My favorite Bible verse has always been Psalm 23:1-6 which I suppose is a cliche of many Christians, but it has comforted me throughout my life even and especially in the times when I was most lost and confused and fearful, so it remains. How can you not feel comforted by a God that protects you and provides for you and guides you?
"The LORD is my shepherd;
I have what I need.
He lets me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside quiet waters.
He renews my life;
he leads me along the right paths
for his name's sake.
Even when I go
through the darkest valley,
I fear no danger,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff —
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Only goodness and faithful love
will pursue me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house
of the LORD
as long as I live."
Psalm 23:1-6
I think it's very interesting to consider the line, "only goodness and faithful love will pursue me" as though God is pursuing us constantly and faithfully even when we aren't pursuing God ourselves. God is after us and wants to bring us love. It's really much more simple than we make it out to be. The problem is that sin causes us to believe we are not worthy of love and we think we must give up and give in because that's the logical choice amidst the sorrow and pain, and the thing is that we have fallen short of perfection, but God wants us to embrace the love He offers. God wants us to live in joy and He wants to help us become perfect, since we can't do it on our own. The more we hold back and punish ourselves over and over again for not being perfect on our own, the more we are allowing Satan to have a hold on our lives. We are allowing the fear that God doesn't want us to hold us back from embracing our Heavenly Father. Satan lies to us telling us that God isn't there when God has always been there. In God's eyes we are worth pursuing when we are at our worst. Our friends don't pursue us at our worst. Family members sometimes don't pursue one another at their worst. Yet, God pursues each and every person in the entire world. The people that nobody understands, like the psychopaths, the serial killers, the murderers, the rapists, the politicians, God pursues these people. God wants to give them love. How can we understand the love of God who sent His Son to die on the cross for every person, every sinner? How can we understand the forgiveness and the grace of our God?
Another verse I favor is Romans 8:38-39. This verse is yet another reminder that God's love cannot be separated from us.
"For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord."
Romans 8:38-39
It's a comforting verse, one that has been on my family's fridge as a magnet for quite some time. It's bent and creased and ugly looking. It kind of looks like it came straight from the 90s, but it doesn't really matter. It's not the look of the thing, but the content that the magnet holds that matters. It's been a constant reminder that God's love is powerful, even with other forces at play (i.e. the devil).
I think it's both easy and hard to be a Christian and both easy and hard to not be a Christian, for many reasons. The top ones I can think of for Christianity is that giving everything to God is easy because God can handle everything and then there is peace and joy beyond compare, but we have to completely give up our desires and the idea that we know everything, the idea that we are more special than somebody else, that we can create a better life for ourselves than God wants to create for us. We have to want to be made perfect and it's not easy to give up yourself. Of course not being a Christian means you have the freedom to be your own "god" and you get to create the rules for yourself and your life. I think it becomes hard though because even though you think you are finding yourself and that makes you joyful and happy, maybe there is more joy and peace than you could have imagined when you find yourself in Jesus. Maybe you will not find your complete self outside of Jesus and you are ultimately missing the love that God wants to give you. God wants to reach out to us and love us in a way that is better than we could have imagined, more than we could want. I understand darkness better than most people I know, because I think darkness and nightmares come from the in between, the not knowing which direction to turn. Once the choice is made, there is relief on both sides. So you can live well as a Christian or a non-Christian, however the choice changes everything else.
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