God's gift

I just want to start off by saying sorry for not posting sooner and Merry Late Christmas!!(:

The reason I haven't been blogging is because since break started I haven't felt as close to God as I did when I first started this blog. Like I said, I'm not perfect and I am always going to be making mistakes. But, I think the main reason as to why I'm feeling distant is because things in my life are going good. Meaning, no drama.

A lot of people use God as a miracle worker only. When times get rough, someone gets sick, tragic things happen, and people turn to God to help them and to 'fix' things. I am guilty of this myself. I pray more when I need him. But since my life has no major problems right now, 'I don't need him.' I put those in quotes because that's just the mentality of thinking. I do still need him. Even when things are going smoothly.

The Lord is our father and our friend. I don't ignore my own dad just because my personal life is good. No, I talk to my dad all the time. I'm constantly bugging him and trying to talk to him even when he's too occupied with TV and he doesn't hear a word I'm saying. I need to be that way with God. Everybody does. I need to include Jesus in my every day routine.

Yesterday was Christmas and before we opened our gifts my dad told us a spiritual message. He talked about how the day after Christmas the longest line at Walmart is the return and exchange line. People actually return their gifts because what they got wasn't exactly what they wanted. He said that people do that with Jesus. He gave us the greatest gift anyone could ever give us. He took sin out of the equation of life so we could have eternal salvation. We have this gift and still people 'exchange it' for other other worldly things. People don't appreciate his gift as much as they really should. I'm guilty of that.

The biggest thing I have learned since I starting paying attention in church is this:
We aren't cleansed and then we are saved. We are saved and then we are cleansed.
Which means, we don't do good works so that we can earn eternal salvation. We earn eternal salvation by believing Jesus is our Savior and then through him we turn into good people. We do good because we want to honor His Grace. Because the spirit of the Lord is in us and we want to show God that we appreciate his gift to us.

My goal: to talk to my Savior more and to not take his gift for granted.