ON A MISSION

Yes, Agent 23 is on a mission. Today at 1300 hours, I received a message from my Commander, General Jesus. Primary Objective: I am to use this blog not only for my own purposes, but to help spread the Gospel. Secondary Objective: I am to have fun writing about myself.
If you are thinking, "Gosh, I thought this kid liked funny stuff. This isn't funny at all", don't worry. Some of my posts will be serious, some will be humorous, some will be heterogeneous (that means a mix of the two for you non-scientific folks). This post will be mostly serious. Oh well, a small price to pay for spreading the Gospel.
By the way, if you already know Christ, you still might want to read my posts. I'm going to try to list any Bible verses that apply to what I'm talking about. If I leave something out, don't worry, at somepoint it'll pop up in another post.
Okay, this spreading the Gospel thing is harder than I thought. I don't know what to start telling you. Ah, I got it.
Romans 10:9 states,"If you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." This verse tells us several things, a few of them not so easy to believe.
1- Notice that the word God is singular. That means one. God does not belong to a group of gods, nor is he some sort of king of the gods. He is the ONLY God. There are no gods for certain things like in most other religions. He isn't the god of the forest, or the god of mothers, or even the god of duct tape. He is the God of everything and everyone. Therefore, he is the only one you can worship and rely on. Any other god is fake and cannot save you. You MUST put all your faith in God. Believing in some fake god is like believing that you can use scotch tape instead of duct tape to hold your toy together (isn't it clever how I found another connection with my title?)
2- Who is this Jesus fellow? Well the verse says he is Lord. What a minute, didn't I jsut say that God is the only God? Is Jesus some kind of assistant or human helper? No. Jesus is God's one and only Son. Jesus plays a key role in our salvatoin though. John 3:16 says "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall never die but have eternal life." Where did God send his son? To earth. For what reason? Well, as always, the world had fallen into sin. The price for sinning was death. But God loved the world he had created and didn't want us to have to pay that expensive price. So he willingly sent his son to earth to pay the price for us. Of course, he didn't force his son into doing this. Jesus loved us too, and was willing to die for us. So he came to earth and was born (hence Christmas). He lived his life as a human, fully exposed to the harshness of the world, yet also as the Son of God, performing miracles that weren't your average magician's tricks: he healed the lame, the blind, the deaf, the mute. He walked on water, turned water into wine, fed 5,000 people with a basket of food. He raised the dead. Turned worthless scotch tape into duct tape. Actually, he never did that last one, but it would've been cool if he did. Jesus then suffered the worst death imaginable: crucifixtion (more on this in a future post). Through his death, our sins were paid for. His death bought us the opportunity to have eternal life. But that isn't the end.
3- Look back at the first verse. It says that you must also believe that God raised him from the dead. Wow. This is probably one of the hardest things to believe, so don't rush into this. The fact is, Jesus didn't have to come back to life. His job was done. He'd already defeated sin. So why did God raise him up? So that we may believe that he truly was God's son. Without his resurrection, it would be easy to say that Jesus was just a crazy man who died thinking he was God's son. I mean, his disciples (followers) went on to do exactly what he did. The only difference is, when they died they stayed dead. By coming back to life, Jesus proved that he was who he said he was. You must make a decision at some point. Did Jesus stay dead, in which case believing in God is futile, or is Jesus really the Son of God, in which case our salvation lies in him? (Quick fact: what I just related was called the Gospel, or the Good News. It is the story of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection).
4- Finally, if you make the decision to believe in God, you have to confess this faith with your mouth. Tell your family, your friends, anyone about your faith. Writing a blog doesn't count, by the way, when it comes to confessing your personal faith (key word: mouth). It does, however, count when trying to get OTHERS to believe and confess their faith. It's like a chain reaction. I believe. I confess my faith out loud. I write a blog about it so that you believe. You confess out loud. You write a blog so that someone else believes. They confess out loud. And so on.
I really hope that this post was helpful. Sorry if it too serious for you, but it makes up for its lack of humour by its wealth of life giving knowledge.
If you ever read one of my posts and think "Huh? This thing about --- doesn't make sense." Please don't give up hope. Find someone who can help you, post a comment and I'll try to answer it in one of my posts, or just wait and eventually I'll write a post about it anyway.
If you ever read one of my posts and think "Wait. I already believe and I disagree about ---." That's fine. Just because we believe in the same God doesn't mean we agree on everything. Just do what one of the options I listed above.
If I have a typo, try to ignore it, otherwise I'll probably be flooded with comments on my writing. If the typo messes up what I'm trying to say (i.e. "Jesus raised the duct tape to life"), THEN you can comment.
That's all for today (whew!).
Go and spread the Good News!