“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God…”
There are people who do not believe in God. They can’t see Him with their eyes or feel Him with their hands, so they say that He does not exist. I know that it is not that simple, but it is the beginning of unbelief. Besides that, why would people not believe in God? People reject the idea of God because of bad things that happen in the world. The reasoning is that if God exists, we would not have earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, cancer - you name it. There is a long list of bad things that happen and seem to be unfair. What they do not take into account is that we live in a fallen world. This is written plainly in the Bible and is plainly seen in history. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their perfect world came to an end. As a Christian, I do not try to explain why bad things happen, or why bad things happen to good people. That is the nature of life in a fallen world. For myself, I am just glad that in the midst of all of the bad things that happen, there is a God who loves me and is with me in the good and bad things that happen. People reject the idea of God because they do not want to be beholden to a higher power. Belief in God puts brakes on our natural inclinations. People have always tried to get around obedience to God, because He curbs their natural inclinations. Those who do not believe in God see no need to repent and ask for forgiveness. They just do not want God to exist. People reject the idea of God because those of us who believe in Him sometimes act as if He does not exist. We see this in churches all of the time. The New Testament teaches that we are to be in unity in Christ’s church, but the world sees us disobey in this and acting like people who do not have to answer to God. I know that we are “only human” but this does not relieve us of the responsibility of living Christian lives before the world. The world is crying out for we who believe in Jesus Christ to make Him real in our lives. It is my daily prayer that my life will show my belief, for example, in how I treat people. It is my prayer that people will not base their unbelief on my behavior!!! Make that your prayer as well. (I need to add that I am sure that I have not always succeeded in this. I'm glad that our God is a forgiving God.) There are many other reasons why people do not believe in God, but these are uppermost in my mind today. Let’s show the world what a profound belief in an almighty God can do in one’s life. Bro. Joe
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Some times when I get a case of “writer’s block,” I will write down a word and try to make an acrostic of it. This time I wrote the name of Jesus, and what follows is the acrostic that I came up with to describe Jesus, our Savior.
J- Justification – It is through Jesus we can be saved and justified in spite of the fact that we are sinners. Here is what Paul wrote about justification in Romans 3:23-24: “For all have sinned and short of the glory of God; 24. Being justified freely by His grace thorough the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” In spite of the fact that we are sinners, we can be justified before God almighty through faith in Jesus Christ. It is a matter of confessing your sins and asking Jesus to come into your life and save you. This justification is available to all people – even you! E- Eternal life – Eternal life in heaven is made possible through Jesus Christ. I want to quote from Paul’s Roman letter, chapter 6:22-23: “But now being made free from sin, and become servants of God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. 23. for the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The mortality rate on earth is 100%. We will all die, but by faith in Jesus Christ we can have eternal life in heaven when we invite Him into our lives. This eternal life is available to all people – even you! S - Soul Satisfaction – It is true that soul satisfaction is given us through faith in Jesus Christ. What was written in Psalm 107:8-9 is true about Jesus: “On that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men. 9. For He satisfies the longing soul, and fills the hungry with goodness.” This is what Jesus does for those who put their faith in Him. Eternal life is available for all – even you. U - Understanding – There are a lot of things that we will never understand. It is difficult sometimes to understand the ways of the Lord. But Jesus gives us understanding of the greatest truth. I will let 1 John 5:20 explain what I mean. Read it carefully: “And we know that the Son of God is come, and has given us understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.” This understanding is available for all – even you! S - Surety – Perhaps you are unsure about what is written above. I want to share Hebrews 7:22 and 25 – 22. “By so much more was Jesus made a surety of a better testament. 25. Wherefore He (Jesus) is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by Him, seeing He ever lives to make intercession for them.” This assurance is available to all people – even you. Well, that ends my acrostic, but I hope that this does not end your interest in what I have written. Read it and share J-E-S-U-S with the world. Bro. Joe “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great of crowd of witnesses, let us lay about every weight and the sin which so easily besets us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. 2. Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
If I have a life text, this is it. I want to break it down over the next four days, and give you some of what I have gotten out of it for my own life. I hope that what I write will help you in your own journey. Please do not understand me that I have done all of this perfectly, but it has meant a lot to me. The first line that I want to deal with: “Let us lay aside every weight.” The writer used a racing motif to teach us how to live more freely. People who run in foot races do not wear anything that will slow them down. They do not run in sweat suits, but they run in the thinnest material possible. We have things in our lives that slow us down as we run the race of life. What is weighing you down that is keeping you from running the race of life as effectively as possible? First, you might be weighted down because you have not taken the weight to Jesus. Jesus invites us to: “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give your rest.” Jesus told us in this text that He wants to ease the load. He is probably wondering why you are taking life’s burdens on your back, when He has offered to ease them. “Tell it to Jesus” is not a slogan. He really wants to ease our burdens. Second, you might be weighted down with people that you have to deal with in your life. Other people can be a blessing to us, but there are times when they weigh us down. They might weigh us down with criticism that we did not ask them for. They might weight us down by spreading tales about us. The truth is that there are some people who are just hard to get along with. Give them to Jesus, so to speak. The only reason they load you down is that you let them. Third, you might be weighted down with a false sense of guilt. This is something that I have had to deal with myself. What I have learned is that I have got to stop letting false guilt take over my life. Don’t let other people “whip the guilt” on you. There are some things that you might be guilty of, which is true of all of us. We just need to accept Jesus’ forgiveness, stop doing what makes us feel guilty, and go on with life. Hey tell it to Jesus……..” Fourth, you might be weighted down with a sense of doubt. I know about this one too……I just always remember what Dr. Ted Adams told us at Southeastern Seminary years ago: “Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs.” You are not alone in having doubts. What I’ve learned is that Jesus will relieve this load for you. He has done it for me in some amazing ways. Don’t let your “weights” get the best of you, because Jesus wants to relieve you of them. Bro. Joe "Behold, I will put out a fleece of wool on the floor and if the dew be on the fleece only, and it is dry upon the earth, then shall I know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said."
I always get a little aggravated with Gideon when I read this. My thinking is something like this: "Where is his faith? Wasn't God's declaration enough?" Then I think again. The Midianites had conquered Israel and ruined their crops and houses. Now the vast Midianite army was about to attack again. The Israelites repented and God turned to Gideon to rescue them. I have to ask myself what I would do under similar circumstances? I would probably act like Moses and say "Why me?" Or I would probably pull a Gideon and say "Prove yourself to me." Taking on the Midianite army at that time in Israel's weakened condition would surely be a tough task, especially since God pared his army down from ten thousand to three hundred. God proved himself to Gideon and, to make a long story short, under Gideon's leadership the Israelites prevailed. What is the moral of this story? When God calls upon us to serve Him, He wants us to do it by faith. This is certainly what Gideon had to do. I once heard a preacher say that “God plus one is a majority.” I later heard a correction to that: “God is a majority.” Compared to the power of God we have little power. What God wants from us is obedience. We are living in what is being called “the post-Christian age.” This means that we are not in the majority. The fact is that we have never been in the majority, but we have never needed to be in the majority. God wants us to know what Gideon learned, if we will follow Him by faith and obey Him, He will do great things through us. I recently wrote an article entitled “God Is not in Trouble.” In it I pointed out that just because things seem to be moving away from Him, God is not anxious, because He knows that He is a majority. That being the case, we don’t have to worry about it either. I wish that people across America would be more responsive to the gospel, and I wish that unbelievers would stop worrying about where the Ten Commandments are posted. But the reality is that these negative things are happening, but it is still true that “we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” (Romans 8:37) Verse 31 of Romans 8 tells us: “What shall we say then to these things? If God is for us who can be against us?” This goes for our personal problems as well. Whatever you might be going through at this time, God is not unaware of it, and He will take you through it, over it, under it or around it. You need to start seeing yourself as a conqueror, not because of you, but because of Jesus. You won't go through anything that God will not go through with you. He has promised to never leave or forsake you, so take heart, have faith and, like Gideon, see what God can do. When you get to the end of what you are going through you will be the victor. The Lord wants us to take Him at His word and trust Him. He will take our humanity into account and humor us, like He did Gideon, but it would be better if we would just trust Him. The Bible is full of God's promises to us about using His power to aid us in serving Him. We quote Philippians 4:13 so confidently: "I can do all things through Him (Christ) who strengthens me." Do we really believe it or do we lay out the fleece? When I really think about it, I'm not quite as aggravated with Gideon and his fleece. But I can pray that I will have the faith and courage to serve the Lord in any endeavor He calls me to. You can pray the same prayer. Bro. Joe Jesus said: “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”
My good friend, John Townsend, sent me an Email that really caught my attention. The Email was about a man who had a heart attack. The hospital staff tried to revive him but could not get a heartbeat. Finally, they pronounced him dead and had begun to prepare him for the morgue. The doctor who pronounced him dead is a Christian. He said that the Lord spoke to his heart and said to turn around, go back to where the man was and pray for him. At first, he was a bit hesitant, but the “still small voice” was so persistent that he did what the voice told him to do. He went in and prayed for the man, then told the technician to shock him one more time. To make a long story short, the technician applied the paddle to the man, shocked him and he revived. He is still alive today and is indeed a believer because of the experience. (What I failed to add above is that the man was not a Christian, and is glad he was called back, because while he was dead, he was in a dark place and was all alone.) Do you believe that this sort of thing can happen today? Well, do you believe in the Bible? There were all kinds of miracles in the Bible in the Old and New Testaments. Miracles occur by the hand of God, who is sovereign over human affairs. In other words, not everybody is healed when healing is prayed for, and not everyone is raised from the dead when people would wish it to happen. But if God wants a miracle to occur, it will occur. Our part is to have faith in Him, believe in what He can do, and trust Him to do what is best for us. Jesus did all kinds of miracles in His ministry on earth. He did things that were way above the level of possibility. For example, Jesus turned water into wine. Now, you can’t make wine out of water. When water sits for awhile it only becomes brackish, has little green things in it, and is harmful to drink. Water cannot be made into grape juice or wine – period. Another example of Jesus doing miracles is His power over demons. They were absolutely subservient to Him. When Jesus told them to come out, they came out. Now, demons are cast out today, but the casting out is not from the power of people, but from the power of Christ. It is our faith in Jesus than can cause Jesus to do things far above what we would humanly expect. To me, that is the exciting thing about being a Christian. We can’t do anything that we want to do, but we serve a God who can. You might be thinking right now: “Bro. Joe have you ever seen a miracle?” Let me put it this way: I have prayed for people to be healed and they were healed. I didn’t slap them on the forehead in front of television cameras, but I prayed for them in the quiet of my place of prayer, God heard and answered. Needless to say, I have prayed for people to be healed and they were not healed because God had other plans for them. Did I pray for myself to be healed in my bout with two cancers in 2011-2012? Of course I did, and I was healed through medicine. God did not see fit to heal me immediately, but He grew my faith in Him while I was recovering. I am not trying to explain to you why God does what He does in various lives. I’m just telling you that our sovereign God always works on behalf of believers, and sometimes that does not jibe with our ideas of what He should do for us. Like Paul, I don’t think that God has to explain to us why He does what He does. We just have to confess that when God inspired Isaiah to write that His ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts, He wasn’t playing games with us. He is beyond our understanding. I just rejoice that by faith in Jesus Christ, I can serve God and see what He can do in the lives of individuals. It is beyond our power, to determine when God will perform miracles. It is in our power to trust Him when He inspires Paul to write in Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.” That is a miracle within itself. Believe it! Bro. Joe “Take away the dross from silver, and it will go to the silversmith for jewelry. 5. Take away the wicked from the before the king, and his throne will be established in righteousness.” “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost. 4. In whom the god of this world has 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 upon them.”
After his conversion on the Damascus Road, Paul’s whole life was consumed with telling the world about Jesus. He shared the “glorious gospel” with Jews and Gentiles alike. His primary ministry was to Gentiles, but he did not withhold his witness from anyone. But there were people who did not respond positively to the gospel. In our text verses, Paul explains why, and it is the same today. At this point we might say that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” The gospel is hid, or veiled, to “them who are lost.” “Lost” is a word that people who are not Christians do not like. I have heard people say, “I’m not lost, I know where I am.” We do not use this word because we think people do not know where they are, but because they are lost from the salvation that is offered by Jesus. This means that they are lost to the blessings of God in this life and the blessings of God in heaven. It is a biblical word and we do not need to apologize for it. (Actually, the Greek word translated “lost” in the KJV, also means “perishing,” which is less complimentary than “lost.”) Why are people without Christ lost? Paul’s explanation is that they have been blinded by the “god of this world.” The “god of this world” is the devil. Lost people are also offended by making reference to the devil in dealing with their being lost, but Paul makes it plain that those who refuse to believe in Christ have been blinded by the devil. This is the devil’s job: to lie to people and blind them with the ways of this world in order to keep them from believing in Jesus. The devil has been the enemy from the beginning. (Think of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.) He has convinced the world that he either does not exist, or that he is an ugly little red thing who is really a joke. The devil doesn’t care how people think of him as long as he can keep people from obeying God. What the devil does is blind people to the reality of Jesus so that they will not believe. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of books in print that deny the reality of Jesus Christ. Some teach that He did not even exist. Some teach that He existed but that He was not really the Son of God. Still others teach that Jesus was not really resurrected; therefore He is dead and God only knows where His body was hidden. But there are many other scholarly books that teach the reality of Jesus Christ, but they are not as popular to the world as the negative books. We should not be surprised, for denial of Jesus’ resurrection, and, consequently, His being the Son of God, is the devil’s main ploy. If people are blinded and will not believe, it is because they willingly choose to deny the reality of Christ. Why would people choose to deny the reality of Christ when there is so much evidence of His reality? Paul gave the answer in verse 4b: “Lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, Who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” They are kept from seeing the light of Christ because they do not want to see His light. In his book, The Case for the Real Jesus, Lee Strobel interviewed Michael Licona, who is a real scholar who is also a real believer. When Lee Strobel asked Licona why people would reject Christ’s reality, Licona’s answer was that many of them did not want to believe, because they did not want their lives to change. His meaning was that they were happy with the world and did not want to give any of it up. Understand that this is not the case for every unbeliever, but it is the case for many. This brings us back to the word “blinded.” The devil has blinded them to the way of Christ, because he has made the way of the world so appealing. Why did Paul continue to witness for Jesus, and why should we? Because He is real, and we are told to tell others, not to necessarily convince them. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. So “keep on keeping on,” and do not let the world, controlled by the devil, keep you from obeying Christ’s command to witness. Bro. Joe |
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