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Monthly Archives: June 2013

Not by virtue of beliefs alone can we have real assurance. A person needs truth plus experience in order to be rest assured.

To say, “Well, a person must believe in something,” is a way of creating assurance.

“Rest assured,” cites Jesus, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

There is faith and hope. These have to do with some perception, hopefully true, that a person possesses.

Today’s suicide bomber possesses hope and faith in the perception planted in his mind.

Yesterday’s Third Reich was built on the theme that to cleanse the world of Jews would yield a better world, a better place to live.

Actually, the LORD will separate the sheep from the goats; not allow entrance into His heaven to those whose choice it was to remain in their sins rather than receiving divine forgiveness of sin, acknowledging and confessing it, and turning in hope to the Savior from it.

Our educated elite have re-defined sin. Christian values have been ruled by them, outdated and therefore bigoted, judgmental, sometimes a civil crime to even express.

We are each an individual. As such, we can experience faith, hope, and love.

Love, real love, is a permanent thing, beneficial more than a philosophy or a religion. Love transcends religions, infiltrates them when allowed, does not know bigotry.

Love alone can grant us assurance in this world where absolutely we will have only passed through, and where, also assuredly, we will have encountered much difficulty.

With faith and hope we attempt to deal with reality: Love is the Great Reality; but love can be rejected, ignored, even abused.

Shall we consider promises Jesus makes:

• He will never leave or forsake.
• You shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.

Rest assured – take heed, use your faith and place your hope upon this Rock, on “Me” he says, and the truth I have spoken. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am, you may be also. (John 14:3-16:33).

In times like ours, and many times and places in history, to keep silent meant the difference between life and death, punishment and torture and the lack of it.

As it was with Jesus concerning these, it has been to those who have been evangelical; that is, those who invite others to the One who did take away the sins of the world and for so many the addictions to abuses in all forms.

Never has a text been more vividly either challenged or received as the Bible. There we learn not to accept our sinning as normal but as abnormal, destructive, yet as forgiven if we receive what God did for us through His Son. Within the pages we find that life is a gift from God, not a mere biological accident and it is meant for us.

Rest assured, “your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23).
We can run; but we cannot hide. The choice only, is ours; the provisions always were.

So, dear friends, do not rest until you have entered into that “Rest which remains for the people of God.” (Hebrews 4:9)

Do not rest from your search until you find the One who came for you. Do not stop with finding Him. “Be filled with His Spirit” abide in Him who alone can invest His assurance within.

Buddy

At a time and place of His choosing, this is your life. We read in scripture, “In all things give thanks. . . “(1 Thess. 5:18).

As “examples,” various lives in Old Testament times are biographic: so we can more clearly see the heroic and the heinous, the example of faith filled lives verses the examples of men “doing what is right in their own eyes.”
(Judges 21:2)

Joseph, who, because of His following after God left a legacy of the life of faith in the living God. This he did in the face of family rejection, brutal betrayal and deception in that family. His forgiveness and undaunted following after God was God-like – and His fruit remains as folks like you and I study his life in scripture.

Moses, was not his presumptive murder of an Egyptian and the forty years that followed mere preparation at the hands of God for a work that would make “the Exodus” a topic considered in all centuries since? Even our failures, if we will relinquish our lives to God while believing “we are His workmanship” will “work to the furtherance of the Gospel.”

Circumstances don’t make a person, not mine and not anyone. Circumstances reveal a person.
Overcoming is a life-way, and pouting another.

Without exception, we are in the right place at the right time – because – if God is for us, as he has revealed, then who can be against us. (Romans 8:31)

The time is now for great living. The true “Man of the hour” is the man, who beholds that the world is spinning, the man whose God is God – the God of our salvation.

The men of the hour in times past were quite imperfect. Like you and I they made many mistakes, even deliberate sinning. But God “Did not deal with them according to their iniquities;” but according to His life – giving; life infusing power in them. (Psalm 103:10)

God willingly gives to those who ask Him- those who– open themselves to be guided to greatness in the most unusual and often very difficult challenges. In no small way, the greater the difficulty, the more possible it is for God to show His mighty power.

On our knees, like the cloud of witnesses gone before us are “Men of the hour.” Blind, Fanny Crosby, Spurgeon, the Wesley brothers, John Newton, Moody and Finny, Billy Graham and their team – in Europe, England, Scotland, Germany, the northern countries there and Spain; in Egypt, India, in America; today on television from the lips of Australian preachers, a preacher in Singapore – literally from the ends of the earth – stands a man of the hour.

So, here we are, this is our day, it will soon be over, will what we’ve done prove to have been something that lasts?

Buddy

In his book, The Force of Faith . . . Creating, Don H. Polston says, “What is your greatest Mountain?  What was your last Mountain?  You could be facing the very last mountain on your road to end the pressure. Each mountain calls for a different approach, and all mountains must be taken over with the power of Christ”