What God offers us is so much more than a ticket to Heaven. When we seek Him, He gives us more and more of Himself. As we allow Him to deepen our wisdom and understanding of His character, He fuels us with an ever-greater passion and purpose in living for Him.

When we're faced with sudden crisis, we have two choices: respond in despair, or respond in worship. Trials will come and go throughout our life on earth, but it's in those circumstances that our trust in God is built. And in the midst of it all, we've got to keep our eyes looking up, because Jesus promised He'd return out of the blue to bring us home with Him.

When we decide to follow Jesus, it's not a decision for that moment or that day -- it's a decision for life, even when circumstances are tough. It's tempting to want to go back to when life seemed "easier" whenever we encounter trials, but God wants to use those difficult situations to grow our faith in Him so we can receive the blessings He has for us that we'd have never experienced without Him.

Jesus challenges us to live in a way that seems backwards to the rest of the world. While culture tells us to hate our enemies, hold grudges, and sin as long as it makes us feel good, Jesus commands us to go against the grain and do the opposite. And when we live how He intended, we realize that His way was never "living backwards", but "living forwards" all along!

We like to put sin on a scale where our own transgressions wind up looking "less" sinful than those of the next person. But we don't get to say that other people's sins are too terrible to be forgiven while ours aren't bad enough to keep us out of Heaven. Jesus' death on the cross served as payment for ALL sin, and there's no person alive who cannot be declared forgiven thanks to His sacrifice.

Scripture tells us to seek God first, and to seek Him with our whole heart. But we can't do that unless and until we set aside all the other distractions that attempt to draw our focus away from Him. The question is: what do we feel so passionate about and desperate for that we're prepared to ask God for it with unwavering boldness and relentless persistence?

Sometimes it feels like God's hiding from us. But the truth is, we're the ones trying to hide from Him! God promises that we can find Him if only we're willing to seek Him with our whole hearts instead of continuing in our patterns of sin and trying to hide our actions from Him.

When we focus on the attacks that come at us from the devil, we lose sight of the incredible power of our God. He's promised to protect us and to fight our battles on our behalf. All we have to do is cry out to Him -- and then trust and obey what He tells us to do when He comes to our aid.

God doesn't want us to just look good on the outside -- He wants us to clean up the inside. But when Jesus lives within us, we often neglect "cleaning house" for Him because it can be a messy process for us to sort through the junk in our lives. Instead of focusing on doing all the right things to appear clean on the surface, we should be taking inventory from the inside out.

Nobody ever promised the Christian life would be easy -- least of all, Christ Himself! But we're called to persevere through the trials with the power of the Lord. The easiest response to boredom, struggles, and suffering is for us to move on to the "next" thing, but when God directs us to stay in something, He also gives us the strength to do it.