A New Creature

“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:7).

 

Whenever the Holy Spirit enters any person, He brings His holy nature with Him. The result is that all those in whom the Spirit of God dwells have new holy hungers and holy loves they did not have prior to having His indwelling presence.
There are new created things that take place. They hunger for His holy Word, which they used to find boring or irrelevant. They love fellowship with the people of God, finding it unimaginable to live apart from meaningful interaction with them. Hearts and minds find new desires of holy longings. They long to live in a body without sin. They groan for a holy world filled with holy people, and long to see at last the face of the one that angels call “Holy, Holy, Holy” (Rev. 4:8).
This is the heartbeat of 100 percent of the hearts where the Spirit of God lives. A person may be nine years of age, yet where the Spirit of God has come to him or her, then these hungers are planted there.
According to the Word of God, of course, there is a desire to pray. The Spirit of God creates an inward desire to cry, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). All those who are born again, born of God, want to pray.
It does not matter if the one who says he is born again is nine or ninety, there is the ever-fresh, evergreen work of the Holy Spirit manifested in every person in whom He dwells.

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  • A Worthful Church

    “Ye sent unto John, and he bore witness unto the truth” (John 5:33).

    The duty and delight of every Christian is to bear witness to the truth. Our behavior and our beliefs are to be saturated by the Spirit of God. When we are living by God’s Word in the keeping, drawing power of God, then we are bearing witness to God’s Son who lives! We choose to flesh out what has been worked in by dependence upon God’s Spirit.

    John bore witness to Christ. He bore testimony to the Son of God. There can be no shining if there is no burning. John burned for Christ and was passionate about the Spirit’s work in his own life. The flesh was burned away and the Spirit of God burned within.

    A.W. Tozer said, “If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.”

    Churches are only as powerful as their dependence upon the Holy Spirit. We can say that any man who is bored with church work and worship is not ready for Heaven. People of God are renewed daily by the inward pressure of the Spirit of God who leads. He does not drive. The external situation or climate dictates to the leader of a family, a Sunday School class, a work place, or a church, that God desires to move in! And to take over! And To change it! This is a man/woman who lives in God.

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Christian Faith Entrusted to Us

    “As for you, speak the things which are fitting for sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1).

    Biblical knowledge is meant to be both intellectual and experiential. There are two sides to the same coin and it is meant to be enjoyed together. Knowledge without response is like an incomplete sentence or a song without a chorus. We have to go beyond merely quoting the truth….to obeying it.

    Why are we to contend for the faith? Because there are false teachers, wolves in sheep’s clothing, counterfeits, apostates in our pulpits across the church scene.  Theology was important to Jude and Paul. God takes the truth seriously. We must know what and why we believe. That is God’s call on every believer.

    Our faith is not primarily a feeling. It is belief based on fact. It is more about a grounded assurance than personal philosophy. We can not simply make up facts or imagine things about God and then base our lives on those thoughts.

    Faith fads, theological trends, popular contemporary thinking, is carrying an unthinking church away from strong historical beliefs and Scripture. Just believing something doesn’t make it true. It’s either true or not, independent of our belief in it. Everything that is not Scriptural and experientially defended in our daily lives sets up misrepresentation of the God of doctrine and truth. Just ask the woman at the well in John’s gospel chapter four.

    It may feel as if the Word of God is rocking back and forth, swaying to the fads of Christianity, but it is not…for the Word of God is stable, it is not changing, progressing, or emerging. We are called to stand for and proclaim what is true, and even when necessary to expose false teaching and heresy. Always ask, “What does the Bible say? And not “Does it make me feel good, happy, or accepted by others?”

     

     

     

     

  • When Pain is Allowed

    “Saying, The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day” (Luke 9:21).

    Being confident in God doesn’t make the pain we experience less deep but it can become less broad. If you and I have some things settled with God, there are boundaries around the field of pain we experience. With God our pain doesn’t have to spread out into the endless spaces of limitless meaning. God allows the touch of pain to test us and to see if we will trust Him and find His reward to be better.

    God set His plan in motion before the foundation of the world. His glory is seen in this aspect of His omnipresence. Before time was, He was. He sits upon time and He spans all time, history, and future. He circumscribed all things to happen to His people.

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    If we confess Christ as the Son of God and Savior, and take up our cross and follow Him, He will reveal to us His kingdom and His glory. When you and I experience the glory of God, the demands of discipleship become blessings that carry us along in joyful obedience. Passing the test means loving God to the end.

  • Let Me Show You Something

    “And he said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” (Luke 24:26).

    The hearts of the two disciples have been overwhelmed with sadness, but now their minds have been opened by the Scriptures…and now they are ready for their eyes to be opened to the Savior.

    Only the Spirit of God can open the eyes and hearts to the Christ of God. He alone is the One who illuminates the Scriptures to our hearts. He is the Teacher who stands alongside to give us what we need for the hour.

    Frankly we don’t believe God’s Word because we do not depend upon the Spirit of God to open parts of the Word of God to us. There has to be a cross before there is a crown. There has to be a cross before there is a kingdom. Jesus wore the crown of thorns before He wore the golden diadem. And He will explain Himself to us if we will open the golden book of Scripture.

    The cross was a doorway into eternal glory for the Son of God and for all who will believe in Him! Oh my friend allow the Resurrected Word to explain the written Word. The Fulfiller of Scripture will explain the prophecies of Scripture. Oh He is the great I Am; the Passover Lamb Whose blood protects His people from the angel of death and the wrath of God.

    Father please open our eyes that we may believe. Help us to open the Book before the world opens our eyes. You are the Living One and we are dependent upon You. Thank you for Your written Word that is explained by You. We are thankful to be instructed in righteousness. In your name! Amen.

  • Going Beyond the Gun

    Hundreds of students across the Piedmont Triad walked out of class during Wednesday’s nationwide walkout, but Connor Groce had his own way of taking a stand by staying in his seat.  Connor said, “I just spent the moment in prayer and in reflection,” the West Forsyth senior explains.  “Obviously, for the families of the victims in Florida and the horrific tragedy down there but for our nation as a whole because I think we live in a very fragile time.”

    At its core, the current debate taking place about gun control is about more than guns.  What’s being protested is a symptom of a much larger problem.  We will not be able to legislate away evil.  No laws written on any book will change the human heart.

    Our day is a lost culture that the students have inherited from us.  It’s a lost culture that mocks or ignores God and His “Timeless Truths“.  We live in a generation that is top-heavy for carnal pleasures and temporary thrills.  We have lost control of ourselves.

    There is a growing epidemic of gun violence.  In addition to Florida, there have been school shootings in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  “How many schools, how many children have to get shot?” Andrew Pollack asked and pleaded with the President of the United States.  Mr. Pollack’s daughter, Meadow, was murdered in Parkland, Florida.  He said, “It stops here, with this administration and me, because I’m not going to sleep until its fixed.”  Any parent can understand this man’s broken heart if it were one of us before President Trump.

    Many of the people who want to control and eliminate the symptoms are the very ones, sadly, who want to ban the very things that will lead to healing and revival.  Unless this country and her churches turn back to God, those with a fervent and sincere faith are going to be continually mocked and marginalized rather than respected and uplifted, meaning there is absolutely no help or hope from outside of ourselves, for God is out and Satan is in.

    John Adams, second President, remarked that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  History is very clear:  godlessness and immorality leads to any outbreak of evil.  If Conor Groce can take 17 minutes to pray in a classroom, can not God’s people take more and call upon God’s grace and mercy to start in us.

  • Pleasure Seekers

    “Woe unto them…and the harp, and the lute, the timbres, and flute, and wine, are in their feasts; but they regard not the work of the LORD, neither consider the operation of his hands”  (Isaiah 5:11-12).

     

    There is a way that seems right unto man, but afterwards it yields death. When mankind refuses to recognize the operation or the working of the will of God, then he or she will find death and loss at the end of their pleasure seeking.

     

    There are too many people, especially the youth of today, who are in desperate need of some mentors who will love them to Jesus. God is looking for someone to get up from the table and work with the God of orphans. There are too many women who have been abused by men’s lusts. God is looking for someone to come alongside and to love them to the bosom of Christ.

     

    America and other countries are in a stupor. They are drunken with pleasure While we take our pleasure trips, buy our modern things, God is looking for someone to stand in the gap. It takes a wise man to recognize that the ways of the world are coming to an end.

     

    It is God who gave us all things to enjoy. And it is God who will take it away. Push yourself away from the table of pleasure and go get someone and feed them the bread of life.