Saved, Sealed and Secure

 
In Ephesians Chapter 1 Paul is talking about how those of us who are Christians got saved. In verse 13 he gives a very simple 3 point outline—“You heard the word of truth (the gospel), you trusted in Christ, and you were sealed with the Holy Spirit.”
 
1. You heard the word of truth—v.13a
 
Romans 10:17 (NKJV)
So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
 
1 Corinthians 1:21b (NKJV)
…it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
 
This is our part in God’s plan for saving the lost—to honor God with our lives and to share the gospel with our words.  We really have not been called to “win people to Christ” or to “save souls”—that’s the Holy Spirit’s ministry.
 
Our responsibility is to, “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone” as Jesus commanded us.
 


Marital Warfare

One of the things that has many of us pastors very concerned is how many Christian marriages are struggling and failing today.  I personally am seeing more Christians getting divorced today than I saw 36 years ago when I first got into ministry.
 
One Christian couple I know got married, two months later she was cheating on her husband and two months after that they filed for divorce. And while that may be an extreme example of the flimsy, shallow commitment that many are entering into marriage with—it is nonetheless becoming more and more the norm.
 


In Everything Give Thanks

 
  • A young mother learns she has terminal cancer.
  • A bus taking a church group to a ski resort overturns, injuring many and leaving one young woman permanently paralyzed.
  • A child crossing the street is struck and killed by a drunk driver.
  • A Christian girl is abducted by two men, though she shares Jesus with them and pleads for mercy; she is brutally raped, tortured, and murdered.
  • A missionary is killed by the tribe he came to serve after only two weeks of ministry.
  • A young father working a second job as a convenience store clerk is killed by a teenager on drugs who holds up the store.


We Have Come To Worship Him

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Well, here we are less than two weeks away from Christmas—so let’s spend a little time focusing on the real reason for the season!
 
Matthew 2:1-2 (NKJV)
Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”
 
I.   “Wise Men from the East”—v.1
 
The term “wise men” is the Greek word “magoi” from which we get the word “magi” which is just a transliteration of that Greek word. Few biblical stories are as well known, yet so clouded by myth and tradition, as that of the magi, or wise men, mentioned by Matthew.
 


Learning To Be Thankful-2016

 
In a few weeks, we will be celebrating one of our greatest national holidays, Thanksgiving—a day that we have set aside as a nation to thank the Lord for all His goodness and blessings which He has so richly given to us.  
 
Our nation was birthed in an attitude of thanksgiving to Almighty God for His blessings and providence that planted, sustained, and nurtured our fledgling nation from infancy to maturity as the strongest and most blessed nation on the face of the earth.  Back in those early days, before we were even a nation, those early settlers were thankful to God, not for big houses and new cars but for keeping them alive! 
 


The Foundation of Our Faith-Part 2

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In Part One of this post, we discussed the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible. That now brings us to the sufficiency of God’s Word.
 
Sadly, it is at this point that many evangelical pastors and leaders have erred.
 
Many of these men would defend the inspiration, the inerrancy and the infallibility of the Bible with their last breath—Yet when it comes to the sufficiency of Scripture they stumble by believing that the Bible needs to be supplemented with the wisdom of the world if Christians are to be fully victorious and fruitful (my professor in Bible college—“we need to combine the secular and the sacred…)”


The Foundation of Our Faith-Part 1

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A structure is only as strong as the foundation it’s built upon—a weak or defective foundation will cause whatever is built upon it to eventually crumble and fall—the same is true with the Christian faith.
 
In Ephesians 2:20 we have an important statement on this subject—Paul tells us that the Temple of God in the New Covenant (the Church) has been built “on the foundation of the apostle and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone.”
 
The prophets that Paul is referring to were of course N.T. prophets because O.T. prophets knew nothing about the church. Now we need to be careful not to misinterpret what Paul is saying here—he isn’t saying that the apostles and prophets were the actual foundation of the church.
 
That would contradict other passages that clearly teach that Jesus Himself is the foundation upon which the Church has been built—
 
1 Corinthians 3:11 (NKJV)
For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.


A Prayer For All Believers

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In Ephesians Chapter 1:15-23 Paul the apostle is offering a prayer to God for the believer’s in Ephesus, and for all Christians, and he asks the Lord to help us understand the awesome power that raised Jesus from the dead. And how that same power brought Him all the way to heaven where He now occupies an exalted place of authority at the Father’s right hand.
 
Paul wanted the Father to show His children how that same mighty power is available to all of us who belong to Him—power to take us all the way to heaven someday.
 
If you were to ask the average person today how someone gets to heaven they would no doubt tell you by living a good life here on the earth and doing our best to help others. In other words, it’s all about human effort and hard work on our part that gets us to heaven even though Jesus told a very religious man, a Pharisee named Nicodemus, that no one ever reached heaven that way.
 
Let’s imagine for a minute that heaven is on the moon and if we could somehow jump to the moon we could attain heaven. And yet common sense tells us that no matter how high we jump we will never be able, in our own strength and by our best efforts, to jump high enough to reach heaven if it were on the moon. Read more…


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