Happy Birthday, Mom!

Today is my mom's birthday. This picture is actually from her birthday in 2010, but it's the only one I have handy. I hope she doesn't want to whip me for using it.

It certainly would not be fair to say that everything I am today I owe to my mom, Reba. There are things in my life that she would not be so proud to own. But I must give her credit for the good things anyway.

There are so many stories in the news today of moms who abandon or harm their own children that I know I am blessed to have a mom who has sacrificed everything she has and everything she could have personally achieved for the sake of her children, her family, her friends, and her God. There are very few things that she does that do not have as their motive the welfare and the happiness of others.

God has been more than generous by the gift of the heritage passed along by Mom to me, my wife and family, to my five brothers and sisters and their spouses, to the 14 grandchildren and the spouses of the eight that are married, the eight and soon-to-be ten great-grandchildren and one spouse, and the two great-great-grandchildren. (Sorry if I left anyone out! With the two great-grandkids on the way, the total will soon be 40 if I've counted right!)

One of my fondest memories of life is hearing my Mom sing, especially when she was younger. I can still hear her singing a song that is probably a statement of her faith more than any other song in my memory. She may have sung other songs, but the one that sticks in my mind is "I'm a Child of the King."

It is a statement of her testimony. That makes everyone in that list above part of a family of royalty.

Thanks, Mom.

(This isn't Mom. It's Skeeter Davis, but the song is the same.)



I'M A CHILD OF THE KING

1. Once I was clothed in the rags of my sin,
Wretched and poor, lost and lonely within.
But with wondrous compassion, the King of all kings,
In pity and love, took me under His wings.

CHORUS:

Oh, yes, oh yes, I'm a child of the King
His royal blood now flows in my veins.
And I who was wretched and poor now can sing
Praise God, praise God, I'm a child of the King.

2. Now I'm a child with a Heavenly home,
My Holy Father has made me His own.
And I'm cleansed by His blood, and I'm clothed in His love,
And some day I'll sing with the angels above.

All I Have Is Christ

I used this video in church a couple of Sundays ago just before I preached. It is a great song with a great testimony and the video made even better, especially in light of world events. The video was created by Chris Powers and can be accessed for download at vimeo.com.


All I Have is Christ - An Animation from Grace in Cranberry on Vimeo.

Nothing Is Impossible with God

When the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would give birth to the One who would be the Savior of the world, he gave her assurance by telling her, “With God nothing shall be impossible.” (Luke 1:37)

From this, we have the common saying, “Nothing is impossible with God.”

Typically, we interpret this verse to mean that anything that can be conceived within the mind of an infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God can be accomplished by Him. He is only limited by His nature and His holiness, such that He can neither die nor tell a lie. (1 Tim. 1.17; Num. 23:19)

That is why anything we request in prayer will always meet with success as long as it is circumscribed by the boundaries of His will. For whatever God wills, He will do. (Ezekiel 24:14)

Yet there is another way of expressing the relationship between “nothing” and God. The idea is not original with me, but it is an interesting perspective on the power and the authority of God.

From the Common Book of Prayer:

Eternal God,
protector of all who put their trust in you,
without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy;

The prayer affirms our belief that the world offers nothing that is strong and holy apart from God. But C.S. Lewis took expressed this thought from a different perspective.

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why...

I also read a sermon from the pastor of The Parish Church of St. Michaels’ Cornhill in the city of London that reflected this same sentiment. Read or download the entire message here.

Reflect on how strong nothing actually is. For nothingness, denial, the void, the abyss is the very strong and potent force of evil.

In practice our society operates on the basis that there are no moral absolutes. You are, as the saying goes, free to make up your own mind. This leads to the dereliction of reason, to depravity and to moral and social chaos.

…poisonous intellectual posturing and satanic destruction of all values has produced the vicious society in which we all now live. This is the society without God. It is bound to be a culture of death.

When there are no real values, when there are no absolute standards of judgement, then we must expect our education system to collapse too. And that is just what has happened.

When God created Adam, He breathed into him the breath of life and Adam became a living soul, made alive by the indwelling Spirit of God. When Adam chose to rebel against God, he died – he lost the indwelling Spirit and left a void – a “nothing” – within man’s soul.

Satan has multiplied the strength of that “nothing” to create a world where God is rejected and where the dominant themes are tolerance and even the promotion of evil as if it were good.

Nature abhors a vacuum. It cannot tolerate “nothing,” and thus seeks to fill it with something else. Man may confess that there is no God or that he does not need to worship God, but God has place eternity in the hearts of men and thus there is a desire to worship.

Man has attempted throughout his existence to fill the void left by the departure of the Spirit of God following the fall of Adam. Yet eternity is a driving force within his being, and man will forever seek to replace that which was lost with something that is worthy of his worship – something that man deems worthy of the sacrifice of his time and health and fortune – even his very life. Man will worship.

Nothing is strong, but with God, nothing is impossible. He is infinite, eternal, transcendent, and perfect in all of His ways, expressing His love for His creation through inconceivable gifts and ultimate sacrifice.

Thus, even when the world is at its worst, the child of God can join Jeremiah in his song, “This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; 23 they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness (Lam. 3:21-23).

The Practice of Prayer

I am currently in the midst of a sermon series on the practice of prayer and how prayer works according to what God has revealed to us in the Bible.

The first sermon dealt with two fundamental points:

Point 1: We must pray because the will of God is not released for action until we do.

In Matt. 16:19, Jesus told His disciples, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (ESV) He repeated these words in Matt. 18:18.

2 Chron. 7:14 If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (NKJV)

Notice the contingency in the verse: If my people…pray…then…I will heal their land

We do not command God to do anything, but God seems to be willing to wait to see His will carried out based on our obedience to His command to pray.

I heard about a room is Heaven that will surprise all of us when we see it. The room has within it large boxes, each neatly decorated with a lovely ribbon on top, and with a label with each of our names on them. The label reads, “Never delivered to Earth because never requested from Earth.”

Point 2: We must pray according to God’s will and not our own.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught His disciples how to pray. He said, “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’” (Matt. 6:9-10, ESV)

So, we must pray to release God’s will, and we must pray according to God’s will.

The question, then, is “How do I pray God’s will?”

The short answer is that you must know God’s will – a subject for another lesson actually. We come to know God’s will by spending time with Him in prayer and by spending time studying His word.

Yet even then, we may struggle to know that we are praying God’s will. But God already knew that we would have this challenge. So He made provision for it, as He did for every other aspect of spiritual growth.

Romans 8:26-27 Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

How do we pray God’s will? We submit ourselves completely to the Holy Spirit who fills us and carries out the task of molding us into the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29). He who knows the thoughts and purposes of God (1 Cor. 2:10-11) brings to us the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16).

As the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, He always prays according to the will of God.

Free Will, Part 3

In earlier blogs (Part 1 and Part 2), I answered the first question asked by a friend concerning the free will of man. Here is his follow-up question and my efforts at answering it.

I must admit that I did not intend for this answer to become one concerning irresistible grace, but that is the way the answer went. I pray that this answer helps others come to an understanding of this seemingly difficult and controversial concept in the larger study of God’s sovereignty in election.

Question 2

If man has free will before salvation, what about after salvation? Can he decide to leave the faith?

Answer 2

No more than he could will himself to have two legs after having one amputated.

No more than Adam could “unwill” his decision to rebel by intentionally disobeying God’s commandment not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Adam may have been sorry that he rebelled. He probably repented of his rebellion. But that did not undo the fact that he had actually rebelled. It was a fact of history that could not be repealed.

Man has the ability to make a decision for righteousness – and the ability to acknowledge Christ as Lord for the purpose of salvation – only after he is empowered to do so by the Holy Spirit at the discretion of the Father. (John 3:3)

Man, by his very nature, will never cease to resist the will of God in his own strength and by his own will. (Romans 3:10-12) He is only able to make a decision for righteousness when he is overcome by an infinite grace that is irresistible to the continued defiance of man’s will – thus, irresistible grace and irrevocable atonement (Romans 11:28-29).

Irresistible grace does not mean that God chooses a man and bowls him over with grace against the man’s will, but that God is persistent in applying infinite grace toward the finite and defective will of man until God’s grace, by its very definition overcomes man’s ability to resist.

Here is where evangelism comes into the picture. Here is where there is room for preaching and persuasion. The fact that God’s grace is irresistible once applied should prompt every Christian to a renewed effort at reaching out to lost people.

If He wanted to, God could speak a word and every man would be saved. But God does not work that way in the plan of redemption. God works through men. God causes one man to be saved by the hearing of the Word from one who already knows Christ as Lord.

Our persistence in sharing the Gospel with a lost person equates to the grace of God bearing more and more weight  of grace against the resistance that is natural to man’s being until that man can no longer naturally resist.

Once a man is enabled to see the kingdom of God – more specifically, the person of Christ – he is then able to choose something that he never had the ability to choose before – righteousness!

By the gift of faith from God that now becomes effective in his heart, he can no longer resist plunging full-depth into the previously unperceived riches of the grace of God’s redemption and is immediately baptized into the spiritual realm of eternal blessing and the presence of God.

Then with Paul, he begins to sing, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (Romans 11.33)

He would no more give back or abandon the gift of faith that redeemed him than he would the new leg he had willed in the place of the one that had been amputated (if such a thing were possible).

In fact, he cannot give back his salvation or abandon his faith, because he is forever preserved within the state of grace by the earnest of the Holy Spirit who now indwells his heart and bears upon his will. (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5)

Free Will, Part 2

This is a continuation from the answer to the question that was asked yesterday: Under what conditions does a man have free will. If you missed Part 1, scroll down or click here. (By the way, if you ever want to comment on a particular article I've written, click on the article title and scroll to the bottom of the page.)

Yesterday I taught that when Adam expressed his free will in the Garden of Eden by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he did not lose his free will; he only lost the ability to choose righteousness. 

As a result, when man expresses his free will - whenever man makes a choice - whether for good or evil, he is always choosing from the realm of unrighteousness. His way is blocked to the Tree of Life until by God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit the man is given life and the ability to see the Tree of Life (the kingdom of God, as John put it in John 3.3).

I was reading yesterday in one of my old books – a study of Ephesians by Watchman Nee entitled Sit, Walk, Stand. I read it many years ago (1972, in fact), but have forgotten most of it. Here is a passage from the section on walking:

Since the day that Adam took the fruit of the tree of knowledge, man has been engaged in deciding what is good and what is evil. The natural man has worked out his own standards of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and striven to live by them. Of course as Christians we are different. Yes, but in what way are we different? Since we were converted a new sense of righteousness has been developed in us, with the result that we too are, quite rightly, occupied with the question of good and evil. But have we realised that for us the starting point is a different one? Christ is for us the Tree of Life. We do not begin from the matter of ethical right and wrong. We do not start from that other tree. We begin from Him; and the whole question for us is one of Life. (Nee, Watchman. Sit, Walk, Stand. Christian Literature Crusade:Ft. Washington, PA, 1972, p. 25.)

It’s funny how something I read almost 40 years ago now comes to surface in my current understanding of how God works. I love it.

Free Will

It's been a long  time since I've updated my blog. One of the big changes at church was a new webpage. I have spent most of my time trying to learn how to keep the page current. There are still areas that need to be completed. I am working on these, but progress is slow.

The one area I have learned how to update is the sermon page. You can find sermons there in mp3, Word, and pdf formats.

We also have attempted to start a Facebook page, but that is another challenge that we are still working on. Stop by for a visit.

The reason for the title of this blog: 

I recently had a friend of mine ask me two questions. As usual, my answers were too involved, but I decided to share them with you anyway. Let me know if my answers help or hinder. I will post Question 2 in the next post.

Question 1

Under what conditions does man have free will?.

Answer 1: All conditions. Man always has free will.

·         In the Garden, man had two choices: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Unrighteousness) and all the other trees, including the Tree of Life (Righteousness).

·         Utilizing his free will, man made the choice of unrighteousness, thus forfeiting for eternity the ability to choose righteousness – in other words, he died.

·         From that point on, every choice, whether good or bad, was an unrighteous choice because it was made without the Spirit – it was a choice of death.

·         Even if man could live a life filled with nothing but choices for good, he would still be expressing his will in the realm of unrighteousness. Even good people are dead because of the sin of Adam.

·         By giving life to a man dead in sin, the Spirit restored his ability to choose righteousness. Once he is born again, he is as Adam was – he can see both choices – righteousness as well as unrighteousness.

·         Because of God’s grace, he will choose righteousness.