Cleaning Up Our House

It has been awhile since my last post.  It may be a while yet before my next.  I am going through a valley right now and covet the prayers of those who know Christ.  Here is a word that was upon my heart today.  May it be food for thought…

For those of us who still long to see a real movement of God, there is a major problem which exists in many churches and amongst Christians in general that is holding back the healing rain of the Spirit we so desire. Sin in the camp. In our present age, we hear people beat the drum within Christian and secular society saying, “We shouldn’t judge!” The problem is that it is almost always taken out of context and is the very thing that has allowed sin to be in our midst amongst churches. In the Old Testament, we are all familiar with how God brought down the walls of Jericho. And some of us may even remember how a man named Achan hid a wedge of gold and a Babylonianish garment under his tent. No one knew except God and Achan. However, when Israel went to defeat the next town, Ai, they lost and many of their men were killed. Joshua began to pray, wondering why God had not been in their midst fighting their battles. “And the LORD said unto Joshua, Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face? Israel hath sinned, and they have also transgressed my covenant which I commanded them: for they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff. Therefore the children of Israel could not stand before their enemies, but turned their backs before their enemies, because they were accursed: neither will I be with you any more, except ye destroy the accursed from among you.” (Josua 7:10-12) Notice the Lord says “Neither will I be with you any more, except ye destroy the accursed from among you.”

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Reflection…

Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works:
Ephesians 4:29 Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!  Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog and I am thankful to the Lord for the opportunity to serve Him.  One year ago today I posted my first blog post and felt led to call it ‘Think on These Things…’.  As Christians we are a part of the same spiritual body and are instructed in God’s word to consider or esteem one another more than ourselves.  We should seek to do and say those things which are spiritually edifying to each other.

The word edify means to instruct or improve someone spiritually or intellectually.  Over the past year, it has been my prayer that this blog will be a blessing and spiritually edifying to the reader.  I have also been blessed to have a good Christian brother agree to come on board and contribute posts under the pen name ‘The Servant’.  The Lord continues to use him in writing posts that are both timely and encouraging.  In these last days, we need to try to do more for our savior Jesus Christ and also more to be a help to one another.

 

And They Rose Up to Play…

I Corinthians 10:7 Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.

This Sunday morning, referred to as the Lord’s day in Revelation 1:10, will unfortunately be a time when many who call Him ‘Lord, Lord’ forsake His altar and instead, like the children of Israel at the base of Sinai, will rise up to worship the golden calf gods of this world ie. the beach, the lake, the ball field. They will, like Paul says here, rise up to play.

Would to God they showed as much devotion to the one they have been known to call ‘Lord’.  Many Christians have supposed in this day and age, possibly due to the humanistic style of gospel preaching and teaching, that their happiness is paramount in God’s eyes and that, as long as they ‘love’ the Lord, they can do what makes them happy.  Faithfulness in their intentions rather than actions is considered sufficient.  They suppose that being faithful to God’s house is not as important as being faithful to tell others they love the Lord and His church.  Many have supposed that being a faithful servant or bearing the disciple’s cross is archaic and no longer required of the modern American Christian.  Why is this?  Why, my friends, would you suppose that when we have scriptural evidence to the contrary?  Take Luke’s gospel for instance:

 

Have You Died Yet?

Galatians 6:14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

The modern social gospel being promoted across the land in many churches today speaks of a religion that has no costs, brings no change, and seems to give all glory to the wrong party… us.  In fact, to hear most Christians discuss styles of worship, contemporary or traditional, you would think that worship itself was for the sole benefit of man.  The humanism that has crept into the contemporary sermons, has led many a lost soul to believe that they need only to believe and they have their ticket punched for glory.  Most then fall well short of what the apostle Paul called the ‘new creature in Christ Jesus’.

Why is this so?  It goes all the way back to the Old Testament.  Many of our gospel songs speak of crossing the Jordan River as though it was the passage from life on earth to life in eternity in heaven.  This is flawed because unlike Canaan, Heaven doesn’t have enemies to be destroyed.  Rather, the crossing of the Jordan River in the book of Joshua more aptly typifies our passage from the death of sin to the newness of life in Christ Jesus.

 

No Revival without Reformation

The following is an excerpt written by A.W. Tozer which I shared with a few men of God a while back but felt led to share with you all now. It sums up what is truly the dire need of today among Christians.

No Revival without Reformation – A.W. Tozer

“WHEREVER Christians meet these days one word is sure to be heard constantly repeated; that word is revival. In sermon, song and prayer we are forever reminding the Lord and each other that what we must have to solve all our spiritual problems is It “mighty, old-time revival.” The religious press, too, has largely gone over to the proposition that revival is the one great need of the hour, and anyone who is capable of preparing a brief for revival is sure to find many editors who will publish it…

…I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms. It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.

 

“I have written to him the great things of my law; but they were counted as a strange thing.”–Hosea 8:12

There are over 400 different versions and paraphrases of all or part of the the Bible in the English language today. Some think this is a positive development, but I think it has served to create confusion as to which represents the true word of God. The devil is the author of confusion… 1Corinthians 14:33 “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.” The production of so many different versions and paraphrases has also led to a culture within modern Christendom of ‘tailored’ Bibles. In other words, man is searching for something to worship that he has control over. This is part of our sinful nature and is not too different from the pagans in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 10:2-5), or even today in foreign lands, who go into the woods, cut down a tree, and carve themselves a god to worship. These efforts by publishers to produce ‘Bibles’ tailored to particular audiences are also copied by many churches who, worshiping the ‘god of growth’, tailor music, sermons, and services to the tastes of the world in an effort to be ‘seeker friendly’.

All of these things are, in essence, putting the cart before the proverbial horse. First, Christ told us in John 3 that man loves darkness rather than light. Our sinful nature would rather the truth bend to our will than the other way around. Second, the apostle Paul wrote in 1Corinthians 2:14 “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Paul was explaining that the unsaved man cannot understand God’s word and that it is foolish to him. Fallen man, since the tower of Babel, has been trying to reach heaven on his own efforts or works, to justify himself. But God has preserved His word and we should seek for the truth, not for a version of the truth which will justify our lives. For that kind of ‘truth’ is not truth. The only way we can know justification is for Jesus Christ to save us. Then we will know the truth and the truth will make us free.

Charles Spurgeon said it best, “Strange that there should be men so vile as to use the penknife of Jehoiakim to cut passages out of the word, because they are unpalatable. O ye who dislike certain portions of Holy Writ, rest assured that your taste is corrupt, and that God will not stay for your little opinion. Your dislike is the very reason why God wrote it, because you ought not to be suited; you have no right to be pleased. God wrote what you do not like; he wrote the truth. Oh! let us bend in reverence before it, for God inspired it. It is pure truth. Here from this fountain gushes aqua vitae–the water of life–without a single particle of earth; here from this sun cometh forth rays of radiance, without the mixture of darkness. Blessed Bible! thou art all truth.” (from the sermon ‘The Bible’ delivered Sunday evening March 18, 1855)

“I have written to him the great things of my law; but they were counted as a strange thing.”–Hosea 8:12

Think on these things …

 

“They feared the LORD, and served their own gods…”

In II Kings 17 we have the record of the ten northern tribes of Israel being carried away captive by Shalmaneser king of Assyria.  It was the Assyrian way to remove a majority of the conquered people and to place Assyrian colonists in the lands they conquered.  When the colonists in this case moved into the land, bad things began to happen to them as the Lord sent lions among them to devour them because they didn’t fear Him.  So the king of Assyria sent one of the priests of Israel back to the land to teach them how they should fear God.  This was basically the blind leading the blind however since when the Israelites had lived there they didn’t live right either.  Before being led away into captivity, the northern tribes had become very idolatrous.  Now this priest has gone back to teach the heathen how to fear God…  Well this passage goes on to indicate that they learned how to ‘fear’ God but they continued to serve their own gods.  The men from Babylon worshiped Succothbenoth, the men of Cuth worshiped Nergal, the men of Hamath served Ashima, the Avites served Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharvites burnt their children in fire to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim.  This last thing was particularly troubling.  Their worship involved human sacrifice of their own children in order to have a hope of higher status among society ie. “the pride of life”.

“Well what has this got to do with us today?” you might say… My friend here in America we who call ourselves Christians are like these Assyrians.

 

Redeeming the Time

With the time change occurring tonight, I thought about the following passage:

Ephesians 5:14 Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.   15 See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,  16 Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.  17 Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.

I do believe as a preacher and student of prophecy, that we are indeed in the last days.  Not only are world events fulfilling prophecy but the attitude of the church in this day does as well.  The night before Jesus was crucified, He led His few friends to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.  He told Peter, James and John, “…tarry ye here, and watch with me.”  It wasn’t long before He found them asleep while He had been praying for them and for us.  And then when Judas shows up with soldiers ready to arrest our Lord, Peter draws his sword and cuts off the ear of Malchus, one of the high priest’s servants.  Jesus stops Peter and says, “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” (Matthew 26:52)  Like Peter, the church in America has fallen asleep in the last 30 years during a crucial time when she should have been watching and expending all efforts to get the gospel out.  Now, like Peter many in the church are waking up to find many of our values and morals are under attack and we draw our sword and begin to fight the wrong fight.

 

The Traps of Sin

“The fox condemns the trap, not himself.” (William Blake from the poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”)

We often lament circumstances that our flesh and our sin gets us into.  The Bible says the “wages of sin is death” but the god of this world took Marketing 101 a long time ago.  John warned that all that is in the world is “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” and these are the ONLY traps the devil has in his arsenal.

Unfortunately due to our own sinful natures, the devil need no longer bother baiting or even hiding these ‘traps’ when he lays them on the forest floor of our wildernesses.  We often go trudging along leaving not only the whole armor of God at home, but often trying to travel without Him.  Then we stumble into one of these ‘traps’ and as Blake said, ‘we condemn the trap, and not ourselves’.  The Apostle Paul said in Romans 7, “I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.”  The greatest way that we can gain the proper perspective when we find the ‘traps’ closed tightly around one of our ankles is to remind ourselves of this great truth, “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing…”  It will even prevent you from falling into the ‘trap’ in the first place because if you realize your nothing without Him, you won’t want to leave home without Him and His blessing nor will you want to rely on your own understanding.

If you don’t know the Lord Jesus as your savior then “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (IICor. 4:4)  The devil is fooling you into thinking your free but you’re in bondage to the ‘traps’ of sin.  You don’t have control of it, Satan, the father of lies, has control over you.  John 8:34 “Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.”  BUT, I have GOOD NEWS!!  Jesus can free you from these traps of sin and make you a new creature in Him!  AND… “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”  Praise the Lord.

Let those who know the Lord Jesus walk in the light and not in darkness.  Let us seek to flee the appearance of evil and not give the devil occasion to have victory in even the smallest parts of our lives.  To God be the glory.  AMEN!

Think on these things …