The persistent invitations of God are beautiful to behold: "Come thou and all thy house...into the ark." God certainly gives commands but He respectfully and humbly invites often! When God does give us a command, it is for our own blessing. God commanded Noah to build an ark...Noah's obedience blessed beyond anything Noah could have asked or imagined. God's invitations are to blessing as well. Noah's acceptance of the invitation to enter the ark blessed far beyond his understanding too; it not only delivered him and his family from death, it was the key to the future of God's precious creation.
We, too, are invited to enter in--into the ark of our salvation, Jesus Christ. We accept that invitation when we believe in faith that Jesus is Christ and confess with our lives. Confessing is when we live out our belief in Christ through obedience to the Word. When we enter into Christ, our salvation is secure; just as God shut the door on the Ark, God holds us fast when we believe. We may stumble, we may fail to live fully in our ark, Jesus, but our eternal deliverance remains assured. Nevertheless, it bears noting the results for all that IS outside of the ark during the flood: death. While God's mercy will not condemn our failures, all that we do outside of Christ--outside of His character, outside of His ways--will simply produce hay and stubble that will be burned when we stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ. Only living in Christ produces eternal results--gold, silver and precious jewels. Why would we waste our time on anything less?
God is unchanging and still able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think (Eph 3:20);
we are saved to serve Him and to walk in good works He has created for us to do. We can't even imagine the exceeding abundance of the results of our obedience!
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