Archive for October 2014
Drought is because of sin
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Recently I read in a news article that the State of California is going to force Christian churches to pay for abortions. Because of the
sins of abortion, homosexuality and earth worship, the Lord is turning California into a wasteland: look at the severe drought in California.
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CALIFORNIA: YOUR LAND IS POLLUTED WITH BLOOD!
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Psalm 106: 37-42: “Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and the land was polluted with blood. Thus were they defiled with their own works, and went a whoring with their own inventions. Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against his people, insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance. And he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that hated them ruled over them. Their enemies also oppressed them, and they were brought into subjection under their hand.”
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This is from the blog memoirandremains:
Then, from the word “theology” comes the word “theologian.” It used to mean a person who has specialized in the study of God, but it has come to mean someone who is an expert in a slice of Christianity. In many cases that slice is rather small and disassociated from the whole.
These contemporary theologians deal with doctrinal minutia. Their expertise is in the area of rethinking doctrinal positions in light of contemporary society and culture. For some reason, they believe that because society has changed so drastically, our doctrinal positions need to change accordingly. To reexamine the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, for example, is an exercise in futility.
By slicing and dicing doctrinal positions, we have come to a point of not knowing what we believe. Not only that, but we also need new translations of the Scripture. I am not against that at all. Every time a new translation is published, I am one of the first to purchase it.
However, a new, updated translation of the Scripture is not the answer. It is amazing that in a generation of Christians with more modern translations of the Scriptures than all the other generations put together, it is just about the weakest group of Christians we have ever seen.
It is not by reading the Scriptures in the original languages or in some contemporary version that makes us better Christians. Rather, it is getting on our knees with the Scriptures spread before us, and allowing the Spirit of God to break our hearts. Then, when we have been thoroughly broken before God Almighty, we get up off our knees, go out into the world and proclaim the glorious message of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.
Experts who know everything but what is essential in the spiritual life are now running our churches. What I want to know is what are they expert in? It does not seem that many of them are expert in knowing God as the Fathers knew God. They do not seem to have that overwhelming awe that was predominant in the Early Church movement.
What have our experts done for the Church except to push it into a rut, allowing the letter of the law to dominate and control while denying the power of the Holy Spirit? I fear that we may have become too apologetic with our apologetics, and in trying to please everyone we end up destroying the truth. This has created a religious class system.
All these learned doctors with their PhDs and their noses firmly pointed north have caused great strife in the Church of Jesus Christ. Don’t they know that the devil is a better theologian than all of us put together?
—A.W. Tozer
Tozer, A. W. (2012-05-17). The Dangers of a Shallow Faith: Awakening from Spiritual Lethargy (Kindle Locations 223-242). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Beware of Theological Aesthetes
The Death of Voltaire
An Intellectual Dilemma
This is from The Christian Excavator blog:
Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you. Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have eaten the fruit of lies: because thou didst trust in thy way, in the multitude of thy mighty men. Hosea 10:12-13
In this passage God tells His people to break up their fallow ground. Fallow means to be unplowed or uncultivated. It describes a field that has been let go or neglected. Spiritually it describes a heart that has become complacent and unbroken.
My children and grandchildren will reap the iniquity and the “fruit of lies” that several generations of complacent Christians have allowed this nation to sow. I sometimes find it hard to believe how far our nation has plunged. Because of the indoctrination of our school system and the steady corrupting influence of the media most people cannot even discern right from wrong.
“It is time to seek the Lord” Like the people in Hosea’s day we have “plowed wickedness” and then act like we are shocked when we reap iniquity. We have trusted in our own way instead of seeking the Lord.
A.W. Tozer said concerning this passage;
“The fallow field is smug, contented, protected from the shock of the plow and the agitation of the harrow. Safe and undisturbed, it sprawls lazily in the sunshine, the picture of sleepy contentment… But it is paying a terrible price for its tranquility; never does it feel the motions of mounting life, nor see the wonders of bursting seed, nor the beauty of ripening grain. FRUIT IT CAN NEVER KNOW, BECAUSE IT IS AFRAID OF THE PLOW AND THE HARROW… In direct opposite to this, the cultivated field has yielded itself to the adventure of living. The protecting fence has opened to admit the plow, and the plow has come as plows always come, practical, cruel, business-like and in a hurry. Peace has been shattered by the shouting farmer and the rattle of machinery. The field has felt the travail of change; it has been upset, turned over, bruised and broken.”
We have been complacent long enough. We have avoided the plow for too long. Our smug faces need to be washed with tears. Many church doors will close…it is just a matter of time. A lot of churches are just a couple funerals away from extinction.
We need to beg God to plow our hearts. It is true that God will always have a remnant. He will always have His churches. He will always have a people on this earth until He returns…they just may not be here in America. {Some statistics say that 4000 churches shut their doors in America every year}
I had heard several years ago that some countries in the “far east” were preparing to send Christian missionaries to America. A walk through any mall or shopping center reveals how heathen we have become.
Do you really want God to pour out His Spirit on your church, in your community? Are you prepared for the plow to run through the middle of your undisturbed heart? Do you really want God to plow your fallow ground?
“Lord, prepare my heart to receive thy word, that it may be like the good ground, or I shall be undone for ever. Let my heart be broken up and prepared by thy plough. That I may have a good, an upright and sincere heart.”
—Benjamin Keach, Baptist Preacher, Horse-lie-down, Southwark, London (1640-1704)
This is from the Daily Meditation blog:
Leviticus 4:6: and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the LORD in front of the veil of the sanctuary.
There is no running away from the blood as the means of salvation. It does not matter what you feel about it, and how offensive you think that is.
There are three things about the blood of Jesus that makes it important. Where it is from, what it conveys, what it buys.
It is the blood of God (Acts 20:28). It is therefore an eternal statement of the commitment of God to humanity. The impression you may get after God chased man out of the garden because of sin, may be that God wanted to wash his hands off the case of man, as he chased him out with words of judgement, the judgement of death. You may think that was the end, that the holy God has separated himself from man because of sin for good. But with the incarnation of Jesus and the shedding of his blood, the life of God, his acceptance and commitment to man were eternally accented, to make manifest to man.
God is love, and because of that he sets out to make a way for man to come back to him, opening the door, His Son (John 10:9-10, 14:6). And Jesus because he shed his blood became the way. And understanding the truth about the blood is nothing less than liberating.
The earth received life coming from the blood of Jesus (Genesis 9:4), heralding a new dawn for it. Whatever is in Jesus is made available to humanity, which the dust on the earth represented (Genesis 3:19), on which the blood of Jesus which was shed fell.
He had on him a crown of thorns, which those who are persecuting him thought was punishment but they did not know that he was being crowned king indirectly (John 19:3).
Note that the authority which put the crown on Jesus was the number one ruler on the earth at that time, based on the revelation of Daniel about the kingdoms that would dominate the earth, was the roman empire, the iron kingdom (Daniel 2:31-49). When the Roman Empire put a crown on Jesus, and its army bowed to him in mockery, they transferred rulership on the earth to him. What they did was a prophetic act though they were ignorant of that fact.
Pilate inscribed these words on the cross of Jesus: “the king of the Jews (John 19:19-22).” The Pharisees protested against this, but Pilate refused to budge.
You might think that it was just something written in the bible for the story interest, but everything written about Jesus, e.g. events surrounding his death, have prophetic purpose. It was not for fun.
As the “truth” everything about Jesus manifest truth. Even the inscription on the cross communicated truth. He was truly the king of the Jews and the king of the world.
In the book of Zechariah, the bible says that they children of Israel will realise in the future that they have crucified their promised king and they will weep in regret of their action (Zechariah 12:10).
So Jesus, at his lowest moment, nearing the time of death, was “declared” king. He became king by death. This is because the one from whom he wanted to take over at that time was not really the man who was the emperor in Rome, but the devil. He went into the grave, triumphing over the devil in the cross (Colossians 2:15), and came out to declare that all power in heaven and on earth is given to him (Matthew 28:18), because he shed his blood.
He shed his blood to take on another life, another identity. He became a life-giving Spirit (1Corinthians 15:45). He is the Lord of life, rescuing people from death and hell, from damnation.
We are redeemed by the blood of Jesus (Revelation 5:9). What exactly is the purchasing power of the blood of Jesus? It is unlimited, because it is the blood of God. Paul warned the leaders of the church to know how to handle the Christians because they have been purchased by God with his blood. The blood was the ransom paid for our release from the bondage of death. Since the rule of sin was via the dominion of death, offering his son to death, God exhausted the power of death on him (Hebrews 2:14), death was swallowed up (1Corinthians 15:54-55), making all of us free, delivered from the fear of death.
Death was spent on Jesus (displayed by the fact that he rose up from the dead), and now sin and death no longer have dominion over us, we therefore enter into life.
Jesus said that what shall it profit a man to win the whole world and lose his soul (Mark 8:36-37)? This means that the value soul of a man which is saved by the blood of Jesus cannot be quantified. That goes to show that the only kind of blood that can redeem the billions of people on the earth is the blood of Jesus. Jesus had to be God or else the redemption work was not going to work.
If a soul is really precious, how much value do we have in the blood that saves us?
Therefore we cannot sing enough about the blood of Jesus. How precious it is, its cleansing power, its limitless power. The writer of the book of Hebrews while describing the church says that we have come to mount Zion the city of the living God, to the blood of sprinkling which speaks better than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24).
If the blood speaks anything, it is life, because life is in the blood, its life speaks power, because the spiritual power that led to our deliverance is packed in the blood. Jesus walked in the power of the Holy Spirit on earth to set people free from the oppression of the devil, but he needed to take his blood to heaven to buy up a place with his father. He has told his disciples that he was going to prepare a place for them so that where they are he may be also (Ephesians 2:13). The blood brings us to God.
Yom Kippur
To the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world
By Tim Shey
Death and Resurrection
Alpha and Omega
You shall know the truth
Offering for our sin
Friend of thieves and outcasts
Adam’s curse is broken
The truth shall set you free
One death for so many
Not a single bone was broken
Enemy is vanquished
Manifold temptations
Early you shall seek Me
No more tears and weeping
Today is now eternal
Leviticus 17: 11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.”
Isaiah 53: 5: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
Revelation 1: 5: “And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood.”
Altar
Shiloh
Bereshith
A Letter from Israel
Yom Kippur–Day of Atonement
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This is from A Call to the Remnant blog:
“The histories of the monks and the friars shows that if a spiritual movement can be kept within the confines of the Roman Catholic Church or any similar system, it is doomed and must be dragged down to the level of that which it sought originally to reform.It purchases exemption from persecution at the cost of its life. Francis of Assisi and Peter Waldo were both laid hold of by the same teaching of the Lord and yielded themselves to Him with uttermost devotion. In each case the example set and the teaching given gained the hearts of large numbers and affected their whole manner of life. The likeness turned to contrast when the one was accepted and the other rejected by the organized religion of Rome. The inward relation to the Lord may have remained the same, but the working out of the two lives differed widely. The Franciscans being absorbed into the Roman system, helped to blind men to it, while Waldo and his band of preachers directed multitudes of souls to the Scriptures, where they learned to draw for themselves fresh )and inexhaustible supplies from the ‘wells of salvation.'” (The Pilgrim Church, pg 117)
Can you see what Broadbent is saying? Those who bow to an institution,any denomination, are doomed to die a slow death and that which began as fire is doused by the waters of compromise and idolatry. God is a jealous God. He shares His glory with no one and no institution. You cannot serve two masters, you will ultimately love the one and hate the other. The burning fire of God takes place outside the walls, outside the bounds of organized religion. This fire ultimately becomes the enemy of all religion. That is why Frank Bartleman was so upset when the Azusa street revival morphed into a denomination. This would guarantee the demise of the movement itself. Whether a movement begins within the confines of organised religion or becomes an organised religion, the end result is the same. Better to stay within the confines of God and God alone and be persecuted and killed, than to die the slow death of compromise and idolatry. The Waldenses that Broadbent makes reference to when speaking of Waldo, was ruthlessly hunted down and eventually wiped out by religion. Yet, the gates of hell did not prevail against the genuine Church nor can it. God always maintains a witness in the land, a remnant.
Gods end-time Church will burn with the fire of God outside the camp of religion. They will be no less hated by all men. They will fulfill the high priestly prophecy of John 17 and they shall be one for a witness to the world, without compromise and idolatry. The only authority that they shall bow to will be the authority of God. The authority of man ultimately corrupts the moving of God. Self preservation and a desire to avoid persecution in all its many forms is the death of any movement of God. The last great movement of God shall embrace persecution and count it an honor to suffer humiliation and rejection and persecution for His sake, for in this they follow closely in the footsteps of Jesus. And the greatest persecution will come from those who seek to control and organize the people of God. When Gods people reject the authority of religion, they become its greatest enemy and this leads to their persecution. Only lovers of truth will stand in the coming days of darkness. One must be willing to forsake all in order to gain eternal glory.
Outside the Camp
The Road 