God's blessings upon you dear friend for stopping by. It is my prayer that You will be blessed from what you read here today. All I ask is that you allow the Lord to speak to your heart as you read through this. Well, here goes.

Take a look at the latest Barna Research Group poll findings and you will see that many people in the United States consider themselves Christian. Take a poll of your own and ask people if they think that they are going to Heaven one day and the large percentage of people believe that they are going there. Of those who have made a confession of faith, there are many who are nowhere to be found on Sunday morning, much less any other day of the week that the church meets.

Why is it that we know we need to do better, but we never take the initiative to meet those expectations of our life? Why is it that we ignore the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit to rise above our present condition to experience a deeper connection, or walk, with God? Why is it that more people have this haunting feeling that there is more to this "life with God" than is currently being displayed in their life? It's because a great rift resides in our spiritual lives. On one side is where faith says that we should be...on the other, is where reality reminds us on a daily basis that we really are.

Is there a standard by which we are to live, that when closely followed will allow us to walk closer to God? Sure there is! It's the Bible! But the question that I pose to you today is: "Are we living as best we can to God's Word or are we just making excuses?" How can we bridge the seeming disconnect in our lives between faith and reality? How can we get closer to the place that God would have us to live our lives? Let us look at three steps.

First, there must be a vision. In Proverbs 29:18 we read, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." No truer words could be spoken. There must be a new and fresh vision of who we are. There can be no lying to ourselves. We must see ourselves as God sees us before we can truly move on to be the people that God wants us to be. We have to see ourselves with all of the stains and dirt that we have accumulated in our lives before we can begin to clean it out. Ignoring who we are will not allow us to change.

But there must also be a vision of what we are here for. You have a purpose here on this earth. God formed you in the womb to carry out His divine purpose in this world. As you read this, you may be someone who is young -- you have all the world before you, you think. You may be of the opinion that at a later time, you will do what God has in store for your life. Do not be fooled. The Bible speaks multiple times of TODAY being the day that we should take up the things of God and how we cannot rely on tomorrow. You may be reading this today and you are an older person. You may think to yourself that you have waited too long to carry out God's plan for your life. Do not be fooled. Ecclesiastes 9:4 says, "But for him who is joined to all the living, there is hope." You still have time to take care of today what you have put off for so long.

There must first be a vision.

Second, there must be a decision. Joshua 24:15 is a clarion call to God's children, both in the past and in the present. As Joshua stood on the edge of the Promised Land, ready to lead the people into Canaan, he uttered these words: "Choose you this day whom you will serve...but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Before we can move from where we are, there must be a vision, but there also has to be a decision. You MUST DECIDE to get up and move or stay in the wilderness trudging tirelessly through life.

While God is the source of our power and the architect of the plans for our life, it will ultimately come down to whether we choose to follow Him or not. It will be up to us to move into the brave new territory that is filled with anxious expectation or stay in the comfort of where we have been. You know, we read the account of Moses and the Hebrew people and we tend to be really hard on the Hebrews. We wonder why in the world they would want to return to the slavery of their past when they are facing the blessings of the Promised Land. We wonder why in the world they would allow themselves to not have enough faith and foresight to get up and go and claim what it is that God would have for them. But we do the same thing, do we not? Over and over in the Bible, we read of the blessings that God promises to His children if they will but listen and let go of the past. The whole of the Book of Malachi are promises of which I speak today. And yet we do not do them! There must be a decision if we are going to cross that disconnect between reality and faith.

Finally, there must be a division. Jesus told us in John 17:14-18 that we would have to separate ourselves from the world. He told us that we would have to be in the world, but that we did not have to be a part of the world. These are wise words for the living to apply to their lives today.

Bridging the disconnect between reality and faith is going to be more than just doing what we need to do. It also means that we are going to have to divorce ourselves from some of the things that we have been doing. There are things that we have allowed in our lives that we KNOW THE WORD OF GOD SAYS ARE WRONG. Yet, we allow them anyway. Why is that happening? I think for many of us it is because we have allowed the world to influence us. That is not the way that Christ envisioned it for our lives. Rather than the world being an influence on us, we are to be an influence on it! We are to be the SALT and the LIGHT to this world. I also believe that many of us have just stood by and allowed ourselves to be changed slowly over time...much like the bullfrog in the boiling water.

But more than that, dear friends, some of us are going to have to divide ourselves from some things that are good. There are many things in this world that I would like to do, but they are not the things that God has purposed for my life. They are not things that God has told me that He wants me to do. And I realize that if I undertake them, then I remove myself from the opportunities to do the things that He has set before me.

Bridging the disconnect is going to take a vision of who we are to be and of what God has in store for our lives. It is going to take a decision to be the people of God that we are called to be. And it is going to take a matter of dividing out the things of our life that would distract us from being who God desires that we be.

God bless you all,
Bro. Scott