Tag: Salvation

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 …..

Is there punishment in eternity?


I have seen people and I have heard some in churches and magazines claiming that there is no hell. God wouldn’t do that! A loving God wouldn’t do that! That is absurd!

OK, so Satan is going to be admitted back into Heaven and forgiven along with all of his compatriots, is this what that means? The Bible, the Word of God, has been speaking of Sheol and hell for a very long time. It was created for the punishment of Satan and his fallen angels.

But, those who oppose God and His teachings and who do not accept Jesus as their Savior are in the same camp, the same place as Satan. They are unwilling to give their lives and their hearts to Jesus, and they don’t believe in God. At least Satan knows that there is a God, he just doesn’t want to serve Him!

God loves all of humanity and everyone has been given a chance to become Christians and to serve God in whatever capacity that they can. You are not required to become a missionary or a preacher or an evangelist. Just be yourself, but reflect Jesus in all that you do!

There is no grey area where good and evil or black and white is concerned, it is a clear division just the same as the difference between those who believe in and serve God and those who refuse to do so. Anyone who believes that they can be a “casual Christian” on Sunday and then go out and do whatever they want until they come back to church or find that they really need God, is just wrong.

Just as you can’t have a kosher hog or even be “a little bit pregnant”, or have a dark sky with the sun shining, you can’t be a “casual Christian”. You either are or you are not!

Hell is a place just as Heaven is a place. It is not a state of mind. Why would the rich man ask Moses to allow Lazarus to dip his finger in the water to cool his tongue if it were a “state of mind”? It is not God who sends those who choose to refuse Jesus’ offer of forgiveness to hell, it is their choice. Believing that you are not going to hell, but then not accepting Jesus and living your life as you please will get you there just as quickly.

Read and pray your way through the Scriptures and ask God to give you the wisdom to learn and know His will in your life and for your life. Ask God to come into your life and repent of your sins so that you can know the peace of God and live it in your daily life.

If you don’t want to read the Bible or give your life to Jesus, then I suggest a different approach: A sure way to prove that there is a hell would be to refuse the offer of Jesus in your life. Live the way that you want to, do whatever makes you happy and when you can’t find happiness or contentment, seek out a place where you can access “assisted suicide” if you can’t stand to live this way anymore. When your eyes open on the other side of death and you are facing God, you will know but it will be too late.

Please, don’t take the advice in the paragraph above. Learn about Jesus and Who He is. Seek Him out, especially if your life has been or is hard in ways that I can’t imagine! He can save your soul and He will be with you from this point on, no matter what happens! You are valuable and important to God because you are His creation and He considers you His child whether you have yet to give your life to Him or not. You can do things for this world and for God’s Kingdom that nobody else can do! Consider this when the world is piling in on you and things just seem to be too much, God loves you!

 

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.

God has left the building!


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)

Is this what is happening in our culture and our country today? Is this happening in the world today? From what I have seen on the news and on the Internet, it seems to be happening. The thing is that it was prophesied to happen at this time and we are going through what is called the “falling away” or in some translations it is called the rebellion. In any event, it is the people of the church, who have attended church…some for years and yet when persecution comes or times get hard then they turn away from their faith and rebel against the teachings of the church.

These are people who I believe aren’t really Christians at all, they were just going through the motions. The did all of the “churchy” things like being teachers in Sunday school and even being Deacons in the church, some were even pastors, but they had never accepted Jesus as their Savior and Lord.

I don’t understand how that is possible myself. How could you deceive people, and even yourself, into thinking that you are saved and even called to be a pastor, if you don’t have Jesus in your heart? “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” 2 Corinthians 5:17; isn’t this the scripture which shows exactly where your heart is and to Whom you belong? If you aren’t a new creation, then how can you possibly act like and perform as if you are, even when it isn’t genuine?

Our lives, in Christ or not, are in God’s hands and if we continue to push Him out of our lives then one day He will leave entirely. He will still be in control, but He won’t be there when you call on Him just as He did when Israel did this. There are many people today who don’t want to believe in Him or don’t want to hear about His message and that’s okay. Not what you were expecting me to write though huh?

The reason that I did write it is because I can’t convince you, all that I can do is give you scripture or some wisdom that I have gleaned from God’s Word. It is your choice to do with it what you will. Take it into your heart and learn about Him, then ask Him to come into your heart and live every day seeking more of His wisdom. That is His desire for us, at least in part.

Of course, you can ignore it and choose not to learn of Him. Deciding that He is an imaginary being from myth. Choose this road for your life and follow it carefully, watching everything along the way. Then when you die one day, and you stand before the One that you rejected maybe then you will see and understand. By that time, it will be too late to change your mind and your eternity will be before you.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Joshua 24:15

How much more?


How much more is the world going to have to endure? How much more killing in the name of a dead prophet? How many more children will be murdered in the United States because they aren’t wanted? The count is over fifty million now! How will you explain to God that you killed them because you just didn’t want that child because it was inconvenient at this time?

The atrocities that we hear about on the news from the Middle East don’t even compare to our own, because we made it legal. There is a double standard in this world today that is so messed up. It is impossible to keep up with all of the things which happen and many of those we don’t hear about on our “news programs”, we get them from Facebook or somewhere else on the Internet. The lives that we have today, at least according to the pundits of the time, were supposed to be like those of the cartoon family, the Jetson’s. Very little work, money to do whatever you needed to do, technology to take care of all of your needs. By this time, we were supposed to be living the life.

It doesn’t look that way to me today. Our weeks now are taken up with updates on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, texts on our smart phones, blogs where we tell everyone our shopping habits and post our pictures of vacation spots that we would like to go to, but don’t have the money. Then, there are the folks who actually work for a living. Many of them are working sixty and seventy hours and barely have time to shut their eyes in sleep before they have to do it again.

Yes, I do keep this blog going. But I don’t post anything except the messages which I feel led to post by the Lord. I don’t care if you believe me or not, that is not my concern. My concern is that you believe in Jesus, Who died for your sins so that you can have life in Heaven. I know, I sound harsh tonight, but the point is that there are so many who discount the Bible and the Son of God. Why? If it weren’t for their love and grace toward you and me, we wouldn’t be here at all!

God loves each one of you, far more deeply than any of us truly deserve. Yet, He gave His Son on the cross to pay the penalty for all of the sins of humanity from Adam into the future until He comes again and even further than that. All that we need to do, if we want to repent of our sinful ways, is to come to Jesus in repentance and ask to be forgiven. Ask Jesus into your heart and then determine that you are going to live under His teachings from the Bible for the rest of your days. Read it, study it, pray about what you have read so that you can understand it and then tell others about your life with Him. Even if you only tell one person and they come to Jesus, all of Heaven rejoices at that!

All of this terrible stuff that we are going through right now is because of Satan and his demons. They are not in hell, they are here causing all of this. The wars, the diseases, the killings, the murders, all of the terrible, evil things that men are doing to each other is being done because of the influence of satanic powers and demons who inflame our human tendencies to a point where we don’t even act like humans anymore. All of this was foretold in the Bible and that it will get worse before the end comes. Seek out Jesus, pray that He will save you so that you can be a light in someone’s life if only for a while.

God loves you. Look to Jesus for your Salvation. Seek Him while you can.

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!

What do you need from God?


There are many things which we need and He provides them all, even when we don’t ask for them. We need air to breathe and our health which enables us to get up every morning. Water and food are the next things on our list of needs and God has provided those for us through our ability to pay for them. Clothes and shelter are another couple of things which I would describe as needs, since we don’t want to walk around without clothes in the winter especially! Shelter is nice because we can stay warm and dry when it is cold and wet outside. These are the basic needs which everyone has that God has provided for us, even when we haven’t asked for them.

What about our life itself, didn’t God provide us with that too? God has provided for us to be alive every day that we live and He has provided a way for us to have eternal life too. In truth, we all will have an eternity since we have an immortal soul. The difference is our place of residence. Jesus said that “I am going to the Father to prepare a place for you, so that where I am you may be also.”. The dwelling place is in Heaven, which is beyond our comprehension to understand the beauty and majesty of yet.

Since God loves each of us enough to do this, why won’t many of us accept it on faith and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice for us so that we can have it one day? Looking at the Bible, God’s Word, from our stand-point, we see a book of rules and regulations and a book of historical stories which may or may not be true. Many people today see it as just that, a book written by a bunch of old men which has no real truth to it and is a work of fiction. Really?

One day soon, our world will be shaken with the Truth coming back like He said that He would. Then many who don’t want to believe will have their world turned up-side down because of their un-belief. Why do I say this? Because a book with over forty authors which spanned over two thousand years of history could not possibly point to the birth of a Messiah from beginning to end, if it was an imaginative fable written by people who made these stories up!

After His resurrection, His disciples went all over the world that they could reach and were all killed for the message that they brought except one who died of old age. During the last two thousand years there have been many thousands of people persecuted and killed in horrific ways for their belief in Jesus and this Book, the Word of God! I doubt that they would’ve died the way that many did if this had been a fantasy or a lie.

What do we really need from God? Forgiveness, which we already have through Jesus, if we will believe and accept it. Our world and many of our churches need forgiveness for perverting the gospel into something which is twisted out of Scripture and doesn’t look like any of the Wisdom contained within the Bible. Yet, today many so-called “preachers” and “evangelists” are teaching a form of godliness which is not represented in the Word of God. This was prophesied by Jesus when John wrote the book of Revelation.

It is a book of the Bible which many are afraid of and they don’t want to read it but it is relevant to our time.

Living with Love


Consider that God is Love and His Love for us is perfect. Could you live with His Love and experience it every day? Many people seem to think that this is impossible. That we, being flawed human beings, can’t live this way. We can’t possibly experience that kind of real Love daily. Why not? If you have asked Jesus into your life and you have really given yourself to Him, why can’t you feel His love flowing back to you?

You can by worshipping Him every day through prayer and reading and studying God’s Word. Experiencing His Love through His Spirit and the interaction between your spirit and His. I have felt this before and at times it almost overwhelmed me when I was studying my Bible.

I know, many of you will see these as being impossible to do. It takes too much time or it’s too hard to keep your eyes focused on Jesus that much. You know, He loves you anyway but you should show some love back in His direction too. Yes, you can accept Jesus and then decide to sit down and do nothing. You still have the blessing of being a child of God and you can be selfish with your salvation and keep it all to yourself.

But, WHY would you do that? His disciples didn’t and wouldn’t keep quiet even after being flogged and imprisoned and we shouldn’t be either. It is true that many of us can’t go on missions overseas, but with the Internet we can let people know about Him from our homes, no matter where we live. Our blessed existence is in His hands and His power if we have given our lives to Him and we are watched over every day by His angels who strengthen and encourage us according to His will for us.

Don’t laugh, angels exist just as Satan exists and his demons. These are not figments of someone’s imagination. Remember the Bible says that we struggle against “powers and principalities and demons”, that is the spiritual realm that we have to deal with as Christians. Diseases and all sorts of trouble are brought into people’s lives by these beings. Our life in Christ is to be in opposition to these forces of Satan by way of prayer and praise. In expressing our praise to Him we are expressing our love for Him, but we are also strengthening the Spirit so that it can oppose Satan’s forces in the spiritual realms.

Jesus loved us enough to die for us and I think that the least we could do will be to express that love in our prayer and our praise to Him when we read His Word and meditate on it.