Tag: Christ

Love, where does it come from?


Many people wonder about love and today consider that this word is just…a word. It doesn’t mean anything, it has no depth for many people. It is just a simple, four letter word and nothing more. Where does this sort of thinking come from? Why is it so denigrated and down-played from the meaning that it is given in God’s Word?

Mainly because people don’t see love today as the same as what is talked about in the Bible. We have been using the word, LOVE, as a stand-in for lust for so long until it has lost its real meaning. Nobody sees it being acted upon or toward people in the same way that Jesus told us that we are supposed to do. We are supposed to love each other as we love ourselves, but very few people do this today.

Everyone is out to get what they can get and as much as they can get for themselves. Its like the world is populated by millions if not billions of spoiled brats!

I am not saying that stuff is bad but the constant search for and chasing after more toys is idiotic. Nothing that you gain in this life materially gives you much satisfaction except for a brief moment when you are using it for the first few times. Then, just like most children, it becomes old and it just doesn’t fill the void that you wanted filled. At which point you are off to find something else.

Our search for something to fill that void in our lives is not a pursuit which is limited to young or old, rich or poor or middle class. It is something which we feel when we get to a certain age and realize that there is something that is missing. At which point we begin to search for it and depending upon our resources (money), we look in all sorts of places and seek out fulfilment in more and better things.

We will look at new cars or homes or games or guns, then sometimes we seek out new friends or relationships or even new gadgets like an iPad or tablets or phones and computers. Today, the selection is nearly endless yet we still have trouble finding just the right combination or specific person or thing which will fill that void. We will never find it until we begin searching for the One which can fill that place of empty feeling.

That is Jesus Christ. In life, we only have a small amount of time. It could be twenty years or thirty, it might be sixty or even ninety or one hundred years, but when you compare that time with, say one hundred thousand years, isn’t it tiny? God created us all with an immortal spirit or soul and that part of us continues on when this life ends. Your acceptance of Jesus places you on the path into Heaven with Him and that life will never end.

If you choose to hear or listen to a message about being saved by belief in Jesus and then walk away, deciding that you will live the way you want to live because your idea of God would not do that to someone. Your idea of God would not punish you in hell for not accepting His Son as Savior. It won’t be your idea that judges you! It will be God Himself and it is not His decision which will place you in hell, it is yours!

Even a child can understand the Love of God that was given to all of us through Jesus and His death and resurrection, but if you choose to turn away from the offer of grace which God gives you by that love then it is your choice. It will be your choice which condemns you to hell, not God.

Easter, the meaning of it…


Today, we look at all holidays as their commercial impacts the world and the economy. But, what about the spiritual impact that the event itself really should have on people? Does anyone really look at Easter today and think about Jesus going to the cross for us, dying for us and then being raised up on the third day in order to complete His work here?

The holiday that we celebrate has nothing to do with Jesus at all. Bunnies and eggs had no meaning to the world at large in Jesus’ day except to pagans which celebrated the coming of spring and the rebirth of life after winter. That celebration has nothing at all to do with Jesus, with the exception of the rebirth which points to the resurrection. We need to look at our Lord as the Creator of all things and believe in His work of redemption on the cross by the shedding of His blood for our sins.

The reason for Easter being the holiday that it is, is because of a pagan spring equinox celebration and that it coincides with the time for passover in late March or early April. This was the time that Jesus was crucified so on that weekend is when we celebrate His death and resurrection. Since the Jewish tradition is to follow a lunar calendar of thirty-day months, dates are never the same from year to year.

So, what is the meaning of Easter, really? The celebration of Life through Jesus Christ and His atoning death and resurrection! That is the true reason for this holiday. If it had not been for this event, we wouldn’t have the hope of a resurrection to eternal life with Him! Our Savior is alive and He is coming back and if the events happening around our world today are any indication of “birth pains”, then it won’t be much longer until the whole world sees Him and knows that our faith and our Savior is real!

Themes in the Bible


What is the theme which is carried all through the Bible? One of them is the blood. From the time that God had to shed the blood of two animals in order to create garments for Adam and Eve, through Abraham’s time where God provided a ram as a substitute for Isaac, blood was always being shed in some form or another. Later, in Egypt, a lamb was sacrificed in order to anoint the door posts with its blood so that the angel of death would pass over the house of each Israelite. The covenant of circumcision also required the shedding of blood and then later, when Jesus was convicted of doing nothing more than telling the people how they could know God and come into His Presence, His blood was shed during the scourging and then on the cross itself.

In many ways, people in the world today reject our beliefs because they call it “a bloody religion”. What about all the children and parents and grandparents that have been killed by the “religion of peace” in our time? What about the blood that they have spilled? I would call that a bloody religion too, wouldn’t you? It is true that blood has been shed all through the Bible, but what about other themes and requirements?

The most prevalent one that comes to mind that I have seen from the beginning to the end of God’s Word is obedience. All that God ever asked and required of those that He called His was obedience, to His laws and to Him. Starting in the Garden and in every book from that point on, He asked certain people to do as He asked them to. Sometimes, they obeyed but many times they did not. Even before the Israelites had a king over them, as soon as they were delivered from bondage or trouble they would revert back to worshiping other gods and refusing to obey their God.

Even Moses, during the exodus from Egypt, disobeyed God by striking the rock when God had told him to speak to it for water. True, the first time God had said to strike the rock and Moses did, but the second time he was supposed to speak to it and his anger caused him to strike the rock instead. Then, when Israel asked for a king, God gave them one but the first one didn’t obey God like he should have so his kingdom was taken from him. David did as God told him to do, but even he disobeyed God in some things but at least he repented of his sins and asked for forgiveness.

After David’s reign, Solomon did follow God and did as God instructed him for a while, but his wives led him astray to worship other gods in his old age. After his reign, very few of the kings which followed would worship God or do as the prophets told them to do. Many of them desecrated the Temple with strange gods and killed the prophets. Why would God be merciful to a people, even those of us over the whole Earth, when most of us have refused to obey Him and His laws or even to follow His Son?
The next theme which flows all the way through the Bible, from the beginning to the end, is His love for us. He, the Creator of all things, LOVES us! Even when we don’t like or even believe in Him!!

God loves us today, each one of us, enough that He sent Jesus to die so that we could have a relationship with Him. He wants that. He doesn’t need it. God has never needed us, nor does He need the angels in heaven, but He wants a relationship with His Creation, all of Creation. That is why Lucifer rebelled against Him, because he didn’t want the relationship from that point, he wanted to be on the receiving end of the adoration and the love but he didn’t want to give it to Creation or the Creator.

In many ways, we are rebelling today because we want to get the love but we don’t want to be required to give it. You know what? You aren’t required to love God at all!! But, when you realize what He really did for you so that you have the choice and the ability to love and be loved by the Creator, then you actually do want to! If you can’t make that leap into God’s lap as you would into your dad’s or your mom’s lap, then you will miss out on it. You will miss out on the true, loving, whole relationship with God, the Trinity of God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is a feeling which cannot be described to anyone who hasn’t felt it.

The closest way to describe it from me to you would be how a mother or a father feels when they hold their first child for the very first time. If you can imagine being the recipient of that love and then multiply it thousands of times to the point of it overwhelming you….that is what it has felt like to me at times. It is a feeling which can’t be described because the actual feeling is beyond description. Similar to the problem of telling someone what the color blue is or maybe the color purple. If they have never seen it, you just can’t tell them about it at all.

Until you can get into the Word of God and come close enough to Him that you can feel His Presence, then I can’t describe it at all. Then, consider that the river of Life runs through Heaven and it is like liquid joy!

You know, I started this sermon off talking about the blood, then I spoke about obedience, then lastly there is Love, and just as first Corinthians says that “the greatest of these is LOVE”. It really is True! Love is the reason for all of this, your life and mine as well as for Jesus coming and dying on the cross and being resurrected. God’s Love for us! The least that we could do would be to give back some of that Love to Him in the form of our life and our love because He loved us first, isn’t that a wonderful way to look at Easter?

Your time and my time…


We sometimes look at a day or an hour and wonder where the time has gone. It seemed to go by so fast at times and then some days, even some hours go by so slow. As your teachers and your parents have said, it is all in your perception of it. So, why does it seem that our time is so short, especially when there are so many things that we would like to do?

Yes, we have children to take care of and jobs to go to, but those things only make the time seem to go by faster. I agree that being at a job seems to slow time to a crawl sometimes, but doesn’t that make you want some time off to be with your family?

Time is part of our existence from the moment that we are born. It is also part of the natural order of things that God created in our universe. We are subject to the so-called “march of time” as we perceive it, God is not. He can see all of your life and everything else from the beginning to end, any time that He wants to. He knows what you are doing now and tomorrow and even next week, so all you need to do is follow His lead in your life.

What can we do with our time? Many things, but the most important is to allow God to lead you through your life so that others can see Him through you and the things which you do every day. It seems that there are so many people who consider their lives to be important only to them and nobody else. Your life and everything that you do is important to God.

The way that you talk is important to Him. Your actions each day are important to Him. The words that you so to others and how you say them are important to Him. Why? Because, if you are a child of His and you are if you are a Christian, everything that you do is to glorify God and your life is supposed to reflect His so that others can see Him through you!

When you are in such a hurry that you endanger your life and the lives of your children just to get home a minute or so earlier, it says something about you. When you don’t have the patience to listen to someone who needs you to listen, that says something about you too. Patience is a virtue that comes from a relationship with God and if your walk with Him hasn’t produced patience in your life then you need to walk a bit closer to Him every day.

Don’t ask God to give you patience because it isn’t something that is handed out, but something that is learned. You won’t like the lesson, trust me! I made that mistake and I am just coming out of the class after a few years of lessons! Wisdom is also learned through patient study of God’s Word and they go hand in hand. Seek God’s Wisdom and His Kingdom through His Word and all of these will be added to you and your life.

Trust and obey, how can we do that today?


And she named the child Ichabod, saying, “The glory is departed from Israel”: because the ark of God was taken, and because of her father in law and her husband. (Isaiah 4:21)

At the wedding in Cana, Mary the mother of Jesus told the servants, His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”

In the first quote from Isaiah, it was a time of Israel’s departure from worshipping God. They were following all of the stuff that was around them in the promised land. The gods of the different people had enticed them, the people had enticed them and they had fallen out of love with God. Why? Because they had done it before, time and time again. People today ask, “How did the gods entice them?” Satan and his demons were the gods and they would cause things to happen from time to time so that the god seemed real, but the piece of wood or metal was still just as deaf and dumb as it was before. When the ark of God was taken from Israel, the Spirit of God did leave the Temple and the nation itself.

In the second quote above, the mother of Jesus told the servants to make sure that they did what He told them to do. Why? Because of Who He was and Who He is! Today, we have many churches which have formed their own doctrines and their own requirements for worship, but they are man-made! What good is that? Anything done by man or made by man will flop if it is not done for the Glory of God! If what you are doing in your life is only for yourself and nobody else, then it may work for a while but ultimately it will fail. It doesn’t matter if it is a business or your marriage, if you haven’t dedicated it to God and His Kingdom and make sure that you seek His Wisdom for it every day, then there will be trouble at some point. It may start as something small and insignificant but it will get worse.

Give your heart and your life as well as yourself to Jesus. Dedicate your marriage and your business to Him by giving ten percent of your increase to the church and God’s Kingdom. All of these are the beginning of wise living, the most important is giving yourself to Jesus and asking Him to come into your life. Live your life as if He was walking with you because if you have asked Him into your life, He is. Be careful of your business dealings, make sure that they would glorify God no matter what you do. The outward appearance of holiness without the inward man being renewed by Jesus, if like a white-washed tomb. It is pretty, but it isn’t clean. Just as you can clean up a hog and take it to the ring and show it off, but as soon as you let him out of the trailer at home, he will go straight to the mud wallow.

Living your life as Jesus would is the only way to show the world exactly Who it is that we follow. If they can’t see Jesus in your life, then He very likely isn’t in your life or your heart. Remember the clean hog? He is only clean until you let him out, then he goes right back to what he was doing before. Love and the power to change comes with Jesus, if you can’t show others both of those results in your life, then maybe you need the One Who can clean you up inside and out.

To finish the story from the wedding in Cana, Jesus told the servants to fill six water jars (about thirty gallons each) to the brim, then take it to the man in charge of the wedding. He told the groom, “Most people give the best wine at the first, then bring out the cheap wine. You have saved the best wine for last”.

It was because the servants did what Jesus told them to do that the miracle happened. The water was not special. Neither were the pots. What made the difference? First, it was the One who gave the command and second it was the obedience of the servants. Obedience is the thing which God has always looked for in us. From the Garden all the way through the Bible to the end of the age, it is our obedience, faithfully doing the will of God which brings the most blessings into our lives and in the lives of others.

Many people might ask the question, “How do I find the will of God for my life?”. That answer is simple: seek Him out in reading the Bible, prayer for His wisdom in your life, pray that He would reveal His will to you through His Word. Just as Jesus said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added unto you.” Matthew 6:33

The Wisdom of God is contained within the pages of our Bibles, all that you need to do is read it, study it, pray over it and seek Him in it. Then pray about the things which you feel led to do by His Spirit. If He leads you to come to Him in repentance, then do that! It doesn’t matter how many years you have been in church! If you have been a member of a church for five years or fifty, that won’t save you if you haven’t given your heart to Jesus and asked Him to change you into what and who He knows you can be!

Live for Him, allow Him to live and work through you every day, because this is how many people will come to know Him and your example may be the only time that they ever meet Jesus before the end of their life. Make sure that they recognize Him through you.

Life…


Life is opening your eyes in the morning.

Life is seeing your child running in the yard.

Life is working in the garden.

Life is being there for a friend.

Life is going to visit someone in the hospital

Life is living your life in accordance with Christ.

Life is seeing a puppy or a kitten before their eyes open.

Life is holding your child for the first time.

Life is living with your sweetheart until they pass from this world.

Life is joining them in Heaven to carry on into Eternity.

Life is in Jesus and the grace that God grants us through Him.

Life is …..

Eternity…..


Humanity cannot imagine or even comprehend one million years, at least with any degree of understanding. How can anyone with a life-span of less than 130 years comprehend an amount of time that is so vast? We can graph it on paper or on a computer and simulate its effects on a planet’s ecology and surface with some degree of success. But, eternity is so far beyond even one million years that it is staggering. If we didn’t perceive time in the way that we do, we might understand it better. But linear time like we experience through the seconds and minutes and hours rolling into days, weeks, months and years is hard for us to get into our perception.

Yet, God lives outside of time and can see all of it. From beginning to end of each of our lives. It is hard to place my limited understanding outside of time so that I can make sense of it, but that is where He is. We will know and understand these things when we are there, at least in a limited way we will. Because, taking in eternity and the vast knowledge of God and all that this entails, would require an enormous amount of time. Which I suppose is why our souls are immortal, so we will have the time to learn and understand, even when time doesn’t truly exist for us anymore.

We live here in lives which are fleeting in comparison to even a millennia, yet we try to understand as much as we can. We formulate hypotheses about how things were brought into existence but we can’t even comprehend our own existence or the purpose for which we are here!

By faith, we can see things in nature and in Scripture which give us a hint of our purpose. But for those who refuse to accept faith and Scripture for any kind of explanation, there is only science and reasoning. These are wonderful pursuits and they do help to explain in a limited fashion how things are put together, but they can’t give you a purpose or a meaning to your life every day!

God intended for us to have a relationship with Him, every day, not just on certain days or when we have been hurt or feel the need to “find God”. The original purpose of mankind was a relationship with our Creator and to take care of the place that He had created for us to live. But, God knew that since He had given us a choice in our obedience of His rules or laws that were laid down in Eden, we were destined to question and break the one rule that He had laid out at the time.

Is it any wonder that we can’t live in a law-abiding society today, if our ancestors couldn’t even abide by one rule? While it is true that many people all over the world are law-abiding citizens, the numerous laws that are in effect in the world simply can’t be ignored. They are destined to be broken!

The only requirement for your salvation is acceptance of Jesus as your Savior. Anything beyond or besides that doesn’t grant you access to Heaven or to eternity with God. Just as in the garden of Eden, there is only one requirement, one rule to live by and accept. Your works nor your money will not help, in fact they may hinder your acceptance of Jesus.

God gave His Word to us as evidence of His love toward us. Yes, there are some harsh words and requirements in the Old Testament, because the Messiah had not come. God was using the world and the religions around Israel to test and to prove their obedience to Him. He knew then, just as now, that given a choice they would “run after other gods”, forsaking His love and His provision and grace, until they realized what they had done and repented. It happened time and time again then and it happens today as well.

People are chasing after money, power, sex, drugs, alcohol, and just stuff which cannot give you any satisfaction spiritually, much less for eternity. Jesus is the Only Way to the Father and Heaven.

Fantastic stories and outright lies


To many people, that is exactly what the Bible is, a book of fantastic stories and outright lies made up by a bunch of old men. That is what the book of Genesis sounds like to some, with people living to be over nine hundred years old and the whole population of the world supposedly coming from a single couple? Then you have a world-wide flood, with a man who is five hundred years old when he begins building a boat that God told him to build in the desert because a flood is coming? At a time when, the book tells us, that it had never rained before?

Sounds crazy doesn’t it?

But, you know God can take nothing and make it into something so those life spans and everything that He told Moses to write down don’t sound so crazy when you consider that God is behind it all, right?

Oh, that’s right, you don’t believe in God or any “supreme being”! All of this just clumped together on its own and somehow all of the chemicals and molecules put themselves together to form DNA and then all of life just showed up on our little ball of mud and rock, right??

You have more faith in puzzles accidentally putting themselves together than I do in a man walking on water!

The “evolution” of the cosmos and of the Earth and of life on the Earth is the most fantastic pile of nonsense that I have ever heard. Yes, I believe that God did all that He said in the Bible! He is God after all.

If you wish to keep believing in evolution and not believing in God or Jesus, that is your choice and I am not going to refute it here. I don’t have enough proof for His Creation, other than my faith, any more than you can prove that we evolved from apes. Just because an organism has two arms and two legs will give them the same general DNA as any other mammal on Earth. Neither can be proven nor disproven, at least to the satisfaction of those who hold one belief or the other.

Yes, this post will likely get the ire of those in atheist and evolutionist camps all stirred up. That is the point. Whether you believe my argument one way or the other doesn’t matter. What matters is that you may read it. The Bible, that is. To many people it is confusing and a load of crap, which is your opinion and you have a right to that opinion.

But, to me it is the Word of God, given to Moses on the mountain when they met over three thousand years ago. Moses was told by God how the world was created and how mankind was created and all of the history up to that point. The amazing part of those first few books of the Bible is that they point to a Seed, the Messiah, Jesus, Who would be born much later and He would be the perfect, sinless Lamb of God that would sacrifice His Life so that we might be able to be forgiven. Each book, no matter who wrote it from Moses on down, has a reference to Jesus in some way. Some of the prophetic books like Isaiah and Psalms even tell where He would be born and how He would die.

The most wonderful part is that He rose again on the third day and six weeks later, went to be with the Father until He comes again. His return has been waited for by many for the past two millennia and the amazing part is that everything is in place for His return. It won’t be another thousand years, it will likely be in our life-time. Study your Bible, borrow one and seek Him and prove Him through Scripture and in history.

Romans 8, Psalms 22, and the book of Revelation will give you more proof than you need. Psalm 22 was written over one thousand years before crucifixion was used, yet it describes it very accurately. Consider the truth found in Scripture, ask God to show you the truth of what you are reading, whether you want to believe it or not, He will hear you and show you what you didn’t know was there. He doesn’t want anyone to go to hell, but your choice of believing or not will send you there, not Him.

Why?


If God’s presence has really left our country, why? Well, over the last fifty years we have continually pushed Him away from our children, from our educational institutions, from the public square, from being present at football games and other sports through prayer, even out of political and other bodies of legislative actions where His Presence is sorely needed today.

So, what would you expect Him to do? Granted, His feelings and actions are much different from ours but if your congregation or your spouse were doing this wouldn’t you leave too? I would. We are going to reap exactly what we have sown and I don’t think that this country is going to recover from it. There have been many signs and warnings such as the attack on 9/11, the financial crisis seven years later and now we are seven years past that point. What will happen this time? I don’t know and I am not going to speculate, but the moons that are happening on the Sabbaths this year and the two full solar eclipses could be telling us to wake up and repent of our ways.

God loves each of us, whether we are saved or not because He loved us all before we felt the conviction to repent. We are being given a chance to change and repent of our ways, and come back to Him.

Read the Bible, especially Romans and Revelation, because we need Him now far more than we have ever needed Him before. Please listen to the words from the Old Testament:

“Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14

This is referring to all who call on God, not just the Jewish people. In Romans 9:25 it says: “Concerning the Gentiles, God says in the prophecy of Hosea, “Those who were not my people, I will now call my people. And I will love those whom I did not love before.”

Seek His counsel through the Bible and pray that it isn’t too late for our nation and our world.

Celebrate Life, celebrate God!


You hear singers and people on news programs saying things like “We celebrate life itself!”, usually with much enthusiasm. Yet, we kill unborn children by the hundreds every day! There are murders, planned and spur of the moment, that seem to happen almost every hour of every day. So, why don’t more people actually celebrate Life!?

Is it such a hard concept that we say it and it sounds good but it isn’t something that we can actually do? It is just a mantra that we use to sound important or special in our own eyes and the eyes of those around us, right? In a manner of speaking, yes and no. I know, confusing.

My point…if you really intend to celebrate Life, then act like it and get out there and enjoy life! Do spontaneous things, stuff that you haven’t done but have wanted to do such as things which might be on your “bucket list” maybe? Yes, Jessica, there are people who truly need to get out and DO these things! Not just because they need to get up, like me, but because life is too short to dream about them and just say “I’ll do it later”. There may not be a “later”, for many of us there won’t be.

Now, I am not trying to get into “doom and gloom” here, I am just saying that winter for this year is nearly over and spring is getting closer. For many of us, it doesn’t seem that way but it will soon enough. My point on this page and this post, is to point to God Himself, the Author of Life! When we celebrate Life, we should be celebrating God’s purpose in Life and we should be celebrating Him as well! Don’t get into this “new age” thinking that God is not part of the 21st century, He is part of ALL of them! He is now, He was then and He will be God no matter what century that you might be thinking of!

In spite of evolution and its proponents, God is the Author of Life and everything that goes along with the creation of Life, and the maintaining of Life. Yours and mine and everyone else’s on this planet including the animals, fish, mammals, and birds. So, why is everyone so hell-bent on taking Him out of Life? Our everyday living even! It seems that the laws which have been adopted lately have been putting more pressure on just one group of people, Christians. Specifically, to keep us from expressing or following our mandate of how we live and what we are supposed to be doing with our lives.

The Bible clearly says that: “Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. 19Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations,b baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 20Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28: 18-20

This is the command and the commission that we, as Christians, have been given. We have not been told to kill or behead people if they won’t convert to our way of thinking and worshipping, but to love them as Christ did and to tell them of the gospel. Though, it seems that we are leprous in many people’s eyes, they don’t want anything to do with us or our religion yet they will gladly accept almost any other religion without complaint. Why is that? What is so attractive about all other religions that makes Christianity seem as if we are trying to give you a sandwich made of mouldy bread and maggot-infested meat?

Celebrate the Author of Life and the Finisher of Life itself, God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. Between them all, the Earth and all that is in it were formed, created, and established in six days. The day of God’s “rest” has not ended, yet He is still creating, He is still giving Life to all of His Creation. He offers eternity to you if you will believe in Him and in Jesus’ work on the cross and the atonement for all of your sins and mine. This is your choice…it is not forced upon you nor will it ever be. Choose Life in Him and in His Son because the alternative is an eternity of the same punishment that Satan will get one day. Celebrate Life from God’s point of view…the grander scale of the entire universe, big and small, on Earth and in the far-flung galaxies! He knows you better than you do, so give Him the chance to infuse your life with His Life and the possibilities are endless!