March 31
Anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen knows there can be a simple way or a complicated way to accomplish many culinary tasks. There are, in fact, programs on the Cooking Channel whose purpose is to assist their viewers in the goal of finding the easiest ways to obtain optimum flavor from foods prepared.
In this regard, the cooking show hosts are a bit like God. He, too, has made something easy that worldly religious systems have made complicated. The reality is, the most crucial decision any person can ever make in life, the only decision any person can make that impacts eternity, is a very simple one.
A person needn’t approach the Holy One by crawling over mountainous terrain with his forehead bowed to the ground as an eastern belief system requires. A person needn’t sacrifice all he owns to satisfy a demanding God. Nobody needs to strap on a bomb and blow himself up to please a holy god. Why would the Author of life require these acts of destruction?
So, if no great act of devotion or sacrifice is required, exactly what is? The Apostle Paul states it simply in Romans 10:9, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” The sacrifice for your salvation was accomplished at Calvary. You need only believe it.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Friday, March 30, 2012
Insured
March 30
We buy insurance for everything. There is car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, flood insurance, earthquake insurance, and tornado insurance. There are insurance policies that can be obtained that will render financial assistance if one contracts a specific disease. There is general catastrophic insurance.
Governments stockpile arsenals of weapons as insurance against attack by an aggressor nation. At one time the thinking was that if enemies could mutually destroy each other, neither side would ‘push the button.’ With the acquisition of nuclear materials by rogue governments who see nuclear annihilation as a method of assisting God in bringing judgment to a fallen world, that is no longer a safe assumption.
But, in practice, whatever we can insure has a policy written as protection against that eventuality. What are we doing, however to insure our eternal destiny? What are we doing to ascertain our place in Heaven? Some people think their good works will afford them recognition in the eyes of God. They try to earn their reward by sacrificial giving or by doing altruistic works. While these are worthy endeavors, they are not acts that obtain salvation.
The one thing man can do to insure his place in heaven is to accept Jesus as his Savior and Lord. This is the one thing many people put off to a more convenient season. While they would never let their temporal insurance policies lapse, they have neglected obtaining their eternal insurance policy. But, God says,”…Now is the accepted time; today is the day of salvation” II Corinthians 6:2. Make no tarrying!
We buy insurance for everything. There is car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, flood insurance, earthquake insurance, and tornado insurance. There are insurance policies that can be obtained that will render financial assistance if one contracts a specific disease. There is general catastrophic insurance.
Governments stockpile arsenals of weapons as insurance against attack by an aggressor nation. At one time the thinking was that if enemies could mutually destroy each other, neither side would ‘push the button.’ With the acquisition of nuclear materials by rogue governments who see nuclear annihilation as a method of assisting God in bringing judgment to a fallen world, that is no longer a safe assumption.
But, in practice, whatever we can insure has a policy written as protection against that eventuality. What are we doing, however to insure our eternal destiny? What are we doing to ascertain our place in Heaven? Some people think their good works will afford them recognition in the eyes of God. They try to earn their reward by sacrificial giving or by doing altruistic works. While these are worthy endeavors, they are not acts that obtain salvation.
The one thing man can do to insure his place in heaven is to accept Jesus as his Savior and Lord. This is the one thing many people put off to a more convenient season. While they would never let their temporal insurance policies lapse, they have neglected obtaining their eternal insurance policy. But, God says,”…Now is the accepted time; today is the day of salvation” II Corinthians 6:2. Make no tarrying!
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Ones Own Decision
March 29
We look around us and we ‘assess’ people. We weigh the ‘pluses’ and the ‘minuses’ of their lives and we esteem them to be due our respect or disrespect, depending upon their achievements, their character, their ‘goodness’ in our eyes. God doesn’t. The Bible tells us that “He is no respecter of persons” Colossians 3:25.
That is not to say there is no weighing of a man before God. The God who is of “purer eyes than to behold evil…” Habakkuk 1:13 is so profoundly aware of evil and its consequences for mankind that Christ came to die in man’s behalf—and by taking man’s sentence of death upon His sinless person—to free man forever from sin’s penalty.
When Jesus came to be the Savior of the World, He did not ‘make a list and check it twice to see who was naughty or nice’; He did not agree to die for some but not for others. He, unlike us, does not assess any man’s worthiness to have a Savior. When He left the glory of Heaven, He came for all.
Jesus has paid the price for the redemption of everyone who has ever or will ever live, without regard to any man’s worth. I Timothy 2:3, 4 tells us, “God our Savior…wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of truth.” Whether a man comes to that knowledge or does not is entirely in his own hands, completely in his own will.
We look around us and we ‘assess’ people. We weigh the ‘pluses’ and the ‘minuses’ of their lives and we esteem them to be due our respect or disrespect, depending upon their achievements, their character, their ‘goodness’ in our eyes. God doesn’t. The Bible tells us that “He is no respecter of persons” Colossians 3:25.
That is not to say there is no weighing of a man before God. The God who is of “purer eyes than to behold evil…” Habakkuk 1:13 is so profoundly aware of evil and its consequences for mankind that Christ came to die in man’s behalf—and by taking man’s sentence of death upon His sinless person—to free man forever from sin’s penalty.
When Jesus came to be the Savior of the World, He did not ‘make a list and check it twice to see who was naughty or nice’; He did not agree to die for some but not for others. He, unlike us, does not assess any man’s worthiness to have a Savior. When He left the glory of Heaven, He came for all.
Jesus has paid the price for the redemption of everyone who has ever or will ever live, without regard to any man’s worth. I Timothy 2:3, 4 tells us, “God our Savior…wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of truth.” Whether a man comes to that knowledge or does not is entirely in his own hands, completely in his own will.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
A Reminder to Pray for Our Brothers in Bonds
As we read today of the great, unfathomable love that our God has for us, let us not neglect to pray fervently for those who suffer in bondage because of their faithfulness to proclaim that love to the lost and dying souls around them. When one member of the body suffers, the entire body suffers (I Corinthians 12:26) so let us be diligent in our prayers for the persecuted Church.
Love Revealed
March 28
God calls Himself our ‘Father.’ This is His way of conveying to man the intensity of His heart of love for us. We have no point of reference for the concept of an Almighty Entity who is from “everlasting to everlasting” Psalm 41:13. We cannot begin to fathom a Being who has no beginning and has no end (see Hebrews 7:1-3) so He expresses His heart to us in familiar terms, in terms we can understand.
Even those of us who may not have had loving earthly fathers know the inner longing that makes us yearn to know such a one. Through Christ’s manifestation of His love in the flesh, God has revealed to us that HE is the fulfillment of that longing. None of us need ever feel the lack of a father’s love, for our Heavenly Father has unveiled His heart through Jesus, and through Him, we see that we are precious to the Father.
We understand that It is love that conveyed Jesus to the cross and in our grasp of that reality, we know there is nothing He withholds from us, for He has given even His life that we might know Heaven’s Truth and Heaven’s Love and Heaven’s Salvation. In becoming alive to that realization, there is only one thing that our loving Savior requires of us---to share our great and glorious Hope with others. We are to share the good news of Christ’s love and salvation with everyone whose life touches ours.
Even when we haven’t the opportunity to convey His salvation package with words, we allow the “living epistle” II Corinthians 3:2 of our lives to be “read of all men.” We are to reflect the Father’s love to all—to the downcast, to the suffering, to the lost. As the half- brother of the Lord says in James 1:27, “Religion that our Father accepts…is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being negatively impacted by the world.”
God calls Himself our ‘Father.’ This is His way of conveying to man the intensity of His heart of love for us. We have no point of reference for the concept of an Almighty Entity who is from “everlasting to everlasting” Psalm 41:13. We cannot begin to fathom a Being who has no beginning and has no end (see Hebrews 7:1-3) so He expresses His heart to us in familiar terms, in terms we can understand.
Even those of us who may not have had loving earthly fathers know the inner longing that makes us yearn to know such a one. Through Christ’s manifestation of His love in the flesh, God has revealed to us that HE is the fulfillment of that longing. None of us need ever feel the lack of a father’s love, for our Heavenly Father has unveiled His heart through Jesus, and through Him, we see that we are precious to the Father.
We understand that It is love that conveyed Jesus to the cross and in our grasp of that reality, we know there is nothing He withholds from us, for He has given even His life that we might know Heaven’s Truth and Heaven’s Love and Heaven’s Salvation. In becoming alive to that realization, there is only one thing that our loving Savior requires of us---to share our great and glorious Hope with others. We are to share the good news of Christ’s love and salvation with everyone whose life touches ours.
Even when we haven’t the opportunity to convey His salvation package with words, we allow the “living epistle” II Corinthians 3:2 of our lives to be “read of all men.” We are to reflect the Father’s love to all—to the downcast, to the suffering, to the lost. As the half- brother of the Lord says in James 1:27, “Religion that our Father accepts…is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being negatively impacted by the world.”
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Return
March 27
All belief systems are not equal. Yes, I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but truth does not come down on the side of political correctness or expediency. Truth stands for itself in the power of its immutability. Truth is, in its essence, Christ who is, “…the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” (John 14:6) without Whom, no one will see the Father.
We delude ourselves and we delude those who are lost when we convolute God’s unchanging plan of salvation and insist that any sincere seeker will attain Heaven, or that there are many paths to Heaven. That lie, though it resonates comfortably in the mind of Western man who has fallen away from his once stalwart commitment to faith in Christ and his resolve to share His gospel, is part of today’s barrage of “doctrines of devils” (I Timothy 4:1).
We live in an age when truth has been turned on its head. As the scripture tells us, we, “…call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). We are among those who, “Professing themselves to be wise, have become fools” Romans 1:22. Our leaders, our parents—our pastors!—have lost their spiritual compass and we are adrift on a sea of empty promises and demonic deception. In having turned our back upon the TRUTH, we are swallowed into the abyss created by lies.
There is truth in the declaration of Job’s ‘comforters’ which says, “God does not take His eyes off the righteous; He enthrones them with kings and exalts them forever” Job 36:7. We find our economy, our government, our families, our world unraveling at breakneck speed as we pursue the wantonness that brought us to this abysmal turn of events. We shall continue our downward plunge until we accept the Lord’s advice, “…In returning (to Jesus)…shall you be saved…” Isaiah 30:15.
All belief systems are not equal. Yes, I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but truth does not come down on the side of political correctness or expediency. Truth stands for itself in the power of its immutability. Truth is, in its essence, Christ who is, “…the Way, the Truth, and the Life…” (John 14:6) without Whom, no one will see the Father.
We delude ourselves and we delude those who are lost when we convolute God’s unchanging plan of salvation and insist that any sincere seeker will attain Heaven, or that there are many paths to Heaven. That lie, though it resonates comfortably in the mind of Western man who has fallen away from his once stalwart commitment to faith in Christ and his resolve to share His gospel, is part of today’s barrage of “doctrines of devils” (I Timothy 4:1).
We live in an age when truth has been turned on its head. As the scripture tells us, we, “…call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). We are among those who, “Professing themselves to be wise, have become fools” Romans 1:22. Our leaders, our parents—our pastors!—have lost their spiritual compass and we are adrift on a sea of empty promises and demonic deception. In having turned our back upon the TRUTH, we are swallowed into the abyss created by lies.
There is truth in the declaration of Job’s ‘comforters’ which says, “God does not take His eyes off the righteous; He enthrones them with kings and exalts them forever” Job 36:7. We find our economy, our government, our families, our world unraveling at breakneck speed as we pursue the wantonness that brought us to this abysmal turn of events. We shall continue our downward plunge until we accept the Lord’s advice, “…In returning (to Jesus)…shall you be saved…” Isaiah 30:15.
Monday, March 26, 2012
To know Jesus is to steadfastly maintain faith in Him, even under duress. The coercion unless ones faith is recanted, the persecution, the threat of death--death itself!--cannot cause one who has known Jesus to leave His light and return to darkness.
Pray for the Persecuted Church, for the believers who suffer so much because they name the Name that is above all names (Ephesians 1:21). Pray for the Church--that we will truly be His Bride, "without spot or wrinkle" Ephesians 5:27.
Pray for the Persecuted Church, for the believers who suffer so much because they name the Name that is above all names (Ephesians 1:21). Pray for the Church--that we will truly be His Bride, "without spot or wrinkle" Ephesians 5:27.
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