1-31-22

It was the desire for freedom of religion that birthed the American dream when our forefathers first arrived from overseas.  At the cost of many lives through bloodshed, disease, starvation, they were able to persevere to establish a habitable land of freedom, justice and peace. [Yet we have failed to learn and respect history, as we know, for the once established Americans were blinded in later generations with the insensitive and disrespectful acceptance of nonconsensual slavery, making America the land of the free for some, not all (Hence the inevitable fallacy of mankind was bound to be exposed due to our fallen nature (Gen. 3) no matter how good our intentions can be.) It’s a wonder that the slaves did not travel the sea somewhere to escape this entrapment like the Pilgrims originally endeavored, but where else could they go and be free?]

Unlike any other nation, America had the privilege to proclaim itself as “One nation under God.” We were free to flourish in our trust in the One true God who revealed to us the

1-19-21 

There are people who turn away from God because they can’t understand how He would allow evil and suffering in the world.  There is nothing loving and kind about evil.  It is not part of God’s nature, it is of the Devil.  We are the ones who brought this spiritual death upon ourselves.  If the pain and suffering is too unbearable, have you considered seeking the Lord for truth in this matter?  It’s pretty hard to deny feelings of guilt and conviction when we do wrong.  That should be enough to testify of the existence of a moral God and to turn to Him for answers. 

Not until He lifts the veil from our eyes to comprehend the spiritual realm can we believe just how real it is.  But are we willing to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul and mind?  Are we willing to worship Him alone, as Lord of our lives?  Are we willing to be submissive and obedient

12-31-20

When I read Bible verses about the wicked (Col. 1:21-22; Eph. 2:1-3), I think “who are these people?  I’m not that bad.” But we need to come to terms of accepting the fact that though our actions may not be so wicked, our sinful human nature is utterly wicked and beckoned our Savior to come to earth, and at the hands of wicked men be crucified for our sins, taking our place of punishment.

If we take notice, this wicked behavior is gradually coming out of the woodwork.  Back in the day certain things that were once taboos are now blatantly acceptable in society. 

10-19-20

We naturally fear death and avoid pain at all cost.  When I was a young Christian, I would glide over Bible verses that talked about suffering, persecution, martyrdom and dying for Christ.  That wasn’t for me, I just wanted to be a good Christian, do missionary work, and die someday peacefully in my bed.  I couldn’t reason why the Bible mentioned so much evil if God is love, if He is good and in control of everything.  Surely He wouldn’t let me be harmed would He?

By wisdom I couldn’t help but reason that the negative verses in the Bible had to be as valid as the positive ones. My own personal experience with suffering helped me to be realistic. I could no longer pretend by thinking life was meant to be fluffy and perfect, not on this side of heaven. This world offered no answers to give me consolation, reconciliation, and closure for my pain. The negative aspects of life in this world made more sense to me as I looked deeper into the life of Jesus, of why He came, why He, the innocent Son of God, had to suffer beyond what anyone could bear at the hands of men, how they mocked and crucified Him in shame for proclaiming the truth that He was equal with God and came to earth to save us from sin, all of which was the fulfillment of previous proclaimed prophecies in the Old Testament, so that there was no room for doubt about His claims, and why God was able to justifiably raise Him from the power of death. And then He calls and enables believers who understand this realistic view of fallen humanity to live as He lived, by the power of the Holy Spirit in obedience and trust of our Father God, to expect persecution for our faith, and even be willing to die for it. 

10-4-20

Many people have suffered traumatic experiences which have resulted in PTSD to some degree.  They may be a Veteran who has been in a war zone in enemy territory, or they may be a victim from the war zone in their own neighborhood, or the emotional war zone they can experience in school, or the personal war zone in their own household, a place that is meant to be safe and nurturing, or it could be a war zone within their own heart where they find themselves having regret and grief for having done things that have caused their self-image to be marred, and are disappointed in having lowered their standards.

But if they turn to God, they will see that He has not abandoned them.  In fact, they are in the perfect disposition to receive power to become ambassadors for the kingdom of God.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3).  When their eyes are opened to spiritual realities, and they receive His mercy and grace to become adopted as His child, heirs to His kingdom of eternal life, they come to realize that they were traumatized by a world system they instinctively knew was not meant to be their home.  But then they experience another rude awakening – the world hates Christians.  Behind the physical war zone they have personally experienced there exists a spiritual war zone going on in the heavens.  But as Spirit-filled Christians, they no longer have to suffer defeat, for they possess the full armor of God, and they know that they are more than conqueror’s in Christ!

9-13-20

There are various reasons as to why people are feeling depressed and have come to believe there is no purpose for them in this life.  They may have negative thoughts about themselves and feel overwhelmed with rejection, or they may have been boxed into a corner from being in a hopeless circumstance with no way out, or they’re having feelings of guilt from sinful actions that they feel are beyond forgiveness, and think the only way to escape these feelings is to end their life. Life has failed them and has let them down, or they may feel that they have failed life.

If you read the Bible you will find that to come to this conclusion about life is inevitable.  Being that we are spiritually dead as a result of the original sin, our effort to improve our sinful condition is futile, it can’t be done.  Read the Book of Ecclesiastes and see how all of life is vanity no matter who you are.  Life is not meant to be lived apart from God.

Before you become desperate about leaving this world, consider the fact that while you are still here on earth, you can become no longer a slave to the world system and its ways, but instead, you can live by being spiritually born into the living kingdom of God (John 3), you

7-13-20

I used to be afraid of the devil for the wrong reasons.  All I knew of him was that he was a superstitious being that we were able to make light of by dressing up in costumes to scare him  away on Halloween, or hearing about fortune tellers, and hearing of the practices of dark and white witchcraft, séances, Ouija boards, tarot cards, etc., and the portrayal of him in cartoons and horror movies.

What I learned from the Bible is that he is no more to be feared than your own self.  It is actually God who is to be feared more than Satan if you are not willing to submit your life to God through the love and mercy He extends to us through the atonement and forgiveness provided by his Son Jesus Christ.

Why is this so?  How are we comparable to being evil like Satan?  It is our rebellious nature.  Satan held the highest and most honorable position before God’s throne, but he became puffed-up with pride and rebelled against God, wanting to rule in His place.  Adam and Eve were enjoying the provisions and presence of God until the notion was awakened in them that they could live independent of God, self-sufficiently, which is rebellion.  This prideful nature was like a virus and spread to all the rest of mankind thereafter.  This is what is

It is the spiritual realm, of both God and the devil, that is fascinating but fearful to natural man.  If either one of them were to manifest themselves visibly in our presence we would most likely be fearful, depending on how well we know them.  Because the devil is a spiritual being and can manifest himself in evil manipulative ways as God allows, we can’t help but feel vulnerable and fearful of him.  I had the personal experience of having him manipulate my thoughts to the point that I thought I was going crazy, so I knew he is a real spiritual power not to be messed with.  But we are to have no fear if we are safe and secure in our relationship with God who created him and has all power over him.

3-21-20

We spend our whole lives trying to be as secure as possible, yet there is one thing we have no control over.  Sooner or later we are going to have to face it, and that is the inevitability of death.  With the recent coronavirus outbreak, that moment has arrived as a surprise attack that has caught us off guard, causing many to panic, not knowing if their life on this earth will come to a complete end or possibly live on in some kind of afterlife. 

How can we know the truth about life, how we came to be, what our purpose is for being here and how we can have peace about our imminent death?  If there is a sovereign God, how would He answer these questions? He has provided the answers in the Bible, which has been around for nearly two thousand years.  He has not left us clueless.

2-21-20

Job came to a place in his life where he remarked “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21). Think about that, God is our Creator, we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Him, so shouldn’t we trust Him with our lives and His purpose for creating us?  Being that He is love and has a plan for us to spend eternity with Him in heaven should make it easier to do that.  Job was on to something, if God is our Creator then He is sovereign over all things, even death.  Who am I, the created, to judge my Creator?

12-13-19 Responsibility is a character trait that is to be exercised within God’s limits; it is given as a privilege to exercise our likeness of being made in the image of God (as well as the ability to name the animals and given dominion over the earth).  Without free will, responsibility would not be necessary, for if we do things and believe in things without having a choice in the matter, we would not have a reason to be accountable, we would just do things and believe in things automatically as we are told.  For God to give us responsibility is for Him to consider us honorable and trustworthy as human beings, giving us a sense of pure dignity to be able to know for ourselves the right thing to do, filling us with gratitude, purpose, and fulfillment because it’s a reflective trait that glorifies the nature of our Father God.  It gives us a sense of Godly-esteem, not self-esteem.

To be responsible is to have the sense of having to answer to someone else for your actions.  When it comes to moral responsibility, that would be God.

12-12-19 If you have a problem believing in the story of God’s salvation because of what you can’t see, then believe because of what you can see.  You can start by looking within yourself, and notice behavioral issues such as your own tendency to be evil, having lack of self-control; or consider the reality of the death and decay of humans, the earth, and every living thing; or socially our failed endless effort for unity, peace, and justice; and notice how we naturally have disdain towards people who are vain and puffed up with pride and self-adulation.  You may have heard the common remark that “pride comes before a fall.”

God has made much use of visible things to convey the spiritual realities of His kingdom:  The physical act of biting the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil conveyed the spiritual reality of being transferred into death, making everything radically different after that

12-3-19 We are deceived if we think relationships are always blissful, “happily ever after” in a fairy-tale kind of way.  You marry someone you are attracted to, who may have the same values as you.  But as years go by, you start to see unpleasant characteristics emerge in each other, what is happening?  What we saw in our spouse during engagement was the true person, what they desire and believe in, but underneath there are road-blocks, we all have our issues, our pains, our “stuff” that have affected our lives that were too painful to deal with alone, so they are suppressed.  In marriage, you are in a covenant relationship of trust, faithfulness, and intimacy.  The more this develops, the more you feel safe in exposing your “damaged goods,” your fears, pains, and insecurities, knowing that your spouse has the desire and capability to love you in spite of your weaknesses, to love you unconditionally.  This is how it is with our relationship with God.

10-15-19 Is it any wonder that when people read the Bible for the first time they find it so perplexing, with the Old Testament full of the severity of God’s word of judgment against anyone who does not have a heart toward Him and His ways, and in the New Testament, for those who have committed their lives to Him are to expect trials, tribulation and persecution?  And when they do start to read it they tend to skip over those hard to understand verses and read just the pleasant ones.  That just goes to show you how dark and deep and wide the chasm is between our fallen nature and God’s holy nature. 

In the Bible God has shown us that we have all gone astray and are in need of His love, mercy and grace; salvation from death; restoration and healing; atonement and forgiveness for our sins; and reconciliation and justification through the righteousness of Christ.  He is a God of justice and therefore our sinful condition in which we have become blinded of must be exposed for what it is and judged.

10-1-19 It makes me shudder to think of the sinful degrading things I have done and am capable of doing.

At one point in my life I asked the Lord to take me to heaven now, before I do anything worse and disqualify myself from getting into heaven.

His reply was that it’s not about how “good” you are, it’s about relationship, how well you know Me personally, it’s not about being “good,” but about being “righteous.”

Many people are misled of perceiving God as a conditional God, the more you sin, the less chance you have of getting into heaven, and it’s worse when they can’t seem to have any control over their sins, so they start to feel helpless and hopeless, rejected by God.

And if they are deceived into thinking they are worthless in His eyes, they may put on the attitude of “If you can’t beat them, then join them,” and emotionally punish or magnify their worthlessness by selling out to the devil and continue in their sinful ways.

7-16-19 If you want to have full confidence in the word of God, both written and revelatory, and have a close relationship with the Lord like the Apostles did which bore the fruit of missions, not loving their lives unto death, performing miracles, signs, and wonders that glorify God alone, then you will find yourself advancing in this way the sooner you are able to accept the spirituality of the way God works His works in us, and not leaning on our own understanding.  More of God, less of me.  What does that look like?  Observe the life of the Apostles.  Step out of the boat and trust the Holy Spirit to teach you and guide you into all truth.  He will be more than willing to do this if we believe He will. Pray for the Lord to increase our faith.

6-20-19

Why are we so resistive to God?  Being born into the sinful nature as a result of Adam’s sin, which is everything opposite of God’s nature, we are overly self-aware of “me, myself and I.” We are vulnerable and insecure, who can you trust?  We are physical beings who are skeptical of the spiritual realm.

Satan doesn’t have to reveal himself since that would scare us into the arms of God.  To keep us ignorant of God, he just has to keep us blind and self-sufficient.

God can reveal Himself to the world in one moment if He wanted to, but He doesn’t.  He gives us enough evidence through the things He has made and waits for us to seek Him out.  He wants us to realize that He has set us free from the darkest stronghold imaginable.  Satan is the great deceiver and will use every power of the flesh to deceive us into thinking that this temporary shallow life is where we want to be and that this physical realm is all there is to life.  This was depicted in the contrasting lives of Moses and Pharaoh.  The ancient Israelites didn’t have a bible, God was revealing Himself to them gradually through various circumstances – Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Noah, Abraham, etc., and with Moses He reveals His holy nature in the Ten Commandments, and then makes a covenant with a group of people who will serve Him by forming them into the nation of Israel, and establishes a temple for Him to dwell in their presence with a priesthood and rituals, etc., as a means for temporary reconciliation to be ultimately fulfilled by Jesus.  God has to convince us that we are strangers, and not of this world.

4-17-19 Is knowing good and evil of Satan’s nature?  “The man has become like one of us, to know good and evil” (Gen. 3:22).

So no, it is to be like God.  We gained knowledge of good and evil as a result of eating its fruit, and we gained the identity of Satan as a result of disobedience, where we know to do evil all the time (Gen. 6:5).  We have become blinded of God’s ways (we died spiritually) and were made aware of Satan’s ways (we took the fruit).  We cannot know good and evil as God does, but only as being our own little individual gods, each expressing what we think is right and wrong according to our own limited wisdom (which is of Satan’s nature, evil and foolish), since the wisdom of God has been removed from us as a consequence of disobedience.  (We desired to be like God, not to usurp His position like Satan wanted to, we were deceived.)  If there is any

2-26-19 There are ministries that over emphasize  miracles, signs and wonders.  Matt. 7:21-23 talks about those who did miracles and yet the Lord claims they never knew Him.  Rev. 2:11 mentions victorious Christians who overcame and conquered the Accuser by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they love not their lives even unto death.

It’s all about knowing God – submission to Him like Adam was supposed to before the Fall but learned the hard way.  God has graciously given us the opportunity to be submissive in loving devotion to Him again. He has provided the gateway from death (the result of our sinful disobedience) to resurrected life sustained by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, freely given to us because Christ paid the ransom with His own life, atoning for our sins.

1-25-19 He wanted us to learn for ourselves about reality, that He is the sovereign Creator of all things and desires to have a relationship with us as His willing, obedient, submissive children.  By giving us the freedom to choose, He provided an opportunity for us (Adam and Eve) to live by our own wisdom, in self-sufficiency apart from God through the temptation of the serpent.  By making the choice to trespass and sin against God, we experience the reality of the spiritual realm, that we are not capable of being divine, to be “like God.” Through the experience of being human, being the created, of having free-will, we learn the blessings and consequences for the choices we make.  Blessings for obeying God and curses and death for disobeying Him. 

The initial disobedience of Adam and Eve enabled Satan to become our master, the ruler of the world, causing everyone on earth to be corrupt, everything to corrode and every living thing to

3-2-17 Why would God make it so hard to believe He exists?

“Yet so easy is it to become a Christian!  You need only be a sinner, weary and heavy laden;  you need  only hear the voice: ‘Come unto Me.  If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.’” – Christ Crucified by Adolph Saphir pg. 100

First He makes it easy for us by the testimony of our own conscience that bears guilt whenever we sin.  We are aware that we fall short of God’s moral standards whether we are taught or naturally by the revelation in nature.

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”  –  Romans 1:20-21

When we are ready to face the reality that we are sinners, when we are tired of running from God, we can ask Him for forgiveness provided by the atoning sacrifice of His son, and then trade in our sinful nature and ask Him to live in us, to be our righteousness that enables/qualifies us to stand before God and to be our power to live in faith and obedience to Him until He takes us out of this temporary world.

2-17-17   “…so God sees us on the cross sanctified; for when Jesus died, God judged and destroyed our sins.” – Christ Crucified by Adolph Saphir, pg. 36

You may be thinking “How can that be?  I find myself thinking impure thoughts and doing things that are not holy, my sins are not destroyed, I still need forgiveness every day.”  There is sin and there are sins.  We are delivered from our sinful nature by the atonement of Jesus, He took the punishment for them all.  Even so, we are not perfect, only Christ in us is perfect.  To walk in His perfection by the power of the Holy Spirit is a life-long process, forsaking our sinful nature and submitting to His nature in us.

While on this fallen earth we will still be taunted and tempted by Satan until he is finally

1-8-17 Think about how big God is, He designed everything in the world and the way it is, and human beings for His own pleasure. Did He create mankind without a purpose?  So they would be miserable?  If you believe in God then you can’t deny the existence of Satan and his temporary reign here on earth.  You can be a victim of his reign which produces the fruit of wickedness, fear, insecurity, paranoia, having no motivation or incentive for life; or you can be free from all of that by walking in the power of the Holy Spirit when you humble yourself and accept Jesus’ offer to reconcile you back to God our heavenly Father. 

Through your remaining time on this temporary fallen and corrupt earth, His love for you will

1-2017 God is invisible.  If you were God, how would you help mankind know and believe in Him whom they cannot see or grasp?

The greatest love story ever told is revealed in the entire Bible.  God (invisible) became one of us (visible) to show us who He is and that He can identify with all the complexities of being human.  Jesus taught us by being the express image of God Himself and by making use of parables, figures of speech, etc., and about being conformed into His image (see the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7).

In the fall of man (Genesis 3) there are two notable images, Satan’s and God’s . We were created in God’s image.  After the fall we took on the image of Satan, our fallen human nature. Notice in the New Testament we are continuously encouraged to put away our “old” (fallen) human nature which is opposite of God’s nature. 

“When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.” –Genesis 5:3

12-16-16 Our humanity vs. our spirituality.  Jesus had to be fully human to atone for our sins, otherwise it is not atonement; the price would not be paid by a supernatural being alone, otherwise it would deny the accountability and responsibility of our humanness.  We are moral beings, not just existing beings.  Our emotions matter, our emotional needs matter – we need other people to nurture our morality that confirms our purpose.  So we mourn over death, it is real.  We don’t just brush it off thinking God is supernatural and there’s an eternity, as if the physical is meaningless.  It is meaningless if it has no morality which is all that God is about.  Morality is displayed and worked out in our physical lives if we choose to live by it.  We are His witnesses, and life matters.

11-21-15 He can’t crown me until I lay down my crown at His feet.  I can’t be fully operating in His Spirit if I’m still clinging on to my fleshly nature (my rights, my understanding, my intelligence, etc.).  If I’m clinging onto my flesh because of Pride, then if I am sincere about wanting to become His child, He will have to do a major operation to bring about a total transformation.  He will have to knock me off my pedestal and humiliate me to convince me of the deceptive and pathetic nature of the fallen flesh.

If we are clinging on to our flesh because of a false view of God, being convicted but see Him as a conditional God, fearing condemnation and not convinced that He really forgives all sin, then He will have to love us into His kingdom by doing a major heart operation in order to bring about a total transformation from being a prisoner in chains of the lies of the enemy to being a free and beloved child of God.

4-2015

God is invisible, how can we possible know what He’s thinking or what He is like? Can we know what a dog thinks?  No, we would have to become a dog to know that, so God became a man, not to know what we think, He created us, He’s all-knowing.  He did it to show us who He is, to see that He can relate to us.  He can become human but we cannot become God. We already tried that, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; and sin and spiritual death resulted.  But there is something better than for us to think we can become God -we can become filled with God, big difference.  The former produces rebellion and pride.  Think of world leaders, sports teams, players within their own teams; someone is trying to outdo or suppress someone else in their effort to be the greatest.  The latter produces humility, unity, peace, and oneness with God.

3-22-06

Why was the punishment in partaking of this tree so dramatic and irreversible unless God intervened?  Why couldn’t Adam and Eve, after experiencing the dark reality of their consequence in disobeying God simply say “Sorry Dad, now I understand why you told us not to eat from this tree, just send me to my room for an hour and I will promise never to do that again,” and then go on in life as usual?

The Old Testament Jews had to go through all kinds of trials and tribulations as they continually fell short in obeying God and His laws, over and over again their sinful nature was exposed as they suffered the consequence of disobedience, it took that long, and all of that experience to one day finally see and understand what we could never comprehend in our fallen state – Jesus, the Living Word; mercy and grace- unconditional love.

10-12-05

You go through life, raised in whatever circumstances may be, good or bad, whatever they are they strongly influence and condition your way of understanding things and seeing how life is.

If your experiences were negative, oppressive, or painful, do you have to go through the rest of your life as a victim of this circumstance?  How can you break the chain, the habit of thought, the stronghold of influence?  Is there a way out?

9-19-05 The more you have experienced the humility of coming to an end of yourself (Job), the more God can have His way in you and display His kingdom in you.  When the heavenly veil is lifted from our eyes, we naturally want to do good, learn about God and follow Him.  But if we immediately jump into action in our unregenerate state, we will fall into many traps and snares.  Our intentions are good, but we are operating in our flesh, not the power of God. 

Coming to an end of yourself does not just happen overnight, it is not something we can instantly comprehend and then do just like that.  It’s an experience as we walk in an intimate relationship with God.  It’s the purifying experience of going through the refiner’s fire. As you grow in the revelation of the Father’s love for you, you will trust Him more and more and allow you to let Him burn off the dross and impurities that keep you bound.

10-11-04 If you know your identity and self-worth in Jesus, you understand His unconditional love for you, then you will walk in humility in your gifting (teaching, prophecy, musician).  Otherwise, you will be striving for acceptance based on your performance and abilities, pride, giving Satan a foothold in your gifts, because when he attacks you with accusations “you’re not worthy of this gift, you aren’t a good singer, etc.,” and you, because you are looking at your flesh which is dead rather than His Spirit which is alive and blameless, he will have power to cripple you in moving out in your gifts in boldness and power because you know you can never measure up.  The accuser was at the foot of the cross mocking Jesus, yet His identity enabled Him to prevail.  The enemy will also be at the foot of our cross; will we give him power to succeed or walk in the Lord’s victory already won?

8-28-04

It’s such a struggle for the fallen human mind to comprehend the invisible realm (which takes faith, given by God to believe). The ultimate, most extreme opposite of the invisible would be the visible.  Spiritual vs. material.

How far can you go to make it almost impossible to imagine the reality of the existence of God who is invisible?  This is a result of the original sin, how extreme it is. Yet we are not so far gone that if God were to reveal Himself, if He were to reveal to us the reality of His existence and the invisible spiritual realm, we would be able to respond to such a notion, and choose to make it our reality. 

8-28-04 The thickness of our blindness to the ways of God – He wants us to struggle to get it – He suffered to provide it.  This is Satan’s territory on earth, we can’t know any different.  We think we are so smart, even figuring out the things of God.  Yet His word is revealed to the weak and most unlikely people.  How can our fallen minds – having the knowledge of good and evil – know anything?

What was our thinking like before the fall?  Our minds are so far from the ways of God that it requires suffering and struggle and sacrifice so that we can be humble enough to allow the Holy Spirit to penetrate through our deceitful flesh.

Open our eyes Lord, have mercy and let us see the futility of the flesh and our fallen way of thinking, that we may see our desperate need to walk in the power of Your Holy Spirit.  Deliver us from the lies of the enemy so that we may taste and see the goodness of Your love that we would prefer You more than the things of the flesh.  Amen.

“Certainly man has not chosen God.  Christ emphasized this when He said, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.’ Even the first man when unfallen and wholly free to choose, did not choose God; how much more is it certain that fallen man will not of himself choose God!  Therefore the provision of the ground of redemption is not enough in itself; the perverted will of man must be divinely moved.  The unregenerate heart must be rendered willing as well as transformed in its essential character.  All of this God undertakes and accomplishes in sovereign grace.”

Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology Vol. 3, Pg. 166

3-16-04 It amazes me that people can understand salvation, Jesus as Lord who came to save us from sin, but they don’t understand the spiritual warfare aspect of it all.  What is sin?  Is it just having bad behavior or is it separation from God? We are blind spiritually to the things of God and are subjected to the ruler of this earth, Satan.  “We are saved and that’s that.  Now we carry on the rest of our lives loving our neighbor and shielding and protecting ourselves from all evil,” not realizing we need to walk in the power of Christ and engage in battle by carrying our own cross.

4-24-03

We are slaves to man, material things and looking good rather than fearing God. Why?  Because Satan has blinded us.  What does it take to break through being blinded by Satan of the ways of the kingdom of God?  A desperate heart, desperate to know the truth and the heart of God.

3-19-03

Do I smoke because it’s a death wish?  If I stop, I won’t have a vice.  I need a vice because of the enormous amount of anger within me.  If I stop smoking, I’m afraid I’ll want to shout out all kinds of profanities in anger.  Anger at who?  At Satan?  At God for allowing Satan?  The existence of pain?  It’s nice what Jesus suffered for us, but it was still painful.  It’s the existence of pain itself, no matter who has to experience it.  How do I not be angry about its existence?  How do I accept Gods love?  The result would be deep humility, but how do you get over the anger?

9-12-02 How can such a loving God allow someone to go through a harrowing experience?  From a Christian point of view, why not ask: “Why did God allow His Son Jesus to experience the pain and rejection and humiliation that He did, the 49 lashes that He did and the pain of being nailed to a cross until He died? 

When did God ever give us the notion that being a Christian was pain-free?  He said “follow Me,” which means walking and experiencing the same persecution as He did.  Heaven is not here on earth, we experience the pain-free life after we die, in heaven.

Let’s say there really is a heaven and hell, and your time is up and you see Jesus standing there holding out His hand saying “Come with Me to heaven, where there will be no more pain or sorrow etc…” Would your response be “No thank you Lord, I’m too angry with You for allowing so much misery and pain in my life here on earth?”

10-23-01  Why are we so introspective rather than focused on our freedom in Christ?  I think it all has to do with fear of pain.  I think everyone knows that God exists, He’s all around us, it’s undeniable. 

You can either live in the pain of denial or the pain of accepting the reality of this fallen world, and therefore, called to accept the trials and tribulations associated with following Christ.  One brings death, the other brings life.  One causes insecurity resulting in all kinds of ills, including lack of self-control and self-destructing habits, because deep down you know you are powerless.  The other causes security, a sense of completeness and fearlessness.