December 28, 2005

The apostle John was shown “an open door in heaven” (Rev. 4:1). There he saw scenes the whole world should know about—especially Muslims. No one in heaven, in earth, or even in hell, could “prevail” to break the seven seals that kept that mysterious book (scroll) closed in the hand of the One who sat on the throne of the universe. John cried “much.” Then “the Lamb, “ all bruised and mangled in His death, “prevailed”—the Son of God crucified. He broke the seven seals! He had saved the universe from ruin!

John saw all the redeemed people overcome with joy as they cried, “Salvation belongs to our God” (7:10; NKJV). But that doesn’t mean primarily that God Himself is now “saved,” although in a sense that can be true. The idea is that God’s redeemed ascribe their “salvation to Him.” That mangled Lamb gave them salvation; it was He who took the initiative 100% in saving them. He was the Good Shepherd who went on a long safari to seek and find them. By His “much more abounding grace” (Rom. 5:20) they were saved. Their song of triumph in Revelation 7 is the same as Paul’s word in Ephesians, “By grace you have been saved, through faith” but their faith was not the means of their salvation. Immediately they insist that their faith is not “of [themselves; 2:8, 9].” They take no credit for their “decision to accept Christ.”

As Paul says in Romans 5:15-18, it was Christ who gave them the “gift” of “justification unto life” (KJV, NKJV) even “while we were still sinners” (vs. 8). Just let your heart begin to grasp this, and you will throw yourself down with them “before the throne” even as that great multitude did, that crowd that “no one could count” (TEV).

December 27, 2005

Our local newspaper tells the harrowing story of a marital breakup in which the husband (and father of his 8 year old daughter) is trying to separate his wife from her family. His father-in-law and grandfather to the child sent her a doll as a gift. She loved it as any 8 year old girl would.

Then papa in his rage beheaded the doll, probably inspired by the beheadings in Iraq. The child was of course devastated. You can imagine how she felt watching this.

Now shift gears to ancient Israel. When the sinner would realize his guilt, he would come to the sanctuary to offer an innocent victim who would die in his stead for the sin. When he would ask the priest to slay the lamb or whatever he had brought, the priest would hand the sinner the knife, “You do it!” (cf. Lev. 1:3-5, 3:3, 4:4, 8:14, 15, etc.). Can you imagine how the sinner would feel doing this deed, especially if the lamb is a pet?

For us today, true and genuine repentance is not complete until we realize our part in the murder of Jesus Christ. WE took His innocent life. His blood was shed for US. “All the world” is guilty of slaying the Son of God (Rom. 3:19); that’s in a corporate sense.

Now when the sinner hears the truth, he realizes his own personal guilt. God has foretold in Zechariah 12:10-13:1 a repentance of the ages yet to come—“the spirit of prayer and of supplications” when we “look upon [Him] whom [we] have pierced.” Then at last will come the “cleansing”—not so much from guilt realized as from forgiveness realized. But the forgiveness can never be effective until the guilt is finally fully comprehended!

This gigantic task will be accomplished by the ministry of the true and genuine Holy Spirit. His primary work: convicting us of what we are ignorant of—sin (John 16:8).

December 22, 2005

You may have dreamed of doing some great work for the Lord. He has put that vision in your heart. If you have had success, thank Him in humility. It was all His blessing.

But if you feel that you have accomplished little of what you had hoped to do, please do not wound your Lord by doubting His love and faithfulness for you. He has heard your prayers; if you can receive this brief message, that proves that there is still opportunity for Him to bless the meager offering you have to give Him. The little boy in the big crowd of 5000 plus women and children had only his two fish and five barley buns his mother had baked for his lunch—but in love and boyish faith he gave them all to the disciples to give to Jesus (Matt. 14:15-19; John 6:9-11; did you know that John is the only one of the four Gospels to give the “lad” credit for his loving offering!).

You know how the Lord Jesus blessed that humble gift!

Now ask the dear Lord to show you what little thing you can do to bring some truth or some blessing in another way, to someone. The angels keep the record books; don’t even think about a reward for yourself. Forget that. But do pray that the Lord will bless your tiny little offering and trust Him that He will for the good of someone, somewhere. Someday someone will walk up to you and thank you for what you gave or what you did TODAY.

December 21, 2005

If someone is sad or melancholy, we in today’s culture usually condemn him/her as mentally ill, and useless to society. In the ancient Persian Empire, anyone who wasn’t smiling and laughing at the imperial court was in danger of losing his head (cf. Neh. 1:4; 2:1, 2). You wouldn’t last long as a TV Anchor today, likewise, if you weren’t bubbly and bouncing on camera.

The October ATLANTIC magazine has Abraham Lincoln on its cover and says: “Today he’d be called ‘unfit for office’—but his struggles with mental illness gave him the tools to bind a nation” in its Civil War wounds. The article says: “Being able to look troubling reality straight in the eye also proved a great strength” of character. His problem may not have been genuine mental illness: perhaps he simply understood the reality of our humanity in our corporate alienation from God. “Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud!” was his favorite poem he loved to recite to people who wanted him to crack jokes. Slavery and the Civil War, he felt, were no joke.

One wonders what he would do if he were in the White House today. Iraq is also no joke.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). But He was truly “healthy.” His grief enabled Him to sympathize with you and heal you—and the world. Says Jesus: “Happy are those who mourn: God will comfort them!” (Matt. 5:4, TEV). Sounds backward. But only those who have been hungry can ever be truly thankful for a square meal. Every loaf of bread is stamped with the cross that Jesus bore for us. The “faith” that the Bible talks about includes the gift of being able to appreciate what that loaf of bread you eat cost the “Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” We learn to walk softly. We look reality in the eye—soberly. That’s happiness.

December 18, 2005

We just received a letter from a Christian man in Zambia (Africa). He tells of the blessings he has received in reading some of my writings (which have been widely circulated in Africa, where I spent 24 years).

He calls himself “a peasant farmer.” He writes page 2 as a plea for me to send him American dollars so he can buy food to feed his starving children. Drought has ruined his crops, and the well where he and his fellow villagers draw water has dried up. He writes an excellent, courteous letter; I have no reason to doubt its utter truthfulness. I do not know him personally; I never lived in Zambia.

I must respond positively. Said Jesus, “Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you, do not turn away” (Matt. 5:42). A check would do him no good, and a Western Union Money order would eat up a considerable portion in fees, and he probably wouldn’t be easily able to cash it. If I send him some cash and ask him not to tell others, that would be selfish of me (just let the word get out that a letter to this strange person in America brings American dollars!). Yet how can I sit in judgment on all the letters I receive as to which represents genuine need? How can I help him? If I give him a “fish,” it will soon be eaten up; how can I teach him thousands of miles away to “fish”?

As the holiday season comes on us, I cannot, I must not, forget Jesus; it is He who tells us in His word that we are living in the world’s grand Day of Atonement—the one day in the ancient Levitical year when the Lord called for fasting. We can’t fast all the time, of course, in this antitypical Day of Atonement; but we can live humbly in the presence of the Lord, in self-denial, and not feast to the point of obesity while multitudes of fellow humans as dear to Christ as we are, starve.

December 15, 2005

If some heartache, worry, fear, has driven you to prayer, be sure that our Enemy Satan will try to overwhelm you with doubt that the Lord has heard you and that He cares.

Now is the time to turn again to Psalm 27: “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (vs. 13). Those words are perfectly written to meet your need just now!

What keeps us from “losing heart” is “believing” that we WILL “see the goodness of the Lord” while we still live and can enjoy His blessings. There are several “most precious” ones in this Psalm:

(1) Declare your confidence that the Lord alone is the light of your life (vs. 1).

(2) Recount how in the past He has delivered you from your enemies (2).

(3) Choose to trust Him totally even if “war rises against you” (3).

(4) Repent of your selfish prayers; ask for a nook in the Lord’s house and be content to live there and let the fashions and pleasures of the world go by (4).

(5) Snuggle tight in that “secret place” where you dwell alone with Him (5).

(6) When He says “Seek My face,” don’t waste a moment: do it! (8).

(7) Confess the truth: your father and mother have forsaken you! Good as they were, they couldn’t know how to hold your hand any longer. Now rejoice that the heavenly Father Himself has adopted you into His great family (10).

December 14, 2005

When we think of the prophet Hosea (his little book is just after Daniel), we all agree that he truly loved Gomer. She was no mere one night stand. A man may prize his Hummer or Rolls Royce, but when it gets wrecked, he doesn’t weep and moan the rest of his life; he simply gets another one. No big deal. And when one romance fails, a man with skin deep affection simply gets another woman. This is typical Hollywood romance.

Not Hosea. This woman Gomer had engaged his deepest affection; he was imprisoned forever by his love for her, the kind that “never ceases.” She had believed in him, given her heart to him. Their eyes and their souls had met. When she fell for another man (someone who could not love her truly, because God does not put true love for one woman in the hearts of two men!) he was deeply pained. The break-up tore him up. The thought that his deep love for her was not appreciated, not reciprocated, was painful as death.

Now shift gears: Jesus Christ is the real Hosea; He loves His true church with that kind of love—“infinitely,” for Christ became “Immanuel, God with us” (Matt. 1:21); although he is God, yet He is also human. He is the source of all human love and fidelity in it. But think of the pain that the superficial faith, the worldliness in His church, her infidelity, has brought Him. She is His “Gomer”! There is a wrong that must be made right before the great controversy between Christ and Satan can be concluded. Read Hosea: Gomer finally repented. So will the Lord’s church, His Bride-to-be, repent! There is Good News in the story of “Hosea.” It is being played out today. Let us be alert and watch.

December 12, 2005

The most sanguine of politicians of whatever party are worried. They may not know that they are in the Bible, but they are: Jesus spoke of our very days today, “‘There will be.... on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity,.... men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth” (Luke 21:25, 26). They know that there is something seriously wrong; Jesus pinpoints it in that same discourse on the Mount of Olives: “Many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because [unholy] lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold” (Matt. 24:11, 12).

That “love” is the same love that Hosea had in his heart for Gomer, his attractive, charming but unfaithful wife (1:2; 3:1, etc.). Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself for it” (Eph. 5:25), such love being a precious gift which we receive from Jesus—love that never ceases (1 Cor. 13:8, KJV). It was known of old, for Isaac “loved” Rebecca (Gen. 24:67), and the Song of Songs says such love is “strong as death,” that is, it never dies (8:6). It’s from the Garden of Eden.

The word is not in the American Constitution; but its principle pervades it, for it safeguards holy law. “Lawlessness” is the evil that causes such strong-as-death “love” to cool for “many”—bold, callous disobedience to the holy law of God, His ten commandments. The growing crisis of today leads the two-horned “beast” to abandon its lamblike character, henceforth to “speak as a dragon,” assuming the role of dictator to the world (Rev. 13: 11, 12ff). Find your place in that chapter, loyal to the Lamb of God who was “slain” (vs. 8).

December 10, 2005

In our great city of Sacramento, some mega-churches are closing their doors on Christmas Day, Sunday. The pastors are telling their people to stay home and open their presents.

This creates a real problem in logic for them: if Sunday is the true Lord’s Day, then we should keep it holy even if it’s Christmas! Nothing can supersede the obligation for the church family to worship before the Lord on His holy day.

But Sunday is not the Lord’s Day, according to the Bible. It’s one of the “six working days” of the week (Ezek. 46:1). The only one the Lord claims as “My holy day” is the seventh-day Sabbath (cf. Ex. 20:8-11; Isa. 53:13).

But the mega-church pastors have another problem: the Bible does not identify December 25 as the birthday of Christ. It says it’s impossible that it could be because “there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). You don’t camp outdoors around Bethlehem in December, a rainy, cold month in Palestine (in the Northern Hemisphere). Nor do you take an 80 miles walk on foot, as did Joseph and Mary coming down from Nazareth. The roads would be mud.

Why then do so many who worship Jesus keep Sunday, and Christmas as His birthday? It’s a mix-up in history. Here in the North you can see that on December 21 the sun has gone as far south as it can go; then by the 25th you can detect a slight movement back north again—promising another spring and summer to come. The wild pagan tribes of antiquity hailed December 25 as the birthday of their god, the sun—one of many pagan ideas “baptized” into the church. Let us worship the Lord in spirit and in truth (John 4:23).

December 8, 2005

The Bible is clear that the divine Son of God, whom the Father gave to the world, became a man. His name is “Immanuel,.... ‘God with us’” (Matt. 1:21).

But we humans have not as yet been clear in our understanding of how close He has come. He came “in the flesh” (1 John 4:2), which means “closer than a brother” (Prov. 18:24), “in all points tempted as we are [tried, tested]” (Heb. 4:15, Rotherham, Twentieth Century).

What “we” as the fallen human race have been slow to grasp is that His taking our fallen sinful nature upon His holy, sinless nature meant that He became a “man,” the Greek word that means a male. And a “man” loves a “woman” and wants to be one with her; the “woman” whom Jesus loves in His humanity is more than a woman—she is the church (cf. Eph. 5:25). What we can’t seem to grasp is how He loves her as a man loves the one woman out of billions whom his heart is devoted to with conjugal love... “Many waters cannot quench” such love; it’s “strong as death” (S.S. 8:6, 7). But “she” has been unfaithful!

If a woman loves a man who forsakes her, it is painful for her; but if a pure man loves a woman who forsakes him, there is a special lonely pain there that our Savior can understand in a unique way. He has suffered the same pain in an enormously greater way. Nowhere does the Bible say that it’s not good for a woman to be alone; but the Lord said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18, KJV; I’ll probably be shot for quoting this).

The story of Hosea (1:2) gives us a tiny glimpse into reality: it’s clear that he loved Gomer as a good man finds it in his heart to love one woman only; read the story in the book of his heartbreak. Then try to understand Jesus as He is today. (And don’t forget Rev. 19:7, 8.)

December 6, 2005

It’s shocking, but it’s true: our heavenly Father wants us to be rich—not only spiritually, but in money! While it’s true that He is especially kind and merciful to poor people, and the famous poor widow who cast in her two mites into the temple treasury is eternally blessed (Luke 21:1-4), the Bible actually says that God wants His people to be materially rich. But wait a moment, let’s read what the Lord says, in context:

“God is able to give you more than you need.... [He] will always make you rich enough to be generous at all times, so that many will thank God for your gifts” (2 Cor. 9:8, 11, TEV).

He blessed King Solomon with enormous worldly wealth so long as the king was willing to use it wisely (1 Kings 3:9, 12, 13). The key is our readiness to lay aside our natural-born love of self. Jesus was poor in this world’s wealth; He had nothing but His clothing as His wealth when He was crucified. Therefore, every poor person in the world can hold his head high in self-respect; God honors him for He has adopted him into His “family in heaven and earth” (Eph. 3:15; 1:5, 6).

But Paul’s idea is that God would be honored and pleased if we could “grow up unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” out of our childish love of self, so He could trust us with money (cf. 4:13, 14). But let’s not waste time yearning to be rich, thinking we are strong and wise enough to use wealth in an unselfish way; we are probably like Peter when he promised he would never deny his Lord (Luke 22:31-34, 57-60). May the love of Christ move us now to let self be “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20) so we share what we do have. And then trust the Lord to give us of His grace to “grow up” in due time, when He can entrust us with more.

December 5, 2005

It’s not a sin to feel depressed; even Jesus felt depressed (He cried out on His cross, “My God, why have You forsaken Me?”). Isaiah speaks patiently and tenderly to those who do everything right, they “fear the Lord” (which means, they reverence Him), yet they “walk in darkness, and have no light” (50:10).

If you feel depressed, Jesus does not cast you off; He remembers how He felt on His cross!

Part of the answer to your prayer is two verses later, in 51:1: “Listen to Me,.... who seek the Lord.” Discouraged as you may be, He gives you a message especially written for you! Don’t overwhelm Him with your tears on your knees so you can’t hear what He is saying to you: “LISTEN” to Him. (Remember, Mary Magdalene on the resurrection morning couldn’t see Jesus for her tears, Jn 20:13-16).

Here’s the blessing in Isaiah you need just now, verse 1: “Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the hole of the pit from which you were dug.”

If you have lived with that silver spoon of a multi-billionaire in your mouth all your life, you probably can’t get this: but if you have known poverty and trials (as I have), you’ll get a breath of fresh air from heaven if you will call to mind the humble days of your origin. Remember your sorrow then, your hunger, your poverty, your loneliness. Then think of the many blessings He has given you since then! Yes, looking to the pit whence you were dug (KJV) and the hole out of which you came—you will thank God for all you have and all you are today. Isaiah had just the message you need to lift up your soul again!

December 3, 2005

“Who among you fears the Lord [you’re converted, you keep His commandments, etc.]? Who obeys the voice of His Servant [you do everything right, and yet] who walks in darkness and has no light?” (Isa. 50:10). The Lord is merciful to those who should always be smiling and happy but for some painful reason they’re not.

This from Isaiah is to the point:

(1) “Let him trust in the name of the Lord.” It’s downright sin to doubt the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord! To mistrust Him wounds Him, and the unnecessary suffering that results [yours, and those who know you] makes Him sad. The name of “Jesus” means “Savior,” so to “trust in His name” means to believe He is your Savior from whatever ill you find yourself in. Get on your knees, tell Him, “Thank You, Lord, for saving my soul, for giving me the gift of eternal salvation in Christ! Thank You, Lord Jesus, for already dying my second death on your cross!” You may feel you can’t talk to anyone else about your pain (incidentally, that’s good—they couldn’t be the ones to help you anyway, only the Lord can), but thanking Him for His cross where He went to hell instead of you will clear much darkness out of your soul immediately.

 

(2) “And rely on his God”(same verse; KJV says, “stay” upon Him). He loves to have someone pester Him by “staying” at His gates, “watching daily at My gates, waiting at the posts of My doors” (Prov. 8:34). He will never get impatient and drive you away.

 

(3) Don’t waste time and energy reading psychology books. “Those who encircle themselves with.... sparks [they] have kindled” will find only “torment” (vs. 11).

 

(4) Time’s up; more tomorrow, the Lord willing.