Tag: Pharisee

Jesus comes into Jerusalem


In Matthew 21, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey. The coming King of Israel rides into Jerusalem on a beast of burden and not a war-horse. Is it any wonder that He was rejected?

Yes, it is, since the Pharisees knew the Law and the Prophets! They read the Scriptures in the temple and taught them and yet, they didn’t recognize their Messiah or even the one who came before Him to prepare the way, why? In Zechariah 9:9 it says: “9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.”

The reason for His rejection is that they enjoyed the praise of men and the position that they held. When Jesus came into the temple area, He chased the money-changers and those who sold animals out of the courtyard again. This fulfilled the scripture references from Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 when Jesus quoted them saying that: “It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer:, but you have made it a “den of thieves””

Our Lord, the Lord of all Creation, is a jealous One and rightly so. It is He who created all of the things which we have and which we can see in the world and in the cosmos, so why do people try to worship the creation or the things that have been created rather than the Creator? He is the One deserving our praise! We are nothing without Him and the grace that is given to us in order to live and be where we are every day!

Your life is to serve Him, if it is not then your priorities are out of sync with the life that you have been given. In the world that we live in today, we must be vigilant about our faith and in what or Whom we place that faith! There are many in our nation and in the world who would like nothing better than to sweep any reference to Jesus and God completely out of our lives and out of our government’s documents, founding and otherwise. Take, for instance, the group which is working to take religion and specifically Christianity out of our military, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). They sound like they are working for our freedom, but their purpose is hidden in their name.

Although I am not going to get on a soap-box about them, the One that I want to talk about is Jesus! He is our Savior and our Lord and yet, we forget Him and leave Him out of our lives much of the time. If we did that to our spouses or our friends, we wouldn’t have any would we? It is good that Jesus is patient and loving toward us who haven’t loved Him and may not be treating Him with love even now! Is it possible to know someone intimately and not want to know them better and more deeply? I don’t think so! To me, that would be insulting, but to Jesus your Savior and Redeemer it is just wrong!

He gave us this cosmos to live in and a planet to live on that is perfectly positioned so that it is neither too hot or too cold to sustain life. We complain about the heat and the cold all of the time, but the truth is that our next door planets in the solar system have temperatures which are too cold  or too hot ( like seven hundred plus degrees hot on Venus). He knew what He was doing and who He was doing it for, so why do we complain about the little things in life? We do it because we can, but more importantly because we want to complain!

Israel, as a nation, complained to Moses and to God for forty years in the desert. It isn’t any stretch for me to understand why Moses struck the rock when God had told him to speak to it in order to get water out of it. It was their complaining constantly that had stretched Moses’ patience to the breaking point, then the consequences of his anger caused him not to be able to go into the promised land. It is our lack of patience today that causes us to ignore God’s advice and the sermons that we hear because we have become so accustomed to nearly instant gratification from drive-thru eating places to microwaves which prepare our food in minutes instead of hours. Can we change? Will we change?

No, we won’t change on our own but we can if we will submit ourselves to Jesus and humble our lives to Him. Follow Him daily, get to know Him by reading and praying over His Word. Ask Him to reveal Himself to us through it because, if you are not attending a church regularly, getting to know Him through His Word is the only way that you will! It doesn’t take but a few minutes out of every day, but it needs to be done every day!

Getting to know Him and love Him is like getting to know your spouse, it needs to be practiced every day. Not just once a week or on Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Think about it and then get to know Jesus, because you won’t want to meet Him for the first time at the throne of judgement and if you don’t get to know Him now, that is where you will meet Him for the first and last time!

 

Do you know Jesus?


We live our lives in a world full of technology. People are connected today in ways that only thirty years ago was not possible. What about being connected to your Redeemer? The signal clarity never goes away and it is always a clear signal because He hears our every prayer. So why do we not hear Him when He calls? Maybe because we are not listening? Or it might be possible that we just can’t hear that small voice for all of the electronic stuff that we have ringing in our ears between us and Him.

When we have come to know Jesus, do we decide or does our heart feel the pull of the Holy Spirit? Your only decision is whether or not to answer His call on your life, we don’t decide to get saved just on our decision alone. Unless your heart feels the pull of the Holy Spirit, you won’t feel the conviction to ask Jesus into your heart, that is why we can’t just decide to be saved on our own.

Jesus said that the only way to come to the Father is through Him and the only way that you will know that you need Him is by the conviction of your soul and your heart. Just as Peter was broken after he denied the Lord, we have to be convicted and broken to know that we need Him. We cannot save ourselves and through no action on our part can we be justified before God. Our justification comes through Jesus and faith in Him alone.

“Is it possible that you can lose your salvation?” is a question which gets asked many times. The answer is no, you can’t lose your salvation if you truly have it. If you were “saved” during an emotional event and your life didn’t change afterward, then you may not have been saved. If your character, the person that you truly are, didn’t change and your habits didn’t change then you likely didn’t truly ask Jesus into your heart. Yet, many people think that they are saved because of these things and in many instances they will not listen to anyone from that point on regarding their salvation.

This is a deception that Satan has used for many thousands of years. People think that they have their salvation, their so-called “fire insurance” and no amount of preaching or prayer will get their attention unless God does. They remind me of the Pharisees of Jesus’ time. So wrapped up in their religiousness until they didn’t recognize the Messiah when He came.

Why do we do this? We make up our own worldview, our own comfortable spot that makes us feel all fuzzy and safe, and yet we are deceiving ourselves. Still being taken in by Satan’s schemes, we walk in our comfortable religious “feeling”, and fool ourselves right into hell itself.

Now, I don’t want anyone to think that I am judging anyone, all I am doing is pointing out what some people do. The only One who judges is Jesus and He knows the condition of your heart, regardless of how well you may hide it from others.

God’s Word is the only text that we need in order to know how to be saved and then how to follow Jesus afterwards. It is our instruction book for life everlasting and for life here while we can make a difference in other people’s lives.

We have pushed God’s Word from our lives and from the education system that our children are indoctrinated in and yet we want them to grown up into moral, law abiding citizens. How can they when we have removed the teaching and the influence of God in their lives? Many people don’t go to church regularly anymore so their children are not brought up hearing God’s Word! We are creating a culture that has no fear of God because they don’t know Him or even know about Him.

This fact alone is shown in our culture today because of a small group of people who want freedom from religion, of any type. They don’t want to be told that anything that they may say or do is morally wrong, and yet they will have to account for every word and deed when they face God one day.

The answer to all of life’s questions is found in God’s Word and yet there are many who don’t even have a copy of it in their home. I have read through its pages many times and each time I get a sense of peace and security that I can get nowhere else, because it is a living Word and each of us gets a different message each time we read it or hear it.

Pick up a copy of it at the library or at a book store. Ask God to show you His wisdom for your life through His Word. You won’t be disappointed with the answers to many questions that you have had and you may be surprised about the answers that you never thought would be there. May God richly bless each of you!

How does society shape your beliefs?


In the western part of the world, consumption of material things, selfishness, greed all play a part in our society. Whether we like to admit it or not. Many people look at their religion in the same way. They want it to be their personal religion, not a religion that everyone follows but something that is uniquely theirs. The problem with this is that when you “choose” your religion it is like a pair of jeans or a shirt in your closet, it is yours alone. No one else has to believe in what you believe and that is fine because that is the way you wanted it anyway. There are many religions that have sprung up in the past one hundred years like this. The preferred religion of Hollywood, Scientology, was created in the past eighty years and yet claims to follow beings who are trillions of years old. It also claims many of the same things which are exclusive to Christianity and yet it says that one day you can be like a god. Really?

No person on earth has ever been a god except one…Jesus. He is the only prophet, Priest and King who can claim this title because He is the only person to have been resurrected and Who now sits next to His Father, ruling the universe and watching over everything until the time for His second coming is fulfilled.

I know that there are many who don’t want to hear this and I understand that it upsets your personal life and belief in the “god” of your choosing, but listen to this argument and if you don’t take it to heart then I have done what I set out to do, tell you about the One who can show you the way to eternity.

Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth as a baby and grew up as any other child does. The only exception to His life is that He was always in contact with His Father. They likely had many discussions about His mission and His purpose on earth, although we don’t know of it. The only parts that we can be privy to are in God‘s Word. Some of those narratives are more detailed than others but suffice to say, His mission began when His cousin baptized Him.

From that point on, He went all over and around Judea or Israel, teaching, healing those who were ill, telling the religious leaders that they had missed many things in the prophets because they did not or would not recognize Who it was that was speaking to them.

His followers, the twelve disciples who were the closest to Him, also took up the message after His resurrection. He told them to take the message of salvation to Jerusalem and to all of the world and that is what they did. Even the Pharisee called Paul who was trying to get rid of the sect that they called “the Way” became Jesus’ disciple who would take the gospel to the Jews and the gentiles. It was he who wrote nearly half of the New Testament.

The world would be a very different place without Jesus and the Bible as well as Christianity. Many of the laws and moral teachings that we take for granted came from the Bible. Our world has been irrevocably changed because of its influence so it cannot be ignored or pushed aside. Think about it, read it, check the facts contained in it, then let your heart decide!

I have been away too long for God to want me


I know many people who have said this and feel this way, but why? There are times in our lives that we move away from God and it is us who move because He doesn’t. He is always by our side in every situation no matter how desperate it seems and regardless of the circumstances.

Jesus said that not one sparrow falls from the sky without the Father’s notice, so how can we think that He doesn’t notice our troubles and trials? He is always there, we just have to acknowledge Him and turn to Him for guidance and direction. If you have never asked God for anything in your life, He still knows you as His creation, and His child because He created each of us and knew us before we were born. He knows exactly what purpose and plan that He has in store for you and will bring it about without your help if He has to.

God loves us, all of us, whether we know it or not. His patience with us is longer and more enduring than we can possibly imagine. I know that many people try to put “human” qualities and traits on Jesus and God and Jesus did live as a man until His resurrection, yet He was fully God too! As it says in the first chapter of John, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1)

His humanity was what He had to take up like we do when we put on a suit and yet He did it for us, because of His love for us. We cannot deny this and one day it will be for all the world to see. In order for us to come back to Him, if we ever knew Him, takes only a repentant spirit and a prayer for forgiveness because of our actions. If you have never known Jesus, it still only takes a prayer of repentance, one that is truly sorry for the life that you have lived. Acknowledge that you want to live for Him and allow Him to live through you and in your heart. That’s it!

I know that is too simple and straightforward for some to believe but it is true! He made it that simple so that a child could understand how to do it, it is us religious “grown-ups” who make it hard by putting religion and its dogma into the equation. That is why Jesus was so upset with the Pharisees of His day. They knew the scriptures, the prophecies that foretold Him and His coming and yet they did not “see and hear with their spiritual eyes and ears”.

Pride and selfishness get in the way just as it did then. They were proud of being descendants of Abraham and Moses. They were looking at what they would lose if common people could come to God without a priest and a sacrifice. Their position of importance among the people meant more to them that the people that they were supposed to be shepherding toward God.

This same pride is at work in the church today. Many preachers and evangelists, especially those with television ministries, allow their pride and the money which comes into their offering boxes to sway them and their message. I am not accusing all of them, but the ones which get into the news the most and draw the most attention, cause the world to look on all who claim Christ as being the same.

Pride is Satan‘s most useful tool to discredit the Church and the followers of Christ. Mainly because it causes the most hurt and makes the mistakes which are made so visible.

Give your life to Christ so that you can undo some of the damage that has been done in your life. You will be able to do this through Jesus’ power, not your own and He will give you the words and the strength to accomplish it. Don’t rely on your own strength because in the end it will fail, but His will not!