Proverbs 21:21 He that followeth after righteousness and mercy findeth life, righteousness, and honour.

My classmates from high school have a page on Facebook. They post photos and remember when. I look and read and I am surprised at gleeful memories they paint. Some of them don’t remember the pain, or don’t want talk about it, or maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t as painful for them as I thought. Do I have good memories of those days, a few but to be honest I wasn’t happy.

I wanted a loving relationship and I didn’t have the faintest idea about how to love. While I was going to church the lessons of loving relationships was not taught. Every sermon focus was about sin, death and salvation. They were so heavily weighted on salvation they neglected the true meaning of discipleship.

John 13:35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

If you cannot show me love, then I have no sense of the love relationship I so desperately desire. If I have no experience in being loved, then how can I model that love towards others?

Hosea 9:10 I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time: but they went to Baalpeor, and separated themselves unto that shame; and their abominations were according as they loved.

If that is all you have seen, that is all you know.

1 John 4:20 If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?

If I cannot show love, it undermines my confidence in my love toward God. So the examples set the stage of healthy memories by replacing the desires of the heart to be loved with genuine love relationships. It was just one verse earlier that John says we love Him because He first loved us.

While we appreciate all He did for us two thousand years ago, we need your love relationship now.

Psalm 33:4-5 For the word of the Lord is right; and all his works are done in truth. He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.

The earth is full of goodness? Really? That’s how we look at things isn’t it? We see evil in the world and suddenly our thinking isn’t in alignment with God’s word. The works of the enemy are painful and full of evil.  It seems like the enemy is winning the battle if you think that way. Evil prevails. That is what the enemy wants you to think.

The earth is full of the Lord’s goodness. Same sentence, different focus. Now we focus on the Lord. The Lord’s goodness is not gone in the midst of evil, it is an escape hatch, a way out. Always there, always available, all you have to do is open the door and enter in.

Entering into the Kingdom is sanctuary from the evil. The evil still exists but it cannot touch your soul. We tend to forget with all this evil in the world that God is in the soul saving business.

Ephesians 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

The world wrestles in the flesh and blood and that is what we see and feel. It is not where the Lord’s goodness resides. The Lord’s goodness resides in His children. Your goodness does not fade in darkness, it is light. Darkness runs from the light, cannot exist in light.

The enemy will tell you he is winning the battle but the truth is that the war is already over and all that there is left are casualties.

John 16:33 These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

Satan’s victims lash out in pain, they need to escape and the only escape hatch from this world is thru the One who won, Jesus Christ.