Thoughts on God

Here is a slightly modified excerpt of a recent email to a close friend of mine, but it applies to everyone:

It is vitally important to have God as the center of your life and also your relationship. When that is right, the other things may not be perfect, but they tend to be better and you can handle them better (because you have the right attitude about them and have your priorities straight). Remember, Christ would have come to earth and died on the cross even if you were the only one who would be saved by that action. Your true value has no relation to your abilities or deficiencies, your victories or failures, others' opinions of you, not even your opinion of yourself. You are a valuable person because God says so. What He says goes because not only did He create you, but He wrote His love and value for you in His own blood on the cross. He died to save you, and all you can do to thank Him is to constantly seek to be closer to Him and more like Him, which is something that He wants anyway! :D Isn't God amazing? He has already take the first step, and even several more steps, on His way toward us. He has done everything that could be done for us without removing our personal freedom. And he is EAGERLY waiting for us to make the slightest move His direction so He can save us. Just as the Holy Spirit takes our small prayers and transforms them into something more before the throne, so God is waiting for us to do anything that He can transform and take as an excuse to save us. I don't even think that He is patient about it! I think God is waiting *impatiently*! That is not to say that he is angry or upset about the wait, but simply that he can't WAIT for us to come to Him. We don't even need to reach out to grasp His hand. He will seize on the very IMPULSE to call on Him. And the more we open ourselves to His influence, the more we remember that this world is not our home and focus on the heavenly things rather than the earthly, the more we turn our eyes upon Jesus and the things of this world grow strangely dim, the more time we spend in the Word; the stronger His presence will be felt in our lives, the more amazingly He can use us, and the clearer His will for us will be.