I suppose this is a good time for my testimony…
To be totally honest about this ministry it was born out of a great deal of frustration and discontent. I grew up in a church and I knew many people who believed like I believed, but their relationship with Christ like my own was not demonstrating any tangible changes. Everything I was told was “Christianity” I felt I had to accomplish by my own effort. Like many people around me in many different churches, I was pretty good at doing all the traditional Christian things. Later in my life I tried to defend my beliefs and found I saw Christianity as something like any other philosophy rather than a state of being, so I studied to know more details. At some point I was faced with some enormous challenges which I went to God to fix, and I realized I didn’t know how to get God to help me in my time of need. This made me wonder if I would ever get this religion thing right. Finally I was met with the ultimate challenge to my faith, the death of someone I loved, due to a terminal disease. It became a seemingly pointless task of justifying his faith and mine against the inevitable end in sight. It was then that I knew in my heart there was more to Christianity than I was experiencing. I fell on my knees before God and admitted I was not His image as He had suggested and that I was out of resources and energy to make it happen. I asked God to forgive my feeble attempts to get it right and I trusted Him to change me if it was His desire.
After almost 40 years of trying to be a Christian I began to experience the Love of God all over again. The world has never looked the same since. For the first time I noticed and people who knew me noticed I was changed. My definition of life and belief and how this Kingdom of God operates all transformed into a new passion to help other believers come to know this same source of change…God’s Eternal Love.
As a believer in Jesus Christ you were never meant to settle for just the one promise of Eternal life given to you at your new birth. With that new life is an endless source of fulfillment in God’s Eternal Love. Every promise, every miracle, every word of God is available to you as a believer through a Love that has been placed in your heart by God. A Love that must grow up…
It is my desire to encourage all believers to begin to read the Bible with a new paradigm. Through reading and meditating and praying this word of God we are practicing the proper discipline to receive His Love. But the key to the revelation is seeing our selves as God sees us, knowing what faith is, and knowing what it is to believe.
The apostle Paul wrote; when I was a child I thought as a child and I acted as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things. Paul was talking about relating in true love. A baby seeks its mother out of need. That relationship is surely love but it is for the baby limited and purely a result of personal desire for its needs.
An adolescent loves his or her parents but the relationship is largely a spirit of negotiation. The teen wants independence at the same time it needs from its parents and the give and take over rules, clouds the experience.
But as adults we can be in love. A synergy of souls, which nurtures both involved, when combined produces a greater experience than either one’s need separately.
Our society, our country and the world we live in is a reflection of what has flowed from the souls of men and women for several centuries now. When God said be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, He meant we as believers with God, would produce as Lovers do. Jesus Christ died to express a Love which is more than a one time deal to get to heaven. He died so we could experience Eternal Love with our God. Do you remember what I said in my blog on believing? Read again Jesus’ words from John 17:20-23. Our Lord is talking about a state of being in a Love relationship so personal that the world sees His love in us, His Life in us, His Glory in us.
The Bible is a love story. It tells of humanities infancy. It tells of humanities adolescence. It is uniquely developed to fill every believer with Eternal Love. It tells of your love story with God if you will just see yourself through His eyes, a glorious bride, precious enough for God himself to die for. Being in Love as one soul of God…a believer.
So we say God loves you. I hope you have a new and greater understanding of that simple comment. Just like I know I love my wife today more that I did 25 years ago our love affair with God can grow deeper every day too. But just like a marriage some work will have to be attended to…
The following details are the disciplines mentioned earlier I call prayer works. I am not the progenitor of any of this stuff I have written. I have merely collected it and tried to help it make sense. The gift of Prayer Works contains 4/ 90 day reading schedules to take you through specific Bible scriptures every day, a journal for your thoughts and prayers and a pen. Along with a Bible, these are the tools for building this relationship. They are certainly available in any Christian book store, but if you would like a copy for the price of shipping you can contact me by email
Ed Steffens – atgodspd@earthlink.net I Love you all, and may God Bless you with His Eternal Love through your mighty works of prayer!
How to make the best of your Prayer Works Journal
- Set aside time each day to follow your guide for reading the Bible and for meditating and journaling on what it has to say
- Acknowledge forgiveness in your heart and Ask for God’s Holy Spirit to guide you and teach you through each passage
- Make notes as you observe what you think God is saying to you in the scriptures
- Personalize what you have read by asking yourself how it might apply in your life right now
- Journal these thoughts and any impressions you may receive perhaps as instruction, inspiration, promise or guidance.
- Finally, using those thoughts… write down a simple prayer and as you were speaking to God in your presence knowing He is listening to your words, pray that prayer out loud
Communion
- Once a week try to attend a gathering of like believers using this format in a group setting
- As a group take turns reading that days scriptures
- Read your prayers out loud to each other
- Take this opportunity to pray for one another about any struggles or concerns any of you may be going through
- Love and encourage each other by this communion; know what Jesus did for us by the cross, who He is today as we live His life within us and what eternal Glory we have in store at His returning
The fullness of His Eternal Love… is not something that just happens by accident. God’s desire is to share His True Love with all creation.
Our Mission: To bring to conviction the fullness of the Love of God through The Word of God within every believer and equip them to share that same True Love with others as living testaments of God.
…to the Glory of God by and through Christ Jesus His Eternal Word.
