And before you know it, you’re working a full-time job, and taking care of responsibilities and a family.

(ain’t that a trip!)You can’t control time; you can only take advantage of it.   Use your youth to prepare for a great life!

To begin any successful journey, you need to prepare yourself by having a winning plan.  You need to know where you’re going and how to get there.  You also need to know that there are going to be roadblocks and bumps along the way, and how you handle those obstacles will determine how fast you’ll reach your destination or whether you’ll reach it at all.  But the important thing to remember is that God has already given you every single thing you will ever need to have a spectacular journey; a journey filled with the most wonderful surprises and blessings.  Through Christ, you have the tools necessary to shape and mold your life into a thing of beauty.

Sin, Salvation, and Sonship!  
You have a very important choice to make.  Right now this very moment, God is presenting you with the opportunity to change the course of your life for all eternity.  That’s right!  Even though you may not feel it, when you make the decision to take God at His word and live your life according to His divine plan, you are literally beginning a process that will cause you to blossom into a spectacular, unstoppable, marvelous woman or man of God.  If you don’t believe it, take this challenge: Give yourself six months to navigate your life using the roadmap of the Word of God.  Allow God to prove how awesome His plan really is! We’ll help you, just read on! 

What is God’s Plan?
God created Adam, the first human being.  He gave him life and authority over everything else that He created in the earth.  Because Adam was very lonely, God created a woman, Eve, as Adam’s companion.  They lived in great harmony until the day they were approached by God’s number one adversary. Just as we have legal systems that govern different countries, God has legalities that govern the entire universe.  His adversary was very well aware of those legalities, and he tricked Adam and Eve into going against God’s law.  The act of disobeying God’s law is called “sin”. When that happened, Adam lost his authority over the earth, but that wasn’t the worst part of this deal.  When Adam sinned against God, he lost the most precious thing any of us could ever possess, and that was his intimate connection to God. This is known as the “fall of man”. God and Adam had such a close bond before he made this monumental mistake.  Can you imagine how special it must have been to be so close to the Father? Well, he gave it all away, but all was not lost. Here’s where the legalities come into play. In order that Adam’s wrong could be righted, man’s sins had to be cleansed, and just a little dab of cleaning wouldn’t do.  We needed the whole enchilada.  You see God is spirit.  He is the most high God, and the most Holy of holy. True fellowship with him is only achievable when we are holy too, and when Adam sinned, he lost his holiness—his connection to God, and thus we lost ours as well. That’s what sin does.  It makes us beneath what God intends us to be.  The adversary knew that, it’s the reason he tricked Adam, and it’s the reason he tries so hard to trick us.  Only the purest of pure could wash our sins away for all time and restore the holiness that Adam lost, and what could be purer than the blood of God’s only begotten son, Jesus Christ. 

Jesus Christ knew the scriptures up and down.  He knew the predicament of man, he saw us at our worst. God’s heart was to see the connection between He and man restored, and Jesus said to God, “I’ll go, send me! I’ll do what needs to be done.”  He allowed hateful men to nail his hands and feet to the cross so that his blood, his death, could pay a price high enough to cleanse our sins for eternity.  Jesus Christ was our “Salvation”.  When we accept his extreme act of love, we are saved or born again. We die to our old way of living, thinking, and behaving, and we become new creatures in Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

Becoming saved or born again means that we have accepted Jesus Christ as our personal savior.  When we do that, we are saved from the consequence of sin.  What is the consequence or payment for sin? Eternal death, we would spend an eternity without feeling the warmth and care of God’s love. Through the gift of salvation we can be in fellowship and right-standing with God, we become His children, His called-out ones, His beloved. Salvation is the key to God’s plan, and it is His desire that we all accept it.

Romans 3:22-24 NIV
²²This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, ²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV
21God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.