Stay Close to Jesus

Dear Judah, Grace, Joanna, future baby Spears, and all my other future grandchildren,

My prayers for you never cease. I pray that you will always know the goodness of God and that you will never go a day, a moment, without seeing that goodness. More than anything, your grandparents want God’s goodness for you.

This is a very practical post. So how do you see that goodness? Stay close to Jesus. Whatever you do, in your joys and your pain, in your pleasures and your shame, give everything to Jesus. Then you will begin to see the goodness of God.

How to stay close to Jesus? Love Him with all your heart. Even when you don’t ‘feel’ like loving Jesus, take the action to love Him as a step of faith. For that Faith is in something true, that Jesus is God and all good. And by the Spirit of Jesus, that which you acknowledge in your head to be true will start to rule in your heart as true, and lastly you will start to ‘feel’ it to be true.

How to Love Him? There is an old hymn whose lyrics repeat, “trust and obey, for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey.” In other words, let your faith (trust) in Jesus lead to obedience, which is a work of the Spirit. This obedience strengthens your faith as you realize to a greater extent that He whom you believe, is indeed true. This cycle of trust and obedience becomes a cycle resulting in a closer and closer relationship with Jesus. We know Him more and more and experience His joy and goodness to a greater extent. This is why sin is so dangerous and damaging. It short circuits this process and hides Jesus from us. So when you do sin, and everyone does, confess that sin and give it to Jesus because He took care of all the sin and shame of His children on the cross. Let the Holy Spirit fill you with the joy and freedom of Jesus’ righteousness and His favor.

How do you do this? Consistent time in His word and prayer. Our sinful hearts want to do evil things that separate us from Jesus. Our sinful mind thinks it understands the world better than Jesus. Our sinful pride wants to lift us over Jesus. The scriptures, through the work of the Holy Spirit, convict us of what is true and what is false. They lead us into the way of goodness and righteousness. They ultimately bring joy and goodness into our lives.

Prayer brings us into God presence, and that can be anywhere. In prayer we talk to God, we related with God, or better yet, we see God relating to us. In prayer God ‘becomes’ our friend, our counselor, our healer, etc… In prayer we experience God’s Godness. It’s how we build the relationship with Him. Pray at all times, in the morning, in the evening, at meals, whenever. There is no time that is inappropriate for prayer. Pray long, pray short and give your anxieties to the Lord. Pray happy, pray sad, and give your joys to Him as well. As your prayers become more intimate, the goodness of God will go from an idea just in your head, to a warmth, indeed a blazing furnace of the heat of His love in your heart.

It is this red hot love of God for you that melts the world in front of you. The troubles of this world lose their power in that heat, indeed God uses them as fuel for the fire to increase the heat of His love.

So my desire for you, my grandchildren and for as many generations that read this, is that you know God’s goodness all of your lives. There is nothing like it. It is the purpose for which God made you. So my charge to you is this: Whatever you do in life, whatever circumstance you find yourself in, whatever mood your are in, just stay close to Jesus.

Love and Blessings,
Grandpa