Who Do You Love

There is a lot of craziness in our world today with people shooting people with whom they disagree, and evil running rampant in the name of religion.  It brings us to the question of What does the Bible teach about love and vengeance and human relations? 

We know that Jesus brought a message of peace.  Matthew 5 tells us in the words of Jesus:  "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you..."  And Jesus was the perfect example of this, for when He was reviled, He did not revile.

In Luke 10, Jesus was asked by a Jewish lawyer how to inherit eternal life.  Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."  Then the man asked, "And who is my neighbor?"  Jesus then taught the man about the good Samaritan, where a man had been injured by robbers, left for dead, and had been passed up by a priest and a Levite, but helped by the Samaritan, a man hated by the Jews.  Jesus concluded by asking, "So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among thieves?"  "And he said, 'He who showed mercy on him.'  Then Jesus said to him, 'Go and do likewise.' "  This passage shows the love and compassion that Jesus had for all men.  But it also shows that we are to exercise the same....no matter who they are.

Galatians 6:10 puts it this way, "Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith."

And Romans 12:17, "Repay no one evil for evil.  Have regard for good things in the sight of all men.  If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I  will repay,' says the Lord. "

As Christians, we are to love everyone, our enemies, those who are in sin, those with whom we disagree,  everyone.

Thanks for reading.  Feel the love.

Sin

Controlling sin is so difficult; such a struggle.  I think it is safe for me to say that we all struggle mightily with it....if we struggle at all.  Some don't fight it all and just go with doing whatever they want.  But to serve God, to try to be a true Christian, is a challenge in our day and in our world.

Sin started with the first people, Adam and Eve.  The serpent, Satan, tempted Eve and ultimately Adam.  They were told by God not to eat of the one tree; and so, what do they end up doing?  Eating of the one tree.  They knew better; they had been carefully instructed better; but they did it anyway.  Thus, sin entered the world.  And now we get to wrestle with it.

Temptation is inevitable.  Jesus faced it for 40 days and nights.  And at the conclusion of that, the devil only relented for a time.  He promised to be back.  And the devil always comes back for us, at our weakest point.  He is real, and he is ever present.

Paul showed his difficulty with sin in his writing to the Romans in chapter 3:  "For what I am doing, I do not understand.  For what I will to do, that I do not practice, but what I hate, that I do.....For the good that I will to do, I do not do;  but the evil I will not to do, that I practice."

And to be sure, we all face the challenge to overcome sin.  In Romans chapter 3, Paul said, "...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."   And in 1 John 1:8 it says, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

But also note the following statement:  "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."  And Romans 3 says this same thought:  "....being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."

We can be sure that we have all sinned....and we all will sin.  But there is a difference in living in sin, giving into it...and fighting the good fight, and going to God for forgiveness.  We must strive to live right and to please God, even if we know that we will sometimes fail.

Thanks for reading.  Have a great week!

Who will be "Saved?"

I was talking with a person this week who said they had been "saved."  I was happy to hear it, though I wondered what they meant by saying that.  And it caused me to consider what the Bible says about who will be saved.  One thing for sure that I know about the subject: it won't be me who decides whether you will be saved or not; nor you for me. 

We are all familiar with the passage in John 3:  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."  Thus, we see that one must believe in Him.  But that raises the question of what does "believe" involve.  He goes on to discuss this subject in more detail in the following verses.  In verse 20, He says, "For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.  But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God."  Here we see that one not only believes, but he lives in such a way that he does truth and lives in the light.  Evil people love darkness, live in the dark, so that what they are doing may be kept secret from others.

Jesus said in John 14, "If you love Me, keep My commandments."  And in chapter 15, "If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love."  Believing in Jesus means being a follower, doing what He said we should be doing.

And Jesus said, toward the end of Matthew 7, "Therefore by their fruits you will know them."  We must be fruit bearing.  And, "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.  Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?'  And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practise lawlessness!' " 

This is sobering teaching, but it comes directly from the mouth of the Lord; and each of us must pay close attention to what He is saying to us.  And each of us, from our own personal commitment, will decide if we are among the "saved."

Thanks for reading.  You are important.

Moses

Much could be said about the man, Moses.  He was a great man of the Old Testament.  He was born as a Hebrew child in the land of Egypt and found himself being raised by the daughter of the Pharaoh.  But we read in Hebrews 11: 

"By faith, Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin."

Moses was 40 years old when God told him that he was to lead his people out of Egyptian slavery.  With much help from God Moses led his people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and eventually into the Promised land, Israel.  Moses was a great man, a man of God, one who realized that serving God was all that mattered in this life.  And as great as he was, he wasn't a perfect man.  He made mistakes and had his failures.  But he was determined to serve God.

It is interesting to note Hebrews 11:23, where it talks about his birth parents:

"By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child, and they were not afraid of the King's command."

Moses' parents deserve a lot of credit for saving his life at an early age.  Boy babies were being killed by the Egyptians at that time.  Moses parents devised a plan to have Moses be raised by Egyptians and even saw to it that he believe in the real God, not the gods of the Egyptians.  Read Exodus 2 for this account.  Parents are important, obviously, in the correct raising of their children.

There are a lot of lessons that we can learn from the study of Moses, a great man of God.

Thanks for reading.  Have a great week!

Persecution

We don't see much persecution in the U.S. today.  But it is happening in many places in the world.  And it was a serious problem for the early church as we see in the book of Acts in the New Testament.  So we will look at the persecution that the early Christians were enduring and how it affected the church growth at that time.

In the fourth chapter of Acts, Peter had just healed a lame man and it caused quite a stir.  The Jewish leaders placed Peter and John into jail overnight and challenged them the next day.  Peter explained that Jesus was the one who provided the power of healing.  This infuriated the leaders who said: 

"What shall we do to these men?  For, indeed, that a notable miracle has been done through them is evident to all who dwell in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it.  But so that it spreads no further among the people, let us severely threaten them, that from now on they speak to no man in this name.  So they called them and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus."

So what was the result of this "severe threat"?  "And being let go, they went to their own companions and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them.  So when they heard that, they raised their voices to God with one accord and said, 'Lord, You are God, who made heaven and earth and the sea, and all that is in them......grant to Your servants that with all boldness they may speak Your word." 

In Acts chapter 5 we see a similar situation.  In this case, the Jewish leaders become more antagonistic and beat the apostles.  "...and when they had called for the apostles and beaten them, they commanded that they should not speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go." 

So how did this severe persecution affect the Christians?  "So they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.  And daily in the temple, and in every house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ."

Persecution did not deter the growth of the church at all.  Praise God!  And we may one day see persecution in our country.  If that be the case, we can learn from the early Christians to be strong and keep on keeping on.

Thanks for reading.  Have a great week.

The Church

In the last blog entry we talked about why Jesus came to earth, that is, Jesus came to earth to seek and save the lost.  Without Jesus we are lost, we don't have eternal life with God.  The emphasis is primarily on the individual as we look at the teaching of the New Testament.  But there is teaching also about the collective, the coming together as a church; so we will look at that briefly.

In Matthew 16:18, Jesus was talking to Peter and the rest of the apostles saying, "...upon this rock I will build My church."  His plan was to build His church, sometime in the future, upon the rock foundation of Jesus being the Son of God.  He could have started the church right then, but we see that His plan was to lay the ground work, then leave the actual formation of the church to the apostles after He left the earth. 

The word "church" comes from the original Greek word "Ekklesia" which simply means a gathering, a group of people; in this case a group of Christians.

And we see the first church being formed in Jerusalem as people first became Christians, as recorded in Acts chapter 2.  The last verse of chapter 2 says, "And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved."  It was His church and He does the adding.  But from the beginning we see that the church is formed as people became Christians.

We will note that the term church is used in two different ways in the New Testament.  It is used in the over all sense, meaning all Christians are part of His church.  And it is used in a local sense to reference a particular group of Christians meeting together in a local place.  Paul, in writing to the Ephesian church in Ephesians 5, said "Husbands love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for it."  We see in this passage that Christ loved the church so much that He died for it.  And if He felt that strongly about the church, certainly we should value it highly....and be a part of it, both in becoming a Christian and in participating in a local sense, in a local church.

Hebrews 10:24-25 teaches us, "And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another...."  We serve God by coming together as a group; but we also serve and help one another in doing so.

The church is good.....it is His....and we need to be a part, an active part.  Thanks for reading.  Have a great week!

Why Did Jesus Come to Earth?

There are perhaps many reasons why Jesus came to the earth.  It could be said that He fulfilled all Scripture, all prophesies; or He completed God's plan for man, a plan made before the Creation of the world.  I would suggest that the teaching shows that Jesus' coming was for one main purpose:

Jesus came into the world to save man from his sins.  We all know the verse in John 3:16-17, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved."

Luke 19:10 puts it this way:  "...the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost."  People then, and people now, are lost without Jesus.  Sin causes man to be separated from God and being a follower of Jesus is the only solution. 

We might ask where sin came from in the first place.  We see the answer in many places, one being Romans 5:12, where it is putting the initial blame on Adam, the first man.  "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin...."  But the solution is given in this passage as well, in verse 17:  "For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ."  Sin began with Adam, but is solved by the coming of Jesus Christ, who died for us, giving us His grace which cleanses us of our sins....if only we follow Him.

Romans 3:23 says, "...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."

And Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1:15, "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief."

Thanks for reading.  Feel the love.