Dear Precious Friends,
On this Fill Our Soul Sunday, I pray you are able to be back at church physically in fellowship with the body of Christ & you are able to worship our Lord for who He is and what He has done.
We have absolutely loved watched "The Chosen". If you haven't seen it you can download the app for free and watch it. The picture below I posted is from The Chosen.
They just released part 2 and it is absolutely amazing. I understand in an entirely different realm of what the disciples walked when they chose Jesus and gave up their lives to follow Him.
What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ? When Jesus called the disciples to follow him, He understood that the Hebrew word for "follow" is "radaph", which doesn't just mean passively follow someone around, but to "pursue" them.
"Radaph" means to chase down, passionately hunt down, to be hot on the heels of someone. That's what Jesus calls us to do, beloved; passionately pursue Him.
In the same way that Jesus wants us to follow Him by passionately pursuing Him, His goodness and mercy chase us down, all the days of our life, as it says in Psalm 23:6.
Strong's Definition of radaph is as follows:
râdaph, raw-daf'; a primitive root; to run after (usually with hostile intent; figuratively [of time] gone by):-chase, put to flight, follow (after, on), hunt, (be under) persecute(-ion, -or), pursue(-r).
John 8:12
“Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”
Psalm 23:6
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Everything Jesus did was done out of his perfect love for the Father and us. Every word, healing, prayer, and action was done out of unconditional devotion. Ephesians 5:1-2 says, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
As His Followers may we embrace this beautiful day & may we make loving others our top priority. Scripture commands us to love others the way Christ did. Jesus is our model for living. And God never commands us without perfectly equipping us. If we are to “walk in love, as Christ loved us,” we must believe God will fill us up with the ability to love as Jesus loved.
As we look to Jesus as our model, to be His followers, Love is our top priority and loving God and loving others is the proof that we are His. We must first believe that God can and will help us. We must believe that the Spirit is perfectly capable of taking what was dust and fashioning it into the likeness of the Son. Secondly, we must spend time allowing the Spirit to move in and through us. We must make space in our lives to be loved by God so that we can be used by him to love others. I can offer nothing of value that I haven’t first received from my heavenly Father. I can do nothing great unless God has done something great in me. 1 John 2:6 says, “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” We have to be children who abide in Jesus so that we can walk in his ways.
AMEN!
