Have a Blessed Christmas!

May I take this opportunity to wish all my readers and followers a very blessed Christmas, the time of the year when we remember with thanksgiving the glorious and miraculous birth of the Saviour of the world. 

Thank you so much for following this website; I hope you are challenged and convicted by what you read, but also encouraged and built up in your faith.  When going through troubles times, it is an encouragement to know that there are others who are experiencing the same things in different places.  We are not on our own, as Satan would want us to believe. And he also wants us to believe that he is supreme! He's NOT!  Christ, by His coming, life, death and resurrection has defeated him totally, and what we are experiencing are merely the dying flings of a fatally wounded enemy.  Praise the Lord. 

This is the message of Christmas.  Our Saviour is victorious.  As Calvin maintained, GOD MUST WIN!

May God bless you all at this time, and give you a most blessed 2012.

The Right Question!

I think the one big question we have to ask ourselves in church work is this: What is the Lord actually doing here?  How easy it is to get our eyes off Him and see only the activity of Satan through his servants.  We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the whole range of the forces of darkness at every level.  When God removes the unbelievers from a church and replaces them with true Christians, then He is at work; and so is Satan!  Then He will start to draw other unbelievers in under the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom, the Gospel of God's sovereign rule and reign over all things.

 

I am just finishing DMLJ on The Christian Warfare, and hope to move on to The Christian Soldier very shortly.  What a read, and what ministry to my soul.  While there are church ministers whose decided purpose in life is to oppose the Gospel ministers amongst them, DMLJ was the very opposite.  He was the great encourager of Gospel preachers regardless of denominational alignment.  He wasn't too concerned about the accuracy of a man's theology so long as he gave him a sense of the presence of God.  Orthodoxy is important and we should always strive to be as orthodox as we can; but never at the expense of the Gospel.  I am also reading Francis Schaeffer's books, and what a taste of heaven these are.  His ability to dissect what passes for Christianity, especially within the evangelical world, is unsurpassed.

Perverted Pastors

When the Bible condemns the false prophets who preach error to their people, the danger is for us to see the reference to those other churches, the 'unfaithful' ones, but not ours, the 'faithful' ones.  Our church, our denomination, is faithful and true to the Gospel, but these others have 'sold the pass' and have apostasised.  In the northern kingdom of Israel, the church and her prophets were condemned by Jeremiah, and rightly so.  Now, the southern kingdom, Judah, would have breathed a sigh of relief because he condemned the northerners.  But now, he turns to the south and he says they are no better. Come right into the HQ of the Jewish church, and what do you see?  "I have seen ... evildoers," (Jer.23). He sees "a horrible thing," a thing that causes horror, terror, fear.  And He sees this "in the prophets of Jerusalem." 

Here, too, the preachers come under the searchlight of God's Word, and what is exposed is not impressive.  Jeremiah tells us plainly what he sees in the clergy class: "they commit adultery, and walk in lies." Adulterers in the church's ministry!  Ministers who walk in lies - in the church! Now what do these people do, what is their purpose and intent of their ministry?  "They strengthen also the hands of evildoers that no one returns from his wickedness."  In other words, no repentance is preached.  Why?  Because to do so might resurrect all these skeletons in the cupboard of the preachers' lives.  They have no moral authority to preach the truth.  Preachers who "walk in lies" have no authority to peach the truth.  If they say too much, their hearers might know secrets about them and expose them; so they preach a cosy message that keeps their people anesthetised , spiritually paralysed and inert.  That's a safe place fr such people and pastors - each admiring the other.

With this obtaining within the churches of today, is it any wonder that the situation in the nation is so bleak!  If the church is rotten inside, we cannot expect the society within which she lives to be any better. 

Irresponsible Preachers

Dr F. A. Schaeffer wrote, "...in our generation, when men listen at the doors of many churches, what they hear is non-truth."  In other words, they are hearing the negative of truth which may be understand as error and falsehood.  Truth has been undermined by these 'prophets,' and what they substitute in place of the true Gospel  is not Gospel (Gal.1:7), but the opposite; it is a soul-destroying message that allows condemned sinners to go on in their rebellion and guilt to a Christless eternity.  It is a message that not only enrages God, but does an irreparable dis-service to those who hear them.  It is the very height of spiritual irresponsibility, and will result in eternal loss for all those who preach thus and to those who hear them and it.  Whatever else they might imagine it to be, it is not Gospel; it is non-Gospel.

Now. when the preachers of non-Gospel messages do so, it has a clearly designed result; it causes "my people Israel to err," (Jer.23:13-16).  It is the wrong messages that the people listen to in good faith that causes them to err - in thought and in action.  While the responsibility for choosing to listen to error lies rightly with the people themselves, the greater responsibility lies with the pedlars of false doctrine, error, falsehood, non-Gospel. What a condemnation awaits such people!

Jesus Means Saviour

Mary was told to call the Child's name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.  The birth of Christ is about redemption, salvation, reconciliation.  It is about God taking the initiative and acting for man's eternal salvation.  His action is seen in His sending His only Son into this world, with a set purpose.  That purpose was one of salvation.  He came to save His people from their sins.  He is "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," (Jn.1:29).  He came to save.

Christmas is about God's saving action in Christ, and specifically in Christ's death on the Cross for our sin.  He was our Substitute, the divine Substitute.  "He died the Just for the unjust to bring us to God," (1 Pet.3:18). 

If you see Christmas in this way, you are seeing it properly. If not, then you are turning it into a truly pagan festival.

Do Not Harm My Prophets!

The Lord's prophets are those men called and set apart by God to declare His Word to the whole world. They are God's special servants who have vouchsafed to them the protection of the Lord of hosts, God almighty.  They have been separated from the rest of God's people to this very special work and the highest of all callings - the work of declaring His Gospel to all men.

The man who dares to harm these called servants of the Lord are placing himself in great eternal jeopardy.  He does not realise that to do so will bring dire consequences for him, and for his family.  God calls out to the world, "Do not harm my prophets."  Yet men do this very thing.

How utterly blind and foolish they are!  Only a man inspired with deep hatred for the Gospel and the Saviour would stop to do such a thing.  "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," (Heb.10:31).  The God of the Christian church is the living God.  To fall into His hands is a thing too terrible for words.  It strikes fear into the heart at the very though of it. 

Is anyone out there reading this doing that very thing? Then desist immediately otherwise you will face the living God in a terrible judgement.

Touch Not My Anointed!

What a timely warning!  What an urgent reminder! And why is it needed? Because many within the visible church do not seem to know that this is in the Bible (Ps.105:15 and also in 1 Chron.16:22). They appear to have this idea - where they got it from one can guess! - that they have the right to abuse God's children in whatever way they choose, and get away with it.  They believe that if the prophet of the Lord challenges the church or their own lives from the Word of God, that they can retaliate in kind.

Have they not read their Scriptures? Do they not know their Bible?  God said DO NOT TOUCH THEM!  Yet they go on and touch them.  What a foolish thing to do.  They are going against the express command of the LORD to His people.  And they do it to their own peril.