God’s Gift to Us: Part 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Hi, I’m John North.

I’m here to help you focus your day on God. What could be better than that? The most important person in this universe is right there, a part of your personal daily life, and he wants you to focus your life on Him.

He wants you to listen to him each day. He speaks to you through his word, the Bible. He wants you to respond to Him, to speak to Him, which is what we call prayer, and to interact with Him, make your life a living relationship with God. Don’t just come to God with a list of prayer requests. Converse with God. Talk to Him. Listen to Him. Respond to Him when you feel like he’s speaking to you through the Bible.

As you do that, your relationship with him will grow and grow and grow.

Well, we’re talking this week about the ultimate gift. I want to take you today to Galatians chapter 6 in the Bible. In verse 14, Paul writing says, But may it never be that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.

May it never be that I should boast. Well, we would all agree with that. Boasting is bad. Pride is bad. We don’t like it when someone is proud or boastful around us, and Paul says, May it never be that I should boast. I’m unworthy of that, except for one thing that I’ll boast about, and that’s the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

You know, if you had lived in Bible days you probably would hope never to see a cross in your life, and if you saw one, it would leave you shaken, and you would never be able to forget the ghastly memory of it. The cross was a torture device. It led to a horrible death. It symbolised shame and death and guilt.

Where the cross around our necks as a necklace or as an earring. You see it on the back of cars. You display it on the top of buildings.

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What could have transformed something so gross, so horrible – into something symbolising love and forgiveness – it would take an amazing gift to transform the meaning of the cross like that, and it did, and that gift was amazing. It was the grace of God. The cross is beautiful to us now because of what Jesus did for us on it.

Do you know that if you want to have a personal relationship with God and you don’t have that now, you can, and the reason you can is because of Jesus’ death on the cross.

There was a barrier between you and God, and that barrier was your sin and guilt that offended God. You cannot have a good relationship with God as long as your sin and guilt is standing in the way, and there’s no way for you to remove it. Do you know, the only way for it to be gone is for Jesus Christ to take it, and that’s exactly what he did. If you will receive His gift of forgiveness.

Then God will take your sin and guilt and transfer it to Jesus Christ, and Jesus bears it on the cross, and He will take Jesus’ righteousness and transfer it to you so that He has met His justice. His judgement has been passed on Jesus.

But he is able to express his love and forgiveness to you.

How wonderful Jesus’ death on the cross is as a gift to us, as Thomas Brooks has said, Christ’s blood is heaven’s key.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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