Something is wrong when a believer has no desire to know God. A Christian who feels no hunger for the God they serve has a problem worth examining. Believers will spend eternity with him, so getting to know him now is a good thing to do.
I believe that desire is one of the reasons God still speaks. He wants to express and reveal himself so that people understand him. Why? The better a person knows God, the more that person loves him. The more they love him, the more they want to serve him. For this to happen, believers must make sure they hear what God says and listen to him.
 The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him.
You can find instructions online for how to build just about anything. But there is one subject that matters far more than any do-it-yourself skill, and that is how to be born again. Jesus was clear that being born again is necessary for anyone who wants to enter the kingdom of heaven. But what does that mean?
Recognising that every person is under the weight of sin, and then surrendering yourself fully to Jesus, asking him to come into your life and take all of you it what I’m talking about. When you do that, your sins can be forgiven and you can have confidence about where you are going when this life is over.
God asks only one thing of us: Don’t reject the precious gift of salvation. He’s opened the door. Will you walk through it?
 Jesus responded and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nearly five hundred years ago, Martin Luther sparked one of the most significant religious transformations in history by recovering the ancient gospel truth that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. The Reformation that followed reshaped the landscape of Christianity in the Western world. Yet Luther himself struggled with the letter of James, famously referring to it with some unease, precisely because of a verse that can appear to contradict the very principle he had championed. James 2:24 declares: “A man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” How do we hold that alongside Paul’s declaration in Romans that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law?
The resolution lies in recognising that Paul and James, while using the same vocabulary, are addressing different questions and different audiences. Paul is answering the question of how a sinner stands righteous before God: the answer is by grace, through faith, not by any human effort or merit. James is addressing a different question: how do we know whether someone’s faith is genuine? And his answer is: by the evidence of their life.
Works do not provide salvation. But works do demonstrate salvation. Faith, by its very nature, cannot be seen. It is an internal disposition of trust and reliance upon Christ. The watching world, whether believers or unbelievers, cannot examine a person’s faith directly. What they can examine is conduct.
Paul himself captures this harmoniously in Ephesians chapter 2: we are saved by grace through faith, and we are saved unto good works, which God has prepared in advance for us to walk in.
Ephesians 2:8-9
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Before a single atom of the physical universe was called into existence, God already knew what would happen. He foresaw the fall of humanity. He understood the full weight of what sin would cost. And, most importantly, he planned our redemption.
Think about it. God chose, before the foundation of the world, to redeem fallen human beings through the blood of his Son. The plan was not a response to an emergency. It was not a contingency formed after the fact. It was woven into the eternal purposes of God before time itself began its count.
What this plan actually required is where the mind staggers. God the Father, in his infinite wisdom and love, purposed to send his only begotten Son into the world, to let him live among humanity in mortal flesh, and ultimately to allow him to bear the weight of human sin on a cross, shedding his blood so that your sin and mine could be forgiven.
To grasp even a portion of this is to be undone by gratitude. The God who made the stars looked ahead to your need and made provision for it before he made the morning itself.
For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you
Jesus said that the Holy Spirit will guide believers into all truth.
God never makes a mistake. He does not always act as people want, at the time they want, in the way they want or for the reasons they would choose. He permits things that people dislike and things they cannot understand, yet he makes no errors.
I believe that when a believer is walking in obedience and listening, and God wants to give a sense of direction, he impresses the believer’s spirit so strongly that the person simply knows they have heard from God.
What are your thoughts?
For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons and daughters of God.
