What are we to be doing? If we have truly been born again is it enough that we are saved? Are we to just sit back and wait for God to take us on to Heaven? No! God left us in this world for two reasons. One of those is so that we can grow in His image. By learning the truth in His word and applying it to our life we grow. And we are growing to perfection. We aren't perfect yet. Actually we will never be in this body. But we are to be growing in that direction. Hebrews 6:1 says "Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God," Also see 1 Peter 2:2 "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby:" And 2 Peter 3:18 "But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen." The first reason God doesn't immediately take us away when we are saved is that we are to spend time "growing" in Him by studying His word and living it.
The second reason, and a very important reason, is that we are to be reproducing in the Spiritual sense. We are to be spreading the Gospel. Sharing our faith. Bearing fruit. John 15:2,8 says "Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit…Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples." One way we bear fruit is by the spiritual growth that is seen in our life. But another important way we bear fruit is by leading others to Christ. Solomon said in Proverbs 11:30 "The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise." Understand that this growth as well as leading others to Christ or "converting sinners" or being "soul winners" is not something we can do ourselves by our own will and intellect. It is only done by the Holy Spirit and it is evidence of the Spirit at work in us. I just want it to be understood that I am not preaching the works of man here. This has to be the work of the Spirit. Otherwise it is vanity.
The reason I am trying to make this point clear is that there are many Christians who seem to think this is someone else's job. Christ made it clear. Matthew 28:19-20 "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen." We call it "the great commission". This teaching is repeated and reinforced in Luke 24:47 "And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." and John 20:21 "Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." There are also a number of passages in the epistles that encourage this kind of discipleship.
But there are two things I think we need to address concerning the great commission. The first is the word "preach" seen in Luke and often substituted for the word teach in the passage in Matthew. Many people see this and they immediately think of a "Pastor". They will say "Women can't do that." Wait! This doesn't say anything about a "Pastor" (Bishop) or about having authority over anyone. This is the job of every disciple of Christ regardless of gender or age. I am not talking about teaching, preaching, or pasturing from the pulpit. There are people around you that you can "preach" the Gospel to. There may be people at home, neighbors, at the store, wherever you are or go there is someone who could use the Gospel. You don't have to "preach" to preach. You can give someone a tract. You can relate scriptures into a conversation. One good method that has been practiced for over a thousand years is to get people to ask you questions. Raise their curiosity. Then all you have to do is give honest, scripturally sound answers. The point is that this sharing of the faith is for every child of God. Not just Pastors.
The second point I must make is that sharing the Gospel and following the great commission is still everyone's job. This was not a commandment that died out with the apostles. "Oh. But He was talking directly to His disciples." That is the devil trying to keep you quiet. Don't listen to him. It is a common theme throughout the New Testament that we are to be His witnesses. We are to spread the good word that Christ is the only way to eternal life. 2 Corinthians 4:3 "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:" I can't get over this modernized gospel that says things like spreading the Gospel was just for that small group of people and limited to that short period of time. Now God will draw to Himself the people He wants to save. That is heresy. And another heresy floating around is this new doctrine that we can't suggest a sinner need repent. Because they can't repent until after they are saved. That's pig slop that is! Christ said in Mark 1:15 "And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel." Repent and Believe! Beware of extreme dispensationalism!
These are frightening times we live in when I listen to some of the things coming out of pulpits in America today. Our grandparents knew better. Why would we need to change the Gospel to "fit our times"? Christ doesn't change! Hebrews 13:8 "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." And His Gospel doesn't need to change! Remember those good old hymns we used to sing? "I love to tell the story…" If we love Christ wouldn't we want to tell His story? Wouldn't we, having been "lost but now I'm found", having seen the light shining through the darkness, wouldn't we want to "Go tell it on the mountain"? We shouldn't actually see this as a "duty" or a "responsibility". We should see it as a privilege. We should be thankful that we are able to tell the story. Then we will want to take it "Around the corner, around the world" and "Bring them in from the fields of sin"
I hope this blesses and encourages you. I hope it inspires you.
Peace and blessings.
Shannon
Monday, November 29, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Spurgeon on the economic crisis
This is an excerpt from a sermon preached by C. H. Spurgeon on the collapse of Overend, Gurney and Company, (known as "the bankers' bank") which collapsed in 1886 leading to the collapse of over 200 other companies. It is amazing and disturbing to see how history does repeat itself. The financial troubles are a demonstration of the foolishness of atheism and the belief that you can have morality without Christianity. It is also implied that this will soon effect the modern "Mega Churches" built on financial wealth, the prosperity gospel, and Godlessness. I hope you will read this. Spurgeon preached this sermon on the morning of January 10th 1869. Tell me it doesn't sound like something from the news we have been hearing for the last two years.
Proverbs 16:2 "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits."
"During the last two years, some of the most notable commercial reputations have been hopelessly destroyed. Men in the great world of trade, who were trusted, around whose characters there hovered no cloud of suspicion, nor even the shade of doubt, have proved themselves reckless of honesty and devoid of principle."
"The fiery trial has been too much for the wood, hay, and stubble of many a gigantic firm. Houses of business which seemed to be founded upon a rock, and to stand as fast as the commonwealth of England itself, have been shaken to their foundations and have caved in with a tremendous crash. On all sides we see the wrecks of great reputations and colossal fortunes. There is wailing in the palace of sham, and desolation in the halls of pretense. Bubbles are bursting, windbags are collapsing, paint is cracking, gilt is peeling off."
"Probably we have more of this to come, more revelations still to be made of apparent wealth which covered insolvency, as a rich paper may cover a mud wall; crafty schemes which duped the public with profits never made, and tempted them to advance to deeper speculations, even as the mirage of the desert mocks the traveler."
"We have seen in the public prints, month after month, fresh discoveries of the modes of financing adopted by the villainy of this present age, to accomplish robbery respectably and to achieve felony with credit. We have been astonished and amazed at the vile tricks and shameless devices to which men of eminence have condescended. And yet we have been compelled to hear justifications of gigantic frauds, and have even been compelled to believe that the perpetrators of them did not consider themselves to be acting disreputably, their own previous success and the low state of morality together, having lulled them into a state in which conscience, if not dead, thoroughly asleep."
"Some ages may have been great in science, others in art, and others in war, but our era overtops every other in the proficiency of it's rascals; this is the classic period of chicanery, the golden age of fraud. Let a man have a base heart and a seared conscience and a plausible mode of address, and let him resolve upon deluding the public out of millions, he need not travel to learn the readiest method, he can find examples near at home, among high professors and the great ones of earth."
"My brethren, these noises of falling towers on the right, these sounds of crumbling battlements on the left, these cries of the shipwrecked everywhere along the costs of trade, have not only awakened within me many thoughts relative to themselves and the rottenness of modern society, but they have made me muse upon similar catastrophes evermore occurring in the spiritual world. Unrecorded in the journals and unmoored by unregenerate men, there are failures and frauds, and bankruptcies of soul, most horrible to think upon. There is a spiritual trading just as pretentious, and apparently just as successful, as your vaunted limited liability juggle, but really just as rotten and as sure to end in hopeless overthrow."
"Speculation is a spiritual vice as well as a commercial one. Trading without capital is common in the religious world, and puffery and deception are everyday practices. The outer world is always representative of the inner; the life which clusters round the Exchange illustrates that which gathers within the church; and if our eyes were opened, and our ears were able to hear, the sights and sounds of the spirit world would far more interest us and sadden us than the doings which begin in the directors' boardroom and end we know not where"
"We should see at this moment colossal religious fortunes melting into abject spiritual poverty. We should see high professors, much reverenced and held in esteem, brought into shame and everlasting contempt. We should see the wealthy in divine matters, whom men have unwisely trusted as their guides and counselors as to their souls' best interests, unmasked and proved to be deceitful through and through."
"I seem at this moment to be peering into the world of spiritual things, and I see many a Babel tower tottering and ready to fall; many a fair tree decaying at the heart; many a blooming cheek undermined by disease. Yes, a sound comes to my ear of men in the church, apparently rich and increased in goods, who are naked and poor and miserable, and great men whose towering glories are but a fading flower."
"There ever have been such, there are many now, and there will be to the end. the supply of deceivers is sure to be maintained, since the text tells us that all the ways of men are clean in his own eyes; there is a propensity in nature which leads men, even when they are most wrong, to judge themselves most right."
"The text at the same time the terrible conclusion to which all self-deception will certainly come, for the judgment of man concerning himself is not final, and there comes a day when the Lord who weigheth the spirits will reverse the verdict of a perjured conscience, and make the man to stand no longer in the false light which his conceit has thrown around him, but in the true light, in which all his fancied glory shall vanish as a dream."
Proverbs 16:2 "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits."
"During the last two years, some of the most notable commercial reputations have been hopelessly destroyed. Men in the great world of trade, who were trusted, around whose characters there hovered no cloud of suspicion, nor even the shade of doubt, have proved themselves reckless of honesty and devoid of principle."
"The fiery trial has been too much for the wood, hay, and stubble of many a gigantic firm. Houses of business which seemed to be founded upon a rock, and to stand as fast as the commonwealth of England itself, have been shaken to their foundations and have caved in with a tremendous crash. On all sides we see the wrecks of great reputations and colossal fortunes. There is wailing in the palace of sham, and desolation in the halls of pretense. Bubbles are bursting, windbags are collapsing, paint is cracking, gilt is peeling off."
"Probably we have more of this to come, more revelations still to be made of apparent wealth which covered insolvency, as a rich paper may cover a mud wall; crafty schemes which duped the public with profits never made, and tempted them to advance to deeper speculations, even as the mirage of the desert mocks the traveler."
"We have seen in the public prints, month after month, fresh discoveries of the modes of financing adopted by the villainy of this present age, to accomplish robbery respectably and to achieve felony with credit. We have been astonished and amazed at the vile tricks and shameless devices to which men of eminence have condescended. And yet we have been compelled to hear justifications of gigantic frauds, and have even been compelled to believe that the perpetrators of them did not consider themselves to be acting disreputably, their own previous success and the low state of morality together, having lulled them into a state in which conscience, if not dead, thoroughly asleep."
"Some ages may have been great in science, others in art, and others in war, but our era overtops every other in the proficiency of it's rascals; this is the classic period of chicanery, the golden age of fraud. Let a man have a base heart and a seared conscience and a plausible mode of address, and let him resolve upon deluding the public out of millions, he need not travel to learn the readiest method, he can find examples near at home, among high professors and the great ones of earth."
"My brethren, these noises of falling towers on the right, these sounds of crumbling battlements on the left, these cries of the shipwrecked everywhere along the costs of trade, have not only awakened within me many thoughts relative to themselves and the rottenness of modern society, but they have made me muse upon similar catastrophes evermore occurring in the spiritual world. Unrecorded in the journals and unmoored by unregenerate men, there are failures and frauds, and bankruptcies of soul, most horrible to think upon. There is a spiritual trading just as pretentious, and apparently just as successful, as your vaunted limited liability juggle, but really just as rotten and as sure to end in hopeless overthrow."
"Speculation is a spiritual vice as well as a commercial one. Trading without capital is common in the religious world, and puffery and deception are everyday practices. The outer world is always representative of the inner; the life which clusters round the Exchange illustrates that which gathers within the church; and if our eyes were opened, and our ears were able to hear, the sights and sounds of the spirit world would far more interest us and sadden us than the doings which begin in the directors' boardroom and end we know not where"
"We should see at this moment colossal religious fortunes melting into abject spiritual poverty. We should see high professors, much reverenced and held in esteem, brought into shame and everlasting contempt. We should see the wealthy in divine matters, whom men have unwisely trusted as their guides and counselors as to their souls' best interests, unmasked and proved to be deceitful through and through."
"I seem at this moment to be peering into the world of spiritual things, and I see many a Babel tower tottering and ready to fall; many a fair tree decaying at the heart; many a blooming cheek undermined by disease. Yes, a sound comes to my ear of men in the church, apparently rich and increased in goods, who are naked and poor and miserable, and great men whose towering glories are but a fading flower."
"There ever have been such, there are many now, and there will be to the end. the supply of deceivers is sure to be maintained, since the text tells us that all the ways of men are clean in his own eyes; there is a propensity in nature which leads men, even when they are most wrong, to judge themselves most right."
"The text at the same time the terrible conclusion to which all self-deception will certainly come, for the judgment of man concerning himself is not final, and there comes a day when the Lord who weigheth the spirits will reverse the verdict of a perjured conscience, and make the man to stand no longer in the false light which his conceit has thrown around him, but in the true light, in which all his fancied glory shall vanish as a dream."
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