By Our Love by for KING & COUNTRY

When it comes to giving what gifts we have been given, let’s hold our heads high in the dignity of those gifts. When it comes to Jesus —

And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men^[a] by which we must be saved. – Acts 4:12  ESV

— think of Him as our cool place – if we look at it any differently we drain this verse of its significance.

My pastor screwed this up big time when he preached a few weeks ago. He basically told us that all of the followers of Jesus who had yet professed Jesus ( I have no idea how he could have figured out when they did, I cannot even figure out when the disciples professed Jesus other than Peter, and he did not even know what he was really saying {evidence of his betrayal}) were going to hell only because of the lack of their profession as opposed to the state of their heart and how much they loved Jesus. I felt all the air in the church get sucked out as his legalism preached to fit his sermon notes and not his love for the congregation and how that messed up Sunday morning.

Salvation is deliverance – manifold kinds of deliverance. That is what enables us to stand in life and let the water of life flow through us to everyone around us, and then we just observe the results. We don’t make it happen. The burden is not ours. The Lord will take care of it and we have to get out of His way and stop messing with things that we should leave to His care. – Dallas Willard

The very next verse shows what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus. – Acts 4:13  ESV

They observed boldness and confidence, they discovered that the men were uneducated and ordinary, and they began to recognize that they had been with Jesus. It had initially appeared that Peter and John were simply viewed as two unauthorized men, teaching, because Peter’s preaching was so powerful and so skillful they would not have known he was not trained in a religious school.

The gifts that Jesus gives us are our dignity – use them to share with the world the Jesus you and I  know.