Jesus Came To Divide
I am amazed at the wrong opinions so many people have about Jesus. I am referring to opinions held by those who don’t really know Him. They don’t really think He is God. Instead they believe He was a really nice guy who preached love and peace and if we would just do what He said there would be no division and war in our world. This is a lovely thought and while it is true that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and He did preach love, He Himself says that He did not come to bring peace.
Luke 12:51-53
“Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
Years ago, when I was still in college, I saw the movie Gandhi. He developed non-violent methods to protest injustice in India. This development was influenced by a number of philosophies several of which were religious in nature including Christianity. This seems to have been a bit of the old smorgasbord approach – a little of this and a little of that. Gandhi is quoted as saying that “Jesus represents not a person, but the principle of nonviolence”. You see his only real interest in Jesus was how He could be used to support his own beliefs in non-violence – his political beliefs. There is a lot of that still going on today.
The thing is the Bible shows us that Jesus is not a sweet little man who cries out to the world “can’t we all just get along!” As the verses above demonstrate Jesus came to divide. He came to say there is right and there is wrong, you are for Him or you are against Him. He came to separate the wheat from the chaff, the plants from the weeds. Jesus forces all of us to choose sides. Which do you choose?
Have a blessed day!
Your brother and servant in Christ,
Bill
Dying to self, living to serve!
LIVE!
In the first several paragraphs of Ezekiel 16 I see a lovely story about God’s love and what He has done for all those who have accepted Christ.
Ezekiel 16:4-6
“And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling cloths. No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born. And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’”
The passage goes on in greater detail of all God had done for Israel. As I’ve said before I see Israel as an arch type for the saved not the lost so when He speaks about what He has done for Israel in these passages I see a shadow of what He has done for me. I see in the passage above God telling me that He has seen me in my filthy sin and yet He desires that I truly live. Now He doesn’t want me to live as man aspires to live. That isn’t really living. Real living is found in God’s presence. It is found in being the men He intended us to be. It is found in Christ for we cannot be the men He intended us to be, we cannot be in God’s presence without the blood of Christ. You see in our own blood we are simply filthy but when we are washed with His blood we are truly clean and truly able to live.
Brothers, God has saved you and commanded you to live; not as the world would have you live but as He would have you live. Get to it!
Have a blessed day!
Your brother and servant in Christ,
Bill
Dying to self, living to serve!
Marital Bliss
Song of Solomon 1-8
The Song of Solomon is also known as the “Song of Songs” or more completely “The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s”. I’m sure that when first written the reader needed to sit with a bucket of water ready to put out any smoldering fires that this hot marital love song might ignite! Today some of the imagery is lost on us. I suggest you be very careful if you ever try to quote the Song of Solomon to your wife as a gesture of your love. It doesn’t always translate well. The last phrase of chapter 4 verse 1 is a case in point.
Song of Solomon 4:1
“…Your hair is like a flock of goats
leaping down the slopes of Gilead.”
I don’t know about your wife but mine would not respond favorably to that particular “compliment”. Some men might actually get a frying pan upside the head if they made such a statement today. The point here is that God made man and woman to be “one flesh” in marriage. Your marriage is a blessing. Sex is a blessing given to those who unite in holy matrimony. It is not only okay to enjoy sexual relations with your wife it is advisable. More than that, your wife is the only legitimate outlet for your sexual fulfillment. I don’t know what challenges you might face in your marriage but, after your relationship with Christ, there is no other relationship more important. If you don’t have that relationship going well, everything else is going to be out of whack.
Enjoy your wife my friend. Give her the priority in your life that God intends. Don’t view her as an object for your own gratification but as a wonderful gift and blessing from God. Treat her like that and things will go well for you; of that I have no doubt!
Have a blessed day!
Your brother and servant in Christ,
Bill
Dying to self, living to serve!
Know Him
Psalm 102-104
Two thoughts to share with you about today’s reading. The first is the importance of God’s Word.
Psalm 102:18
“Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord”
God has given you His Word that you may know of His love, grace, mercy and glory. He has also given you a responsibility to pass on the importance of His Word to the next generation so that they too will praise and glorify Him.
The second thought for today is about the greatness of God’s love, grace, mercy and glory.
Psalm 103:10-12
“He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”
We each deserve eternal pain and suffering for our self-centeredness, sinfulness, and disobedience. (I wonder if you realize the redundancy the three final adjectives in that last sentence.) But God is so gracious, so full of compassion and grace, that He forgives those that accept His forgiveness, and restores them to Him that they might have an incredible future which they don’t deserve. It all comes down to obedience brothers.
Obey Him. Study His Word. Share His Word. Live His Word that you may truly know Him and truly live.
Have a blessed day!
Your brother and servant in Christ,
Bill
Dying to self, living to serve!
Do You Love Me?
Deuteronomy 12-15
After reading today’s passages I had a large number of thoughts on which I could have commented. God’s Word is often like that. In fact, if I have only one thought about such a large passage of Scripture then I probably haven’t looked deeply enough into that passage. Still, time constrains us all.
For some reason Deuteronomy is affecting me more this time around than it ever has before. I almost feel like Peter when Jesus repeatedly asked him if he loved Him. “Do you love me?” Here in Deuteronomy we are firmly reminded of the priority God is supposed to be in our life. A couple of days ago we read Scripture that became the first part of the Shema – the Jewish statement of faith. The verse “and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5) is the one that weighs most heavily on me today. A similar verse from today’s reading added to this weight.
Deuteronomy 13:4
“You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him.”
Do you walk after God? Do you fear Him and keep His commandments and obey His voice? Do you hold fast to Him? What position does God hold in your life? Is He number 1? Does He serve you or do you serve Him? Do you love him with ALL your heart and soul and might? As much as I like to think that God is number one with me and that I serve Him and that I love Him with all that I am, my behavior doesn’t often reflect that. Oh, I go to church and I pray and I read my Bible every day but I must admit that God has not gotten all my heart, soul, and might. I am usually serving myself and only God when it is convenient for me. These are hard things for me to admit and write.
Some might look at me and say “boy, that guy sure loves God, look at how much he does”. How much I do and what I do don’t really tell the full story. Loving God isn’t about what you do it is about the position He has in your life. God has always been about the condition of your heart. If God has the right place in my heart I will want to do the things that He expects of me. Doing those things doesn’t make me right with God, and some will do them only so they will look like godly people. For them the godly acts are only a façade, an outward appearance – they have their reward.
Let me ask you, what would your life look like if God was truly number 1? What would be different? When I was young I thought love was something you fell into, that you had no control over it. As I matured I have discovered that love is a choice, it is a decision. Being married and having a child has taught me that love is a lot of work. It has also taught me that love is sacrificial. That is how I know that I am God’s child, that He loves me, because He made the biggest sacrifice possible for me. God will know I love Him when I sacrifice what I want in order to hold fast to Him, to obey Him, to make Him number 1 all day, every day. I guess that is when I’ll know I truly love Him too.
Have a blessed day!
Your brother and servant in Christ,
Bill
Dying to self, living to serve!
Love With All Your Heart, Soul, and Mind
Leviticus 19-20
Bibles are put together by editors. They take the original manuscripts and translate them into the desired language and then add Chapter and verse numbers. They also will often give little titles before sections of the Bible that summarize the passage to follow. In my Bible there is a section in Leviticus 19 labeled “Love your neighbor as yourself” – Leviticus 19:9-18. If you read those verses you will see that that specific phrase is not actually used until the last portion of verse 18 and yet the entire sections is labeled “love your neighbor as yourself”. This is because all of the previous verses are about doing just that.
When asked during His earthly ministry which was the greatest commandment Jesus said:
Matthew 22:37-40
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
All of the Old Testament “depend” on the commandments to love God and love others. Frankly, I’m not sure how you can love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and not love others. This statement by Jesus is why I often say that if you had to use one word to describe the contents of the Bible it would have to be Love. Are you able to commit the sins that God prohibits in the Bible if you love God in this way?
I have written this before; what we call love today is simply self-love. Real love is self-sacrificial – it is love for God and, by extension, others. Brothers, do you doubt your salvation? If you truly surrendered your life to Christ then you have nothing to doubt – you are saved. Having accepted Christ He will cause you to love God and others more and more; you won’t be able to help it. This is all the evidence you need of your salvation – real love of God and others. If you “accepted Christ” as some kind of handy get-out-of-jail-free card and have not completely surrendered all that you are and all that you have to Christ then you are not saved – you are dead meat walking.
Surrender to Christ, accept His love, and let that love change you, causing you to love God and others more and more every day. What peace, joy, and happiness are yours when you do!
Have a blessed day!
Your brother and servant in Christ,
Bill
Dying to self, living to serve!
