The Heirloom

Have you ever inherited anything? Had something passed down to you from a parent or a grandparent as an heirloom: a reminder of who you are and where you come from? God has prepared an inheritance for His children: a place where those who are not part of His kingdom will be removed.
Proverbs 2:20 tells us that the upright will inherit the land, and the perfect will dwell in it. This is an inheritance for Christians, something that God has saved for us to remind us of who we are and where we come from. We are His children, and we come from Him. The wicked and the transgressors won't have a part of the inheritance according to Proverbs 2:21. The inheritance is reserved for those who are loyal and faithful and part of the family, not for those who are not.

Are you a part of the family? Will you have a part of the inheritance, or will you be cut off and rooted out? You can turn your life over to God and follow in His will, or you can reject Him. He loves you and He wants you to choose to love Him. What will your decision be?

Pick of the Litter

Have you ever gone to pick out a new animal as either a pet or maybe a farm animal? The first thing most people do when the start to pick out a new animal is to look all the available ones over and try to gauge the potential of each one. Then we try to pick the one with the highest potential to meet our current needs.

Jesus seems to have done the same thing when He was on earth with us, calling Simon Peter to be His first disciple. Jesus seems to have been drawn to fishermen, and Peter was a great example of what it means to be a man as well as a follower of Christ.

Peter had a blind faith like few people I have ever met. When Jesus came walking on the Sea of Galilee, Peter was the only disciple to ask if he could join in the water-walking (Matthew 14:25-31). Peter was also still a man, and shortly after joining Jesus on the water began to sink in doubt.

Peter also directly denied knowing Christ (Mark 14:66-72). However, as soon as he realized his mistake, he was sorrowful and wept. After His resurrection, Jesus reassured Peter of His love in a parallel to his betrayal, by asking him if he loved Him three times, and telling him again to follow Him (John 21:15-19).

After having betrayed Jesus, he subsequently renewed his faith in Him. Then, Peter soon preached the first Spirit-filled sermon on the day of Pentecost to the crowd gathering to see what the commotion was (Acts 2:14-41). Acts 2:41 says "Those who accepted his message", meaning Peter's message, "were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day." Peter's message led to the salvation of about 3,000 people in a single day!

What an amazing testimony Peter had. Certainly, Peter had his moments of failure, and some of them quite bad, but he always repented, and came back even stronger than before. As men we will sometimes fail; we sill stumble and fall, but we need to get back up and try again. Jesus will gladly restore our faith and make us even stronger than we once were if only we'll let Him.

Jesus saw the potential in Peter for a great man, and He wasn't disappointed. Sure, as God, Jesus knew that Peter would betray Him. As God, Jesus knew Peter would have doubts and fears. He knew that Peter was a man, and that Peter would make the same mistakes that we all make as men. Jesus still picked Peter first. How great it is that God looks at our potential for serving Him and chooses us, rather than looking at our potential for failing Him.

Dead Men Walking

Have you been baptized? Matthew 3:16 reports the baptism of Jesus. John the Baptist baptized Jesus. Through baptism, we are partakers of the death of Christ, and are alive in Christ! Romans 6:3-5 explains this to us. But Romans 6:6-10 tells us what the purpose of our death in Christ is: that we can have life without the bondage of sin and death.

Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have already died with Him that we can overcome sin and will have no fear of death; when we die in this world, we will be alive with Him!

How great it is that through the death of one man, the Perfect Man, we can have life. Romans 6:11 says that we are dead to sin. We're in the world with sin, but we're dead men walking. We aren't part of the world any more, we're just here until we pass into a fuller life with Christ. We are dead to the world, we are alive only to God!

The Strait Gate

Today I'd like to take a short look at Matthew 7:13-14. What does this all mean? What is the small gate, and what makes it small in comparison to the wide gate? Why is the narrow path narrow, and the broad path broad?

Close to where I live is a walking trail that I particularly love. On it are gates at any intersection with a road. These gates don't go all the way across the path, but only far enough across the path to let a single person walk through. They limit access to anything larger than a person. You can't drive a car through them. You can't walk through them side by side with someone. This is like the narrow gate.

The narrow gate has room for only one thing: Jesus Christ. There is no room for any other religion. There is no room for additional requirements. There is no room for additional baggage. If you have requirements tacked onto your religion, or if you're carrying baggage with you in the race, let it go; there is no room for it. If you are easily able to carry these extra requirements and this excess baggage with you, then you should look around you to see what road you're on.

Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life: no one comes to the father except through me." (John 14:6). If He is the way, then there is only room for us to walk through Him. Nothing else will fit. How is it that 1 in 3 people claim to be saved (About.com), but the Bible says "only a few find it"? Romans 10:2-3 refers to the people who add requirements to their salvation: they have a zeal for God, but a false religion.

I'll leave you with this quote from Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary: "This plain declaration of Christ has been disregarded by many who have taken pains to explain it away; but in all ages the real disciple of Christ has been looked on as a singular, unfashionable character; and all that have sided with the greater number, have gone on in the broad road to destruction. If we would serve God, we must be firm in our religion. Can we often hear of the strait gate and the narrow way, and how few there are that find it, without being in pain for ourselves, or considering whether we are entered on the narrow way, and what progress we are making in it?"

The Death We Celebrate

Why do we celebrate the birth of Jesus? We often refer to Him as "Jesus Christ", and we refer to this upcoming holiday as "Christmas", but what does it really mean? Jesus' last name wasn't "Christ", nor was it His middle name. The Hebrew word for "Christ" is usually transliterated as "Messiah". Therefore, "Jesus Christ" is actually "Jesus the Messiah".

So, what is the "mas" as the end of the word "Christmas" then? We actually get the suffix "-mas" from the Latin word "missa", which is actually a dismissal. A dismissal in this form is taken as a release to perform a mission. It shares a root with the word "Mass" as in the Catholic tradition, to which the final Latin words are "Ite, missa est", or "Go; it is the dismissal".

"Christmas" then is actually "the release to perform the mission of the Messiah". Mark 16:15-18 defines this mission. After Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection, he gives this single command - "Go". Are we celebrating the birth of Christ? In a sense, we are; without the birth, there would have been no life, death, resurrection, or command to "Go".

Truly, we are celebrating the opportunity to perform the work of the Messiah. We are celebrating the freedom we have through His blood. We celebrate His life, His example, and His redemption! Tell someone the story of Christ this Christmas. Share the redemption story with your family; tell your kids, parents, wife, neighbor, boss, friends, co-workers, and even your church friends. Share the good news even with those who already believe! We celebrate not the birth of Jesus, we celebrate the life we have through His death!

Life's Not Just a Bed of Roses

Did you get saved expecting it to make life easier? Did you get saved expecting God to make you rich or famous? Do you preach, teach, and believe the Word of Faith doctrine? 2 Corinthians 6:3-10 would tend to disagree with your idea of what it means to be saved. Certainly, God does richly bless His children, but it is not always so.

God always meets the needs of His children though. Consider the children of Israel in Exodus 16:3, out in the desert, hungry; then in Exodus 16:11-15 God sent bread in the morning with the dew for them to eat. And no, it wasn't just some bland bread, according to Exodus 16:31 it was like wafers made with honey. Ultimately though, God's people got tired of the provision of God and longed for the enslavement of Egypt again in Numbers 11:1-6. Their greed brought the wrath of God on them though, and many died of a plague in Numbers 11:33-34.

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes good things happen to bad people. Matthew 5:45 tells us that God causes the sun to rise on everyone, and rain to fall on everyone. So then, ultimately, did you become a Christian because you love Jesus because He died on a cross as a sacrifice for the sins you had committed and because God in His supreme love reached down His hand of grace to you, or did you become a Christian because you wanted earthly treasures? Wanting things you don't need or deserve is greed. Is your entire faith is based on greed? Matthew 6:19-21 says to store up treasure in Heaven, nothing on this earth is going to last.

2 Corinthians 1:3-7 now gives us the greatest thing we have. For as much hardship, as much pain, and us much suffering as we go through, we have an equal amount of comfort in Christ. We can rejoice that we have hope in Jesus that through our suffering for Him we are drawn closer to Him, and that one day we will see Him face to face.

Justification and Reconciliation

As children, most of us at one point or another stole some insignificant thing from a store while we were out with our parents. And most of us got dragged back into the store, made to apologize begrudgingly, our parents had to pay for our stolen candy bar that we had already opened, and then if they didn't think that we were really, REALLY sorry, we got a nice thrashing for it, too.

Romans 5:8-9 tells us that the blood of Jesus has given us justification. That's the payment that our Master made for our sins. This "saves us from God's wrath". This is where our parents have gone in and paid for our stolen goods. It's what keeps us from having the store owner press charges against us for shoplifting. According to Wikipedia, "When an act is justified, a person is not criminally liable even though his act would otherwise constitute an offense."

Justification, however, is only half of the equation. Now that the shop owner knows we steal, he's going to be suspicious every time we come in. But Romans 5:10-11 we see that we can also have reconciliation with God as well. This is where our parents tell us to apologize, and we can either give a true apology, or we can be snide about it. We now have an opportunity to be reconciled, or "have cordial relations reestablished". However, this takes not only the reconciliation and justification of the parent for us, but also our sincere apology for the wrong that we've done.

It takes both parties in a relationship to be in agreement in order to have reconciliation. We can have complete justification, and still be the enemy of God. There is no way that we can make restitution for our sin, there is no self-justification. We've already seen in Romans 5:8 that God has reached out to us. Our responsibility is that of reaching out to God with an open heart, being truly sorry for the sins that we've committed, and asking for reconciliation with Him. Jesus has opened the door for us to have a great friendship by offering the opportunity for reconciliation. Will we be snide, or will we with open arms cry out for our forgiveness?

Trials of the Flesh (Part 5)

Again we find Satan intent on attacking Job. His property and family weren't enough. Now he's going for Job's flesh too. As though this would have some effect on Job's faith.

Job 2:4-6
Fateful words from Satan here. "A man will give all he has for his own life." How wonderful that at the Cross Jesus made him eat those words when He gave His life to gain the whole world. Satan is convinced that attacking Job's flesh will kill his faith in God.

This is definitely Satan's mode of operation. He attacks the flesh attempting to influence the spirit. So do not be surprised or disheartened when you are persecuted. In fact James 1:2-3 suggests we take a different approach, saying we should consider it joy.

Saved by Faith! Now What?

If you’ve not been following over the last two days, or if you’ve not yet accepted God’s great gift of salvation and made Jesus master of your life, I urge you to go back two days and start reading there and catch up. Otherwise, read on!

So you’ve recently gotten saved, or you’re just drifting along in your spiritual life, and you’re unsure of what to do or where to go. Or maybe you’re a dedicated Christian, strong in the Lord. Whoever you are, if your sins have been covered by the blood that Jesus shed on the cross, then these words apply to you.

Reading 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and 2 Timothy 2:15, we see that we need to study the teachings we have, contained in the Bible, so that we can be strong Christians. We need to listen to well established Christians, our pastors, our teachers. We need to do our best to be approved by God. We need to do all we can to make sure we pass the muster when God looks at our lives. We need to be workmen for Christ. We need to be honest workers.

We need to study God’s Word (the Bible) so that we know the truth. When we know the truth, we are tasked with “correctly handling” it. Some translations of the Bible use the phrase “rightly dividing” in place of “correctly handles”. Literally, the original Greek word was orthotomeo (or-tho-to-me’-ō) made from the words orthos, meaning “straight”, and temno, meaning “cut”. We should be studying God’s Word so that when we have questions, or someone asks questions of us, we can give them a “straight cut” of the word of truth.

In Matthew 28:18-20 and Mark 16:15 we find both our biggest challenge, and our biggest reward. As Christ’s followers, this is to share the good news of salvation with everyone we can. If you’re happy about having a friend like Jesus, you’ll want other people to get to know Him too. You will try to live a better, more meaningful, and more Christ-like life, and the people who you come in contact with every day will want to know what’s different in your life. They’ll see how no longer being at war with God has brought peace to you, and we should be as prepared as possible to give them a straight cut answer when they ask us about it.

Saved by Faith!

In the last devotion I wrote about a woman whom I had stopped to help on the side of the road. If you haven’t read that article yet, you need to at a minimum go back in time a day and read that first paragraph. Now, why did I stop to help this woman? As I stated in the previous article, most of the time I consider myself “too busy” to stop. Rarely is this really true, most of the time I just don’t feel like it. In this particular case, I just felt like stopping to help.

But now I want to examine things on her side of the white line. She obviously knew something was wrong with her car, or she wouldn’t have been sitting there in the first place. Think for a moment to yourself if there was anything that she could have done to MAKE me stop? If she had jumped out into the busy street waving her arms, she might have been hit. She could have put on some sort of show on the side of the road, or even used sign language. But none of that would have made me stop if I had not already decided to stop in the first place.

Now we know that we were once sinners, and that Jesus died to forgive us of our sins, but is is there anything that we can do to earn our salvation? Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast.” So nothing we could have possibly ever done would have gained us the salvation that is now given to us by God through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. The only thing we can do for salvation is the same thing that everyone else has to: make Jesus the ruler of our lives, believe that God raised Him from the dead, and ask Him to forgive us of our sins.

You can’t buy yourself a gift from someone. Can I take a gift from the One who I have made Master of my life and say, “I earned this.”? If I earned it, then it’s not a gift, it’s a payment. If I could have earned my salvation or paid for it myself, then the sacrifice of Christ’s death on the cross is meaningless; I could have my salvation without Him. If there were some thing that we could do to be saved, then we would be equal with Christ; we would have to be spotless and without sin. This would be contrary to Romans 3:23’s statement that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

Instead of being prideful, and instead of bragging about how great we are that we are saved, we should do as the Bible says in 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14: “But we ought always thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Saved!

Today, as I was driving home, I spotted a car on the side of the road with the hood up, the standard symbol of “my car isn’t running”, and I decided to stop and offer a hand. I did all that my limited knowledge allowed, offered all the advice i could, asked if I could offer any further assistance, and then when there was nothing more I could do for her, I went on to my house.

Are you “broke down?” The Bible says in Romans 3:23 that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Every one of us has been broken down spiritually. And like a car with a broken thermostat, if we go down the road ignoring the problem, we will ultimately be far worse, and often irreparable damage will be done. Romans 6:23 tells us that the payment for our sin is death, but that debt is paid through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:8 explains why the blood is important; because, despite our sins, Jesus died for us in a demonstration of God’s love. Jesus was crucified and died so that we could be forgiven. He’s stopped on the side of the road to give us a hand. But how do we let Him help us? Romans 10:9 says that the one and only thing we can do is acknowledge that Jesus died for our sins, believe that God raised Him from the dead, and then confess (declare) that Jesus is now the Master (Lord) of our life.

Romans 5:1 tells us that because of our belief, we are no longer at war with God, because now our Master gives us peace with Him. Jesus started this intercession for us with God as he was hanging crucified on the cross, when he said in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

If you haven’t done so already, I can tell you that turning your life over into the hands of Jesus is the single best thing you can ever do. All you have to do is just believe that Jesus died for your sins, and was raised from the dead by God, and then just talk to Jesus like you would talk to a friend. Tell Him that He is the Master of your life. Admit that you’re a sinner, and that you need forgiveness. Just like the lady on the side of the road, we have to get out of the car, admit we have a problem, and then let the One who stopped to help us take care of it. If we just take that step of faith, He will help us with everything else.