1st Corinthians 11:1-16...

Wow, this chapter starts out with a very blunt statement, "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ". Imitators of Christ? What is Christ? Christ is love. The two questions we must ask ourselves about this verse are,"What characteristics Christ that we must imitate?" and "Why is this verse seem so bold and out of the blue?" Before I go on I want to talk about how this statement can be confusing. By what he says does Paul mean that he is doing such a great job that we can just imitate him. NO! We are to imitate what he is practicing in following Christ. Now that that is out of the way...the two questions? I can say with a confident heart that Christ is love because his love binds all things. Does indeed this answer my first question? I would say yes but vaguely. Lets dig a little deeper. Feel free to post your comments on your onlook of this. I think some characteristics of Christ are: sacrifice, forgiviness, selfliness which reflects sacrifice,purity, and patience. How well would you say you reflect these from 1-10? I'd say I'm a 1. Paul says directly to give your all to be a 10. I apologize for talking so much about one simple verse ,but this verse is so vital.

To go on, in verse two I found something very interesting. I know the first to verses? Really Steven? "Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you." This is where the Jews and us disagree very much. He clearly states here that he has delivered his people from their traditions.

Husbands are the heads of their wives such as all men are the head of Christ. (reffering to his body and all believers in it I assume.)

It goes on to provide a simple instruction to us. Men do not wear headcovers during prayer or prophesies. Women do! Or it will dishonor you.

Bleeding wrists crying out in screaming anguish pain and sorrow felt from piercing blades into one's own skin. Please Lord save me. Please hear my cry for healing. Will you watch me writh in pain before you, my creator, my saviour. Oh Lord, I am not pleasing in your eyes. I am worthless to you. Make me useful! make me clean. Let me give up everything for your glory. My eyes are dry Holy Father. I give my all for you. Save me. Please help a poor sinful scum of what should be your servant. Its painful to have these memories haunt me and my dreams. It hurts. It shrinks my love. A combination of dispear and hurt. Pain with hate. If had to say one thing on earth was hell i twould be emotional pain. Something that has been toture in the past years of my life. Did David cry ou to you like this Lord? Am I unholy to cry out to you like this? With a broken and aching heart? You are the only one who can heal me. My head throbs with an acho of sleepless nights whereas my heart pounds worthlessly to the beat of a nonexisting life. I have been failing. My heart is stone but now it shatters like glass beneath a hammer. What is the purpose of life if not a hammber crushing your heart and god healing it? NOTHING! The center of our soulds is but God's clay in which he molds us. I stand here as a christian, a believer and follwer of Christ struggling to give up everything for him. Even my pain to take on his joy. To reflect him to others. To be able to shine. He is my dentity. He is who I am. We're jointas once. He i inside of me. You have saved me by amazing grace God of all. Let me sruggle no more let me please you for the rest of m life and the rest of eternity. Let me serve you with a zealous heart that will bow to only you. Thank you Father you are my true love. And I almost missed you. I praise you o Perfect One. I praise the King of My Life. I pray as I write wanting nothing but to fall down before your thrown and worship you. I am a destroyed man made new by an unfathomabl mercy only given to those who truly believe. I pray for those who have pain in their lives Lord. Bring them to me so I can show them you and comfort them with your Godly hugs. I think this is my calling Lord but lead me where you want me. I am your servanwanting to be humbled before you. My heart is yours and you healed it. You are my proof of a new life. You are the one who is my heart. let us become like you and David. Let me have passion that convicts me and will never give me rest until I have pleased you in every way possible. Let me be yours.

PAIN Pain in my life. PAIN....rejection...lonliness...hurt...bleeding...raped heart I stand infront of you oh Holy One. I am nothing. Without you I am nothing, but when I draw close to you I become powerful. So I cry night and day oh Holy Lord hear my prayers. Hear my cries at night when blood streams from my tearducts. When the scars on my heart swell with the hurt. The scars on my chest burst with cries to you Lord. Oh Holy Father I BEG TO YOU please heal this sinful, limp heart of mine.

No comments? Not that you have to post, but I’d love to hear peoples opinions and their views on the different things I’ve written.

Welp…today I got up and went to an amazing bible study for three hours….at seven in the morning…it was SOOO AMAZING!!!!!! It left me so excited with Christ and so much more knowledgeable about him. While I was there though…my mind drifted to some old memories of mine. When I was younger. About 5 or 6 my Sunday school teachers used to dread having me in class. Why? Because every time after class I would take a couple crayons home with me. Leaving them with less and less every Sunday that went by. I think back and I can’t totally remember if I took them on purpose or just put them in my pocket and forgot. I’m not sure although in my mind I think back and remember just not wanting to let go. But this old memory came to my mind…God knows why. Then it occurred to me that I am the same way now. I take things that mean something to me and I will not for the life of me let go even when God has called me too. How stubborn. How foolish. How childish I was and still am. I guess more what I am trying to get at is how evil we are as humans. We are so selfish and so self centered even as innocent children. What is this? Its our nature from when we are born to when we die we all have a sinful nature. It is as much a part of us as our hearts. Now looking at my life, I see how many things I keep for myself. This post isn’t supposed to be big just a simple thought I had today. When God calls me I need to be selfless so that I may serve him with my upmost self. I need to be selfless to have the most effect for his glory. With every part of my life.

Dear Lord…We all fall short of you. Every one of us is sinful and undeserving of your grace, yet you have washed us in the blood of your son. Thank you a million times over Lord. Again and again we fail you…what love you have for us. A love no one can comprehend. Alright, well I am very sorry that I haven’t written much on here, but I think I will be writing a post or two in the next days. I will be mostly writing on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday because of my schedule. So last post I explain my view on how to obtain a righteous life. From here I will be explain how this leads to having a righteous heart and actions. Well this will probably be pretty short because this is pretty simple. I mean what is in your heart will be shown on the outside. So therefore if you have a righteous heart it will be seen by others. The heart of a servant shows by actions. Not words. So the heart of the righteous is shown by actions and not words…I mean come on people!!! Its so simple and so easy!!! We know what to do…why can’t we just do it? I’ll tell you why. Cause we are human. Now I want you to be sure to know that I am not saying that as an excuse but as a simple reminder why we fail. Thankfully we have Christ to be complete us perfectly. WELP….moving onto what was on my heart today…I’ll be coming back to “Truth in Love” later….these last couple days have been the heaviest days of my life. My heart feels like someone has just tied it too an anchor and dropped it in the sea. I can’t explain the things going through my head and my heart. They are far too deep and complex and hurt to explain. BUT….(this is where the rubber meets the road) THIS is where I get to choose what I’m going to do with the pain. What should I do? Where should my heart be? What does Christ want from this? What I should do…IS simple yet so challenging and so hard. I need to trust in Christ. Which I have every intention of fully doing. Where should my heart be……..my heart should be where Christ’s heart is. What does Christ want from this? The same thing he wants from every trial he puts me through, trust, faith, a humble heart, and most of all a heart ready to learn for God’s glory. Now I’m not trying to say I’m some great person who can do all this perfectly…because I’m not and I can’t. But I’m going to try. I’m praying and hoping in Christ seeking his will with my whole heart which is the only thing I can do when all the walls around me seem to crumble. I think that we as people…as humans live so much of our lives thinking about us. I know that’s something that everyone says and you hear daily. BUUUUUT think about this! God doesn’t only care about us. PLEASE…people whoever is reading this. HE DOES NOT JUST CARE ABOUT YOU AND HOW YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE. He cares how you live your life with others too…he cares you be putting yourself in other people’s shoes too. I don’t mean to be like UP IN YO GRILL YO….but what the HECK are we doing? I mean when someone does something that is completely stupid and unworthy….mean…we get mad…we get frustrated…we get hurt…we get upset….well I know this sounds crazy but we shouldn’t be. Right now you’re saying to yourself…Steven…we can be frustrated that’s okay…but no we shouldn’t be!!!! WE NEED TO BE FOCUSED ON OTHERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jezz I’m so convinced and convicted right now that we need to be aware that others may be going through something hard. Maybe they are confused. Maybe they are having something so private and painful in their life that its SOOO hard that they are acting in a rude/cruel/whatever you want to call it manner. Its okay! You don’t need to worry about it. Be aware that you can show them love. YOU might totally completely change their lives by just a little love…think what a lot of love can do? How are you showing love to everyone? I guarantee there are so many people that we have no idea that are hurting or in pain that we are mean too. Please put yourself in their position. Please have that sense of awareness that their loved ones…or their lives are hurting. I know a close person too me…his mom has a duel life…its like skitsofrania… I don’t know how to spell it right…she just tried to kill herself a week ago…she has three children…his dad left him for years and just recently returned…his girlfriend cheated on him and then left him…then she is just starting to see a new guy…NOW….my HEART is BREAKING for this person…and you know what? No one knows what he is going through. I am the only person. No one knows…so what’s happening? NOTHING because no one knows…everyone treats him normal…people give him crap about little things…now WHAT ON EARTH do you think he feels like? Don’t you think someone being there for him would make the difference? I KNOW it would. Please you have no idea what people are going through. We should always show love even when we know the people who don’t deserve love….that’s when we most need to show them love. Christ loved. Christ IS love. Be love.

Today I’m going to touch on the road to living a righteous life. How does one attain a righteous life style? What does a righteous life look like? Well first of all, let me explain how one obtains a righteous life style. It is not just one thing, in fact it’s two which is twice as much. Ha. The first part of this yoke to righteousness is searching God in scriptures and prayer. The second part is will and want of seeking God, his plan, and his glory. These two parts seem very simple, but they may be the most challenging of the process of sanctification. Without one the other is worthless. These two components HAVE to work together in order to be productive. I cannot stress enough how important this is. When one is not seeking God with an earnest heart, he is just reading the bible as he would a story. When he reads and prays with a heart overjoyed in the grace of God. Enthralled in his glory and wanting to understand him more intimately, he is reading the bible as not only a life style but a spiritual nutrition. Now please stick with me, I know that got a little rough because of stressing this point. I am going to switch our focus onto what a righteous life looks like. This subject right here is so vast that I could make this whole blog purely on just that although right now I just want to explain it simply. Starting, one can tell a righteous person by the way he lives his life. Does his life his life in blamelessness or does he live it in shame? For me I can spot a righteous man in a second by his actions and his verbal and physical physique. Actions, how do actions portray righteousness? The heart of a servant. A righteous man is a servant to God and by being a servant to God he is also a servant to others. Finding his skills and using them for the glory of God. A righteous man lifts his work to God’s glory giving his all with joy. In Proverbs 10:32 it says, “The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable, but the mouths of the wicked what is perverse.” Now to me that is pretty clear that a righteous person is set apart from a wicked person by his speech. Not only would it be disrespecting God by saying unwholesome words, but in no way does it bring God glory. Now for concluding point, what does physical have to do with righteousness? How do they connect? I will tell you. Physical expressions such as facial expressions can be the fall of a righteous life. How do your facial expressions reflect Christ in you? Do they give off light and joy or do they give off depression and shame? I think these are very important questions that each of us should ask ourselves. If you are reading this I am hoping you are evaluating your hearts. If you want to evaluate your heart look at it from not only your angle, but from the angle that others see it from. Look at your heart from Christ's view. For me, this is very challenging because I express myself instinctively either facially or vocally. It has been my Achilles heel for a very long time. Why? Because it often reflects how disconnected from God I have been. When I am in the word constantly and praying with my whole heart, I find that I rarely have a problem with this. I know I have only brushed the surface. This is all I want though because the main point I want to get too is “Truth in Love” I am trying to reach it quickly so I am making it very simple where I am coming from. Next I will explain how living a righteous life leads too having a righteous heart and how it needs to be put into practice. I think I am going to call it a night, but I beg you please evaluate your heart. This is such an important role in your walk with Christ. Keep strong in the Lord. God Bless. – “The Will of God will never lead you where the Grace of God cannot keep you.”

Topic of Blog

Now, this blog is going to be about a couple different things that have been on my mind and in my heart for some time. The main purpose of this blog is to share what God puts on my heart, and the minor part of this blog is too entertain you and myself with small funny stories and comments. To paraphrase what has been on my heart would take a large amount of time, but God has given me this time…So I feel I must write. The main idea of what I will be shedding light on, if you will, will be the phrase “Truth in Love”. Now, I asked myself how is “Truth in Love” shown. Now let me be very clear that this is shown in many ways. I will touch on most of them later but the larger ones are, tone in voice, facial expressions, and most importantly where your heart is at with Christ. I also asked myself where does, "“Truth in Love" come from?". The answer I found was from a righteous and pure heart. A pure and righteous heart is obtained by living a righteous life. This comes from searching God in scriptures and prayer. Now pause for a second and think…If what I said is true that sounds very simple and easy. What I have said is what has to be done, but the challenge, at least for me, is the practice of this. To make the gears grind in this machine is the want of seeking God’s will. This is the heart of Life’s purpose. This is the lifeblood of the core of a christian. One cannot be aligned with God’s will unless he is seeking it. The process of reaching a righteous life and heart is called Sanctification. Sanctification, meaning becoming holy, or becoming righteous. In this blog I will mostly ,for now anyways, be focused on explaining my on-look of this matter. I am going to call it a night right now, but I will explain much more in the days to come. I pray that whoever reads this will be touched.