God's blessings

We all are receiving God's blessings on a regular basis.  Not because we are "good" and this is our reward.  In reality, we are bad, nothing we do can be good without God's spirit in us.  At the moment,  most of the people of the earth have the spirit of sin in us.  The spirit we were born with that we received from Adam as his descendant when he disobeyed God's command and was rebellious.  We got it from the snake or Satan who tricked us with his lies.  With this "bad" spirit in us, we are unable to produce good deeds or good fruit.  An apple tree cannot produce oranges.  A bad spirit cannot produce good fruit.  How do we become capable of producing good fruit?  With a good spirit, with God's spirit in us.  We must change our apple tree into an orange tree, change the root of the tree, not the trunk or the leaves, but the whole tree.  this is done through God's grace only.  We must repent and ask him for forgiveness.  We must hate what we do knowing we cannot stop doing it.  We must study our conscience and not accept the least of our sins.  Nor must we get pleasure from our sins.  These sins are designed by the devil to give us pleasure.  He is a wicked one the devil.  He is a liar.  He lies to us and tells us, yes, this feels good, it must be good!  But He is lying to us.  our conscience deep inside knows these things are wrong.  As we do more and more sin, as we accept them more and more, we get deeper and deeper into sin, and we get further and further away from God.  We MUST put a stop to this wicked process before we get so lost that we are so deep we refuse God's existence as we have seen some do.

Back to the blessings.  God knows our nature, to be desiring material wealth, and families, and earthly pleasure.  So he plays that game and gives us all these things as only a powerful God like Himself can do.  The reason we receive these wonderful blessings is so that we realize how good God is to us and how much he loves us.  The purpose of these blessings of material wealth and health and children, etc is to realize that God loves us even though we are no good.  A blessing is not just a blessing for blessings sake.  He wants us to see and to have a feeling of guilt an shame which is appropriate since all we do is sin.  When we love our children and we pray to God and say thanks, it is nothing to God.  Even sinners, even thieves, even liars and murderers have families and care for their families.  Do they love their neighbors and enemies though?  Do they turn the other cheek, do they wish good for those who trespass them, or do they try to get revenge, try to get even, or simply ignore those who hate on them?  We have all heard that we should ignore our enemies, or "don't let the haters bring you down".  Wrong, Jesus has taught us to love our enemies, help them with prayer and with charity when the opportunity comes.

How can we do this, how can sinners do good things that God requires?  It is hard, but we have all the tools to gain what is needed to do this, which is God's Spirit.  We have to get that from God himself through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.  One of the tools we have is free will to decide to go to God.  Free will is given to us by God to go back to um and do good.  We must decide to do good, and not bad.  Unfortunately,  we usually decide to do bad.  But what can good be without bad?  What is cold without hot, what is high without low.  Both Good and bad need to exist for us to choose one over the other.  This is why there is so much evil in this world, humans decide to follow this sinful pleasure, we are blind to truth, we think that things that feel good and good, but once again, the devil tells lies.  If you think about it, all the sins feel good.  Sex, greed, anger, gluttony, material wealth.  

The other tool is the conscience which was implanted in our soul to act like a fire alarm or warning that alerts us when something is going to be bad before, while or after we are committing a sin.  If we continue to ignore our conscience for the sake of pleasure, we will build a callous on our conscience.  This makes it easier and easier to ignore our conscience over time.  This is an addiction.  Jesus Christ's spirit is the only thing that can help us out of this viscous dark hole.

Last thing we have is faith or religion.   This consists of 3 things, the Bible, Church and Prayer.  

The Bible is a handbook or users guide to God's spirit that has been created by God Himself as a way to know what we are going through.  it is also used as inspiration to find God.  But just like a user's guide to an electronic device, what good is the guide without the actual product?  Thats why the book feels empty or doubtful before God's spirit enters us.  But when God's spirit is in us, the book comes alive.  Just like if we now have that awesome electric appliance, the handbook becomes useful.  

The Church as a support group to help one another is another part of religion that helps us.  We need support from our brothers and sisters to know we are not alone in our walk with Christ.  Just like Simon of Syrene helped Jesus carry His cross, others help us walk to and with Christ.  We ned help from anywhere we can get it since this is not something physical, but rather spiritual or super natural.  You will know a true brother or sister in Christ when they help you beyond what you expect without the lure of a reward.  For their reward is your rebirth.  Christ is in them, and with Him, their rewards are things of Christ.

Prayer is the third part of religion that helps us find and grow God's spirit inside us.  We all pray by talking to God.  But do we listen?  Silence is required to listen, and with God He is always testing our faith by being silent.  this is to see if we are patient.  We must know that God knows what is best for us when we pray.  Not us, we only know what is good for us now, but He knows what is good for us in the future.  he is Omnipresent, existing now and in the future everywhere, not restrained by the physical world's limits of time and space.  So who are we to ask for things?  We can ask, but we must trust that He knows what is best for us.  Like how a teenager wants to hang out with he wrong crowd.  The loving parent may object, and the teen may say things like "you don't love me", or "I hate you" or "why do you hurt me, you never let me have what I want".  but what we want is not always what's best.  The loving parent wants to take care of us to preserve us for our future, so they ground you, or take something away to help you realize that you don't know what's best.   We must ask for God's will to be done, even as we are experiencing hard times.  He has a plan that we don't know fully or at all.  People die, people lose jobs, people have pain and suffering.  Sometimes from our own decisions, sometimes as part of God's plan to bring us back to Him and keep us from eternal damnation, sometimes just because of the physical world we live in, and the evil of others.  But we must have faith and trust in God.  He knows everything and will not abandon us ever.  He is with us through everything, from conception in the womb to death on earth.  it is up to us if he will be with us beyond death on earth, and life here on earth is what we will use to find Him.  Because the sad news is this.  Find God and live with Him forever in paradise.  Don't find God, but find all th riches in the world, and die in Hell.  I know it sounds harsh, but thats the contract.  There is no in  between, its the necessity of good and evil.  There is nothing in between good and evil, its one or the other.  So with the promise of salvation and heaven, comes the lack of it in Hell.  And from we know, Hell is no joke.  it's the experience of pain and suffering to the extreme that our minds cannot ever experience on earth, but without the relief of death, it just goes on and on forever.  the spirit cannot die, it can just move from earth to hell or from earth to heaven.  but once it moves on, it remains in existence.  It doesn't burn out like things of the physical world.  

God loves us, so He puts this deal on the table.  but because of free will, we have to make the choice.  Once we make that choice, God cannot change it for us.  For when we ate the apple, we became "like gods" able to know right from wrong, and able to decide for ourselves which way to go.  god has tried to help us by sending us the ten commandments, and sending us His Son jesus Christ to help us.  And finally by sending His Spirit to help us today.  But anything more than all this help he is sending wouldn't be us making a choice.  You can guide only so much before the wheel is taken over.  Then it wouldn't be us really deciding.  Please decide the right way, the truth, the life here and after.  After all, it's your spirit.