OSUNKOYA OLANIYI'S BLOG

DAY 12 DEVELOPING YOUR FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD He offers his friendship to the godly. Proverbs 3:32 (NLT) Draw close to God, and God will draw close to you. James 4:8 (NLT) You are as close to God as you choose to be. Like any friendship, you must work at developing your friendship with God. It won’t happen by accident. It takes desire, time, and energy. If you want a deeper, more intimate connection with God you must learn to honestly share your feelings with him, trust him when he asks you to do something, learn to care about what he cares about, and desire his friendship more than anything else. I must choose to be honest with God. The first building block of a deeper friendship with God is complete honesty— about your faults and your feelings. God doesn’t expect you to be perfect, but he does insist on complete honesty. None of God’s friends in the Bible were perfect. If perfection was a requirement for friendship with God, we would never be able to be his friends. Fortuna...

DAY 11 BECOMING BEST FRIENDS WITH GOD Since we were restored to friendships with God by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be delivered from eternal punishment by his life. Romans 5:10 (NLT) God wants to be your best friend. Your relationship to God has many different aspects: God is your Creator and Maker, Lord and Master, Judge, Redeemer, Father, Savior, and much more.  But the most shocking truth is this: Almighty God yearns to be your Friend! In Eden we see God’s ideal relationship with us: Adam and Eve enjoyed an intimate friendship with God. There were no rituals, ceremonies, or religion—just a simple loving relationship between God and the people he created. Unhindered by guilt or fear, Adam and Eve delighted in God, and he delighted in them. We were made to live in God’s continual presence, but after the Fall, that ideal relationship was lost. Only a few people in Old Testament times had the privilege of friendship with Go...

THE HEART OF WORSHIP Give yourselves to God.... Surrender your whole being to him to be used for righteous purposes. Romans 6:13 (TEV) The heart of worship is surrender. Surrender is an unpopular word, disliked almost as much as the word submission. It implies losing, and no one wants to be a loser. Surrender evokes the unpleasant images of admitting defeat in battle, forfeiting a game, or yielding to a stronger opponent. The word is almost always used in a negative context. Captured criminals surrender to authorities. In today’s competitive culture we are taught to never give up and never give in—so we don’t hear much about surrendering. If winning is everything, surrendering is unthinkable. We would rather talk about winning, succeeding, overcoming, and conquering than yielding, submitting, obeying, and surrendering. But surrendering to God is the heart of worship. It is the natural response to God’s amazing love and mercy. We give ourselves to him, not out of fear or duty, bu...

104 Seconds that'll give you hope....

Who He is by Jon Jorgenson

The Vine by Jon Jorgenson

WHAT MAKES GOD SMILE? MAY THE LORD SMILE ON YOU. . . . NUMBERS 6:25 (NLT) SMILE ON ME, YOUR SERVANT; TEACH ME THE RIGHT WAY TO LIVE. PSALM 119:135 (MSG) The smile of God is the goal of your life. Since pleasing God is the first purpose of your life, your most important task is to discover how to do that. The Bible says, “Figure out what will please Christ, and then do it.”  Fortunately, the Bible gives us a clear example of a life that gives pleasure to God. The man’s name was Noah. In Noah’s day, the entire world had become morally bankrupt. Everyone lived for their own pleasure, not God’s. God couldn’t find anyone on earth interested in pleasing him, so he was grieved and regretted making man. God became so disgusted with the human race that he considered wiping it out. But there was one man who made God smile. The Bible says, “Noah was a pleasure to the Lord.” God said, “This guy brings me pleasure. He makes me smile. I’ll start over with his family.” Bec...