Father's Opinion

1:11 This is how we fit into God's picture, Christ is the measure of our portion; we are in Him; invented and defined in Him. God's blueprint intention is on exhibition in us, everything He accomplishes is inspired by the energy and intent of His affection. (The Mirror Bible)

You are an unrepeatable and entirely unique masterpiece of Heavenly Father’s, Lord Jesus and Holy Spirit’s creative love! You are in no measure a mistake or of inferior bloodline. You are in no measure lacking anything or flawed. You are Abba’s child! 

And as such, you are a sought after and romanced love child. You are forever adopted into the bosom of Father’s heart of mercy, grace and un-ending, un-compromising, un-mitigating (meaning-no one can bring up anything before Father that will ever change His mind about you) un-changing and un-conditional LOVE! They-The Triune God are head over heels madly in love with you!

You are indelibly imprinted with His D.N.A. That D.N.A. is their Divine Natured Added and it forever emanates from the core of who and whose you are! You have Jesus on the Throne of your heart and you are thus always at all times Regal. 

Therefore you have been hewn from the depths of His loving and matchless character. You are the mirror image of Jesus Christ! Your identity is a reflection of His identity! You are secure in Him with Father’s loving arms enfolding you forever. You are so secure that your life is hidden with Christ, in God (Colossians 3).
Your value, worth, expected end and life purpose are all tied directly to Christ in you! That makes you more valuable than the wildest imagination can fathom! Gold paves the streets you walk with Him on every day! Faith always activates the eternal reality of all that you are! ‘To seal our sonship the Spirit of His Son echo’s Abba Father in your heart’! (Romans 8)

Living with Abba's echo in my heart! Ron Ross

Stature and Stability

Ron Ross <kadenhogge1@gmail.com>	10:49 PM (10 minutes ago)

But I will leave within you the meek and humble, who trust in the name of the LORD. 13 The remnant of Israel will do no wrong; they will speak no lies, nor will deceit be found in their mouths. They will eat and lie down and no one will make them afraid." 14 Sing, O Daughter of Zion; shout aloud, O Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! 15 The LORD has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The LORD, the King of Israel, is with you; never again will you fear any harm. 16 On that day they will say to Jerusalem, "Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands hang limp.

There has always been a remnant of those who simply walked with God by faith. Their stature was attached to the One they were walking with-The Almighty God! They simply trusted in His name; which was reflected in whatever need, trial or challenge they faced. His name was/is more than sufficient in every circumstance of life!

17 The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing." 18 "The sorrows for the appointed feasts I will remove from you; they are a burden and a reproach to you. 19 At that time I will deal with all who oppressed you; I will rescue the lame and gather those who have been scattered. I will give them praise and honor in every land where they were put to shame. 20 At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home. I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes," says the LORD.

What else could anyone possibly need? I am stuck on this passage of scripture! Why? Because it assures me that He is always who He is in my life. My life! Really, we are talking about Ron Ross. Nobody special or famous. I would be stretching it a bit to say there are fifty people in my life who would have my back like Jesus does! That will give you genuine, lasting stature and stability!

Yea God! Ron Ross

Quieted in His Love

There is nothing in our journey quite like being quieted in His love. Have you been? Is this a normal part of your walk with Jesus? All of hell is against this! Fear assaults us daily while stress, anxiety, nervous tension, constant worry and trauma work there insidious plan in our lives. We cannot quiet in His love if focused on these demons. But we must. It is a non-negotiable daily part of our joy in Him. These demons will flee as we quiet in His love!

There's nothing to fear from evil ever again! God Is Present among You 16 Jerusalem will be told: "Don't be afraid. Dear Zion, don't despair. 17 Your God is present among you, a strong Warrior there to save you. Happy to have you back, he'll calm you with his love and delight you with his songs. 18 The accumulated sorrows of your exile will dissipate. I, your God, will get rid of them for you. You've carried those burdens long enough. 19 At the same time, I'll get rid of all those who've made your life miserable. I'll heal the maimed; I'll bring home the homeless. In the very countries where they were hated they will be venerated. (Zephaniah 3:15b-19, Msg) Truly, what marvelous news this is!

The Lord your God is in the midst of you, a Mighty One, a Savior {who saves}! He will rejoice over you with joy; he will rest {in silent satisfaction} and in His love he will be silent and make no mention {of past sins, or even recall them}; he will (instead) exult over you with singing.  (Zephaniah 3:17, Amp) The words to this great hymn shed more light as to what He has already done and always does for you and me!

Could we with ink the ocean fill

and were the skies of parchment made,

were every stalk on earth a quill,

and every man a scribe by trade,

to write the love of God above

would drain the ocean dry;

nor could the scroll contain the whole,

tho stretched from sky to sky.(thank you Gayle)

Verses 18 & 19 shed much light on this critical spiritual issue. “The accumulated sorrows of your exile will dissipate. At the same time, I’ll get rid of all those who’ve made your life miserable. I’ll heal the maimed; I’ll bring home the homeless. In the very countries where they were hated they will be venerated.” If you bring up your failures and sins, He will look at you with a question mark. In the silence of His love he makes no mention of them. What more could he do for us to show his unconditional love. Truly He daily quiets us with His love.  Dive heart first into quieting love!

Quieted in His love, Ron Ross

One Eyewitness Account

In the fall of 1970, while hitch-hiking to the Strawberry Fields Rock Festival in Toronto, Canada, I was kidnapped by Jesus Christ. As a drug dazed street hippie I was quickly awakened and completely captured by the fierce love of Jesus. To this day, I am still hopelessly mesmerized by him. I have never been the same.

Furthermore, I have it on very credible evidence that I will never recover the profound sense of loss, loneliness, fear, trauma, aimlessness, hopelessness, hate and shame He has sense taken from me. I certainly hope not! Jesus has taken all of my brokenness and replaced it with his infinite saving grace.

That fateful day in 1970 I fell hopelessly in love with Jesus! I was unwittingly swept up by what would be tagged in history as the “Jesus Movement”! As a hippie my motto and mantra was ‘free love’ and ‘peace not war’. I had met the well spring of all true love and peace ~ The Very Love of God and the Prince of Peace! The following excerpt from ‘On the Love of God’ by Bernard of Clairvaux sums up my life’s purpose since coming to know this Jesus.

You ask me, “Why should God be loved?” I answer: the reason for loving God is God himself. (I encountered loves truth when I met Jesus) And why should God be loved for his own sake? Simply because no one could be more justly loved than God, no one deserves our love more. Some may question if God deserves our love or if they might have something to gain by loving him. The answer to both questions is yes, but I find no other worthy reason for loving him except himself.

God is entitled to our love. Why? Because he gave himself for us despite the fact that we were/are so undeserving. What better could he have given? If we ask why God is entitled to our love, we should answer, “Because he first loved us.” God is clearly deserving of our love especially if we consider who he is that loves us, who we are that he loves, and how much he loves us.

And who is God? Is he not the one to whom every spirit bears witness: “Thou art my God”? God has no need for our worldly possessions. True love is precisely this: that it does not seek its own interests. And how much does he love us? He so loved the world that he gave his only Son; he laid down his life for us.

1 From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in - we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, and verified it with our own hands. 2 The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we're telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us. 3 We saw it, we heard it, and now we're telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy! (1 John 1: 1-4, Msg)

Is there a higher purpose for living? Ron Ross

Love Sees Faces

Love sees faces. Genuine love sees faces, not a mass; the good shepherd "calleth his own sheep by name." Intercession is more than specific: it is pondered; it requires us to bear on our heart the burden of those for whom we pray. George A. Buttrick

Father, Because I Am Loved

Without question, my greatest struggle and crisis of faith is, 'AM I LOVED'? This question releases its evil first cousin; 'WILL I BE LOVED? Is being loved and loving contingent upon if I do some proverbial duty, service, behavior, performance enough and well enough?  Close on their heels is 'can I really love' without impure motive or impunity?
The only correct answer to these questions is simply God is Love. "What marvelous love the Father has extended to us! Just look at it - we're called children of God! That's who we really are." (1 John 3:1a, Msg) Look deeply into the glory of love! Having begun in Father's unmerited, unconditional, unending love; it elicits the following response!

My beloved friends let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. 8 The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God, because God is love - so you can't know him if you don't love. 9 This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. 10 This is the kind of love we are talking about - not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they've done to our relationship with God. 11 My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. 12 No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us - perfect love! (1 John 4:7-12, Msg)


13 This is how we know we're living steadily and deeply in him, and he in us: He's given us life from his life, from his very own Spirit. 14 Also, we've seen for ourselves and continue to state openly that the Father sent his Son as Savior of the world. 15 Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God's Son participates continuously in an intimate relationship with God. 16 We know it so well, we've embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God. 17 This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we're free of worry on Judgment Day - our standing in the world is identical with Christ's. (1 John 4:13-17, Msg)

There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life - fear of death, fear of judgment - is one not yet fully formed in love. 19 We, though, are going to love - love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first. 20 If anyone boasts, "I love God," and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won't love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can't see? 21 The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You've got to love both. (1 John3:18-21, Msg) 

There can be no less of a response. Your faith experience of love gives rise to the intensity of your hope. "There remains faith, hope and love; the greatest of these is love." The Abba of Jesus always pursues you and me as a tremendous, unrelenting lover! Herein is the essence of what we call Christianity. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ! This is the Gospel of Grace!

Father, because I am loved and I love...
I don't have to explain myself to you.
I don't have to explain myself to you.
I don't have to excuse myself to you.
I don't have to abase myself before you.
You know all about me, and you call me friend.
You call me your delight.
You call me your beloved.
Because I am loved and I love...
I need not lie prostrate on my face before you.
I am free to run to you.
I am free to run into the circle of your waiting, always open arms, to enter the fullness of your embrace,
to be held safely, strongly, securely, softly against your heart.
Because I am loved and I love...
I don't have to worry about my response or lack of it.
I don't have to struggle with my desire to understand.
I don't have to wrestle with my feeling of unworthiness.
All I have to do is be still, stay close and let you love me.
But because I am loved and I love, I try.
Here I am, Father.
Still, for once. Closer than I've ever been.
Waiting. Accepting. Wanting. Believing.
Love me, Father. I will love. 
Loved and loving. Ron Ross

I literally believe the Gospel for myself daily! What, you don't? I need the Grace of God more today than ever before in my journey. Why? Because I am learning through the process of years of trials, temptations, pain, failures, temporary setbacks and plain old hardheadedness to trust moment by moment in the Gospel of Grace. Every time that I rely instead on the strength of my own 'religious' flesh, intellect, moral muscle or self-righteousness I am a nano second from Papa's 'woodshed' listed above.
"4. So, my friends, this is something like what has taken place with you. When Christ died he took that entire rule-dominated way of life down with him and left it in the tomb, leaving you free to "marry" a resurrection life and bear "offspring" of faith for God. 5 For as long as we lived that old way of life, doing whatever we felt we could get away with, sin was calling most of the shots as the old law code hemmed us in. And this made us all the more rebellious. In the end, all we had to show for it was miscarriages and stillbirths.
6 But now that we're no longer shackled to that domineering mate of sin, and out from under all those oppressive regulations and fine print, we're free to live a new life in the freedom of God."(Romans 7:4-6, Msg)
Question. Do you feel 'free' in the core of your being? Has your thirst for self-effort and controlling your own destiny been quenched? Are you through heaping shame and condemnation, as some sort of 'sick' religious penance upon yourself and others? Do you still compare yourself to other's journey, thinking them to be better or more dedicated than you? Is your standard of 'righteousness' higher than those 'poor' sinners around you? If you/I answered any of these questions with the faintest 'yes' then we are not 'free in Christ'.
And we may also be unsure of our Salvation. "Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you?" (Galatians 3:5, Msg)
Maybe Paul's experience mirrors yours?"The very command that was supposed to guide me into life was cleverly used to trip me up, throwing me headlong. 11 So sin was plenty alive, and I was stone dead. 12 But the law code itself is God's good and common sense, each command sane and holy counsel." (Romans 7: 10-12, Msg) "I know that all God's commands are spiritual, but I'm not. Isn't this also your experience?" Yes. I'm full of myself - after all, I've spent a long time in sin's prison. 15 What I don't understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise".(Romans 7:14-15,Msg)
Are you done with lesser things? The Ten Commandments were only and always given to Moses to convince us that we need that something more that Jesus alone provides. The Law, as wonderful as it is, doesn't even hold a spiritual candle to the new and living way: which is the good news (New Covenant) of Grace. You can't warrant Grace and you certainly can't make a "decision" to try Grace instead of the Law.
"I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. 20 My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. 21 It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. 22 I truly delight in God's commands, 23 but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. 24 I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question? 25 The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different." (Romans 7: 19-25, Msg)

"Did someone put a hex on you? Have you taken leave of your senses? Something crazy has happened, for it's obvious that you no longer have the crucified Jesus in clear focus in your lives. His sacrifice on the Cross was certainly set before you clearly enough." (Galatians 3:1, Msg)
"When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. 5 Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. 6 For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love." (Galatians 5:4-6, Msg)
"It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows. 14 For everything we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's an act of true freedom." (Galatians 5:13-14, Msg)
"What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. 20 Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I am not going to go back on that. Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily." (Galatians 2:19-21, Msg)
As we believe the Gospel of Grace daily for ourselves we can, with great joy, drink deeply from the well of Salvation. Would you rather dig your own well to drink from? God forbid! There is only one well; Jesus.


Ron Ross