked waaaaaaaay faster and was waaaaaaay easier.
That line of thinking, faster and easier, permeated the thought process of society. And it has done nothing but gotten worse.
If a website doesn’t load in less than two seconds, it’s considered slow.
Raise your hand if you’ve clicked on a link, and when it didn’t open instantly, you clicked away and were off to the next one.
Raising my hand.
We’re all guilty.
Can we be real for a moment?
Like, for real, real?
You know as well as I do we make time for the things we want to make time for. End of story.
When we’re not reading the Bible and spending time with God, it’s a symptom of a larger problem.
A friend of mine and I went out to eat at a quirky, local, hole-in-the-wall restaurant. The tables bore the marks of years of use, and the booths were cramped and had holes in the vinyl. Basically, it's our favorite place to eat.
During dinner, my friend and I did what this friend and I always do, laugh way too loud and delve into all things Jesus. Not the surface-level, platitudes, but the deep. The messy. The ugly.
We talked about trusting God not just with the small things, but with the big things.
Our talk led me back to the night of the car wreck when I was standing on the side of the road, and Office Pirtle told me there were no survivors.
That was the moment my husband, five and a half-year-old daughter and 19-day old son died.
It took me back to the instant where life as I knew it was never the same.
It was the marker in my life of Before and After.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, if you wanted to study the Bible, you had to have a library full of commentaries, Bible dictionaries, and a good old Nave’s Topical study Bible.
When I began a serious study of the Bible, I spent the hundreds of dollars to order the necessary resources.
When the books arrived, I was excited to dive into them. While they are amazing, they’re bulky and require a concerted effort to use.
Since that time, a plethora of Bible resources are now available online and for free.
Despite having shelves full of resources, I find myself using these resources the majority of the time.
If you’ve been around our blog before, you probably already know I have a passion for reading the Bible. There’s nothing more transformative than being in God’s Word.
That certainly wasn’t always the case.
For the longest time, I would read and not understand a single thing I had just read. To say I was frustrated was an understatement.
Maybe that’s where you are today.
You want to read the Bible and grow in your faith, but you’re overwhelmed with life, and the last thing you want to do is add another thing to your to-do list. Especially something that leaves you feeling dumb.
The Bible is simple, but it isn’t easy.
