Mark Hall

Understanding and truly accepting God's forgiveness is the incubator to a meaningful walk with Jesus. As we escape the dregs of compromise to walk in purity and obedience, we are free to grow on God's timetable if we ignore the lies of the unholy world. And only by avoiding faulty human logic can we give our lives over to the seeming risk of a God who is actually unable to be anything but faithful.

There is a reason God used the east and west to describe how far he cast your sin from you,' he said. 'If you go north, you can only go north so far until you're finally going south. And you can only go south so far until you're going north. But if you start traveling east, it keeps going east forever, and west just keeps going west. If you think about it, you're never going to go so far west that you're going east. That's how far he cast our sin from us.

Compromise is the assassin of fellowship with God.

What's true about you is what God says about you. Not what your mirror says. Not what your past says.

Any darkness that comes out in my life is the fruit of my own appetites, and it's my choice either to feed or starve those appetites. I was purposely feeding on music and movies with dark, violent themes and plenty of sexual content. All of that takes root in our thought lives and affects everything we do. It clouds our communication with God and can limit how he uses us. If someone is in a dark place and needs help, we're probably not going to have suitable answers when we're gorging on trash.

The Bible says we are forgiven. It says we are saints. It says we are children of God, citizens of heaven, members of God's family, and chosen members of a royal priesthood. It says we are salt and light, we are people who dwell in a city set on a hill. It says we are co-heirs with Christ, ready to inherit the eternal life reserved for the saints. We cannot be separated from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

Who cares what the Bible means to me? We need to know what it means. That's where I have to allow God to redefine my thinking. He tells us in Romans 12:2 not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. What always gets me about this verse is he's telling believers we still need to be transformed. It means I have a saved spirit but I still think with a lost brain, and slowly but surely my mind has to be transformed. Such transformation comes but one way - by truth. By his Word.