Richard Ellis Talks

Because of Christ's resurrection from the dead, we've been offered new life in Him! That means no one has a reason not to know the Lord and be saved for eternity. But each of us must choose: will we follow God, or be condemned forever?

When God leads us to lost people, He's often already been working on their hearts. But when we ignore His leading to share the Gospel with them, it can be detrimental to their souls. Jesus gave up His life on a cross so that we could be made whole again -- but He calls us to take up our own cross, get out of our comfort zones, and spread the Good News in turn.

Jesus knew Judas would betray Him, but Jesus still walked closely in relationship with him. In the same way, Jesus brings us into relationship with Himself, but too often we betray Him through our words and our actions when we say we love Him and then live otherwise. When we're filled with the perfect love of Christ, we can no longer keep living to serve ourselves!

Jesus endured so much on our behalf -- even to the point of death, when flies circled His body as He hung on the cross. So what will it take for us to proclaim that He's the Lord of our lives? No matter what we go through in this life, it's worth more than anything to be able to proclaim Him as Lord over all.

When Jesus was tortured and crucified, He was stripped naked as He took on the sins of all mankind. And the "naked truth" of His sacrifice on the cross is that we can come before Him completely open to receiving His forgiveness. When we do that, He removes any barriers between us and God, and clothes us in a new wardrobe of righteousness!

You can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their hands. And when we look at the hands of Jesus, we can see a lot, too: His compassion in dying so we could have eternal life, His firmness in never letting us go, and most of all, His immense love that's demonstrated by the nail scars in His palms. Jesus' hands show that His love for us reaches beyond all limitations, and does what's necessary to bring us to Himself.

Can we all be honest? Sometimes our passion as Christians, for Christ and for His sacrifice, can be pretty weak. But when we fully grasp the fact that Jesus was so passionate that He was willing to die for us, it re-ignites our own passion to die to ourselves, take up our own crosses, and spend the rest of our earthly days living this life for Him.

The men who owned the donkey Jesus rode on when He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday were willing to give what they had when they heard the Lord needed their assets. In the same way, we've got to be willing to give whatever God asks of us when He asks for it. Since everything we have is a gift from Him anyway, we have a responsibility to give it back to Him to be used for His glory!

We can't leave the job of spreading the Gospel to preachers alone. Each of us has got to take responsibility for the people that God's placed in our lives, and to share the Good News with them. We may be the only person in someone's life who can tell them about God's free gift of salvation!

Sometimes, God's grace rains down in our circumstances. But most often, it's the droplets of His "dew", sprinkled in and about our everyday lives in small ways, that sustain us and remind us of His goodness! His provision for every area of our lives shows His immeasurable grace -- but it's His gift of salvation that ensures we have more than we could ever need.