Never Blinded

“If our gospel be hidden, it is hidden by those who are being lost,

through whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unfaithful.”

2Corinthians 4:3–4a

There were false prophets among the [Old Testament] people,

just as there will be false teachers among you, . . . 

and many will follow them.”

2Peter 2:1a, 2a

“False messiahs and false prophets will rise,

and they will . . . . mislead, if it were possible, even the elect.”

Matthew 24:24

From the above scriptures, the wise receive two important truths.

The first truth is that Peter’s prophecy was true, that there are false teachers among God’s children who have large followings, just as happened in the Old Testament.  Many ancient Israelites are in hell now because they rejected the true prophets God sent to them, but the above scriptures tell us that they rejected them because they believed the false prophets who claimed to speak for God, but did not.  They were turned away from the truth by false prophets!  This was a grief to God and to the prophets He truly sent.  God lamented, “I did not send these prophets, but they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied” (Jer. 23:21).  And Jeremiah, seeing God’s people following false prophets, cried out, “My heart within me is broken because of the prophets!” (Jer. 23:9).

The second truth is that no matter how persuasive false teachers are, it is not possible for them to persuade the pure in heart to follow them, just as Jesus said.  That promise lets us know that if we follow after the Spirit and keep our conscience clear, God will always be there to help us sense what is right and what is wrong.  He promised through Isaiah, “Your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’ (Isa. 30:21a).

In trusting that precious promise, we can more easily obey Jesus’ command to be anxious about nothing (Mt. 6:25–32).  Our heavenly Father does not want us to spend our lives worrying about whether or not we will be deceived.  It is better to focus on loving Him and doing His will.  If we do that, we will never be blinded by false teachers, for Jesus will be there, protecting our hearts from men who know how to look and sound good, but who are not.  Keeping a clear conscience, we will hear, in even the most confusing times, God’s “still, small voice” whispering in our ear, “This is the way; walk in it.”

Out of Ur, into the Unknown

“The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your land [Ur of the Chaldeans],

and from your kindred, and from your father’s house

 to the land that I will show you.”

Genesis 12:1

“By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obediently went out,

not knowing where he was going.”

Hebrews 11:8

“Hear me, you who pursue righteousness, who seek the Lord!

Look to the rock from which you have been hewn,

and to the hole of the pit from which you were dug!

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you,

for I called him alone, and I blessed him and multiplied him.”

Isaiah 51:1–2

God calls all His people of out of Ur of the Chaldeans, so to speak, and all who are like father Abraham respond to God’s call without knowing where they are going.  All that Abraham knew, in the beginning, was that God had called him to leave his homeland and to follow Him.  Likewise, all that Abraham’s children know, in the beginning, is that God is calling.  And knowing that is all they need to know, in the beginning.

For us, to leave Ur means to cease trusting in the earthly things with which we are familiar and to trust God to be our hope, our Protecter, and our Avenger.  Every sincere child of God has felt that sweet, desperate need for God’s guidance, but not one of us knew, in the beginning, where that guidance would take us.  We only know what we felt.  That wonderful feeling was God’s call to leave the world and follow Him into a spiritual place about which we, at first, knew nothing.

Coming to the Border

No one who cries out for the knowledge of God possesses what he is asking for; otherwise, he would have no need to ask for it.  And many have prayed for the knowledge of God but have been unable to embrace it when God answered their prayer.  A brother named Jimmy once testified that one day, years before, he was down on his knees pleading with God for grace to truly know Him and serve Him, a voice spoke to him and said, “Many have come this far and turned back.”  Jimmy wasn’t exactly sure what the Lord meant.  But he knew that he had reached the border of a spiritual place unknown to him, and that many others had prayed themselves to that same border but were unwilling to cross it with Jesus into the unknown.

If you have been praying to know God more perfectly, you have been praying for something you do not yet have.  Prepare your heart for God’s answer.  Jesus told us to seek, for God will always let us find, but Jesus did not say we would like what we find.  He told us to knock, for God will always open the door, but Jesus did not say that we would walk through the door that God opens.  He told us to ask, for God will always give, but Jesus did not say that we would accept the gift that is given.  Many have sought, knocked, and asked, and God has always responded, but just a few have the faith of Abraham to leave their own Ur of the Chaldeans, the things of earth with which they are familiar, and go with Jesus to places they have not known.

With all their asking, the wise also ask for faith to believe God’s answers, whatever they may be.  For they understand that God can surprise and even frighten us with His astonishing truth.

Wasted Years?

“I will restore to you the years that the locusts ate,

my great army that I sent against you, 

and you will eat in plenty and be filled,

and you will praise the name of the Lord your God

who dealt wondrously with you.

My people shall never be disappointed.”

Joel 2:25–26

The locusts that ate up Israel’s crops were sent by God to punish Israel for her many sins.  That is why God called those locusts His “great army”.  But then God spoke of a day when He would heal her land and bless her so much that it would make up for the years of her being cursed.  In other words, because Israel learned from her error to obey God, her years of being apart from God had not been wasted after all!  God’s abundant mercy transformed even them into part of her blessed life.

Sometimes we look back at our past with regret for what we consider to be wasted years.  But those years are not wasted if we learned from them to obey God.  The very fact that we can see the foolishness of those years means that our eyes have been opened by God to see them as He saw them then.  It means we have grown!  No time is wasted that brings us, one way or another, closer to God.  We make even the years of our rebellion against God valuable when we get the point.  For those who are in Christ, there is no such thing as a wasted year.  He gives us a new past, a past of perfect victory from the beginning of time, a past which taught us the fear and the love of God!

God used Abraham’s lie about Sarah being his sister to bless him and increase his wealth.  The time Abraham spent alone and miserable because of his lie was not wasted time because his loneliness drove him closer to God.  As a result, God turned Abraham’s lie into an investment that paid great dividends.  My father once was dying of cancer because of disobedience, he told us, but he repented and was healed.  Was the time of his suffering with cancer wasted time?  He didn’t think so; he thanked God for it and often referred to “that blessed cancer”, for through that ordeal, he learned to fear and love God better.

Nothing in your old past need ever burden you if Jesus has given you a new one.  He used whatever you went through to get you to him – and using those things, he succeeded!  Every soul who gets the gold from their old past ends up thanking God for all of it.  Every trial is an opportunity, and every failure is merely a stepping stone for those who come to Jesus.

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This blog is so good. It’s tough sometimes when I think back on the times of my teenage years that I was away from the saints and the precious things Jesus was doing in peoples lives at that time, and to remember the foolishness of my youth. I remember my thinking at that time and how I thought I was wanting to do my own thing, but really, I was just running from God. I had to learn a lot of things the hard way. BUT, when Jesus started tugging on my heart, and I began to humble myself to his call, my life changed, my attitude changed, everything changed.  (I was 26 by then.)  Then I started seeing and feeling the remorse of the things I had done and missed. As time went on, it would be heavy on me the more I learned and felt in the Spirit. I would pray and ask Jesus for help and relief often. One night in a meeting, the Spirit was blessing us all, and in the middle of that, I heard “I have restored what the canker worm has eaten”. Shew! That went straight down to my heart. I knew from that moment on, everything that was happening with me in Jesus was new and not repentance from the past. What a sweet feeling that was!

Then, a few years later, after that relief, I would ask Jesus why I went the places I did, like why was it so bad the way I acted and some of the places I ended up in my life. I read a blog you wrote on “The losers are the winners” written for Uncle Joe. When I read it, I just cried and cried. It put me under conviction. I got still and read it over and over again. At the end of it, I heard the Spirit say to me the answer to my question of why it was the way it was. The answer was so tender: “Because I wanted you” 💛 That put an end to the wondering and the feeling so bad about things.  It allowed me to be happy and understand. Now I say, I’m so sorry I was that way Lord, but thank you for rescuing me! And he put a joy down in my heart that is everlasting!

When I read the GCC stories, and read parts of him feeling the feelings of things he had done wrong in his past, he said they made him go to God instead of going away from Him. That really pricked my heart. And I have tried to implement that in my own journey with Jesus. Sometimes I “need a little help from my friends” but I’m so thankful that I have a love in my heart for the truth and life Jesus has given me. The love of the truth and what Jesus has done for me has saved me thus far.

So, I agree that my years are not wasted. I have learned so much through my mistakes. And Jesus gave me what I needed to see those things for what the are, the love of God for me. I do wish I would have taken the higher road many times, that’s the best way, but I needed to learn who I was in order to be who I am. 🙌🏻

Shew, that brings tears to my eyes. I love this life, and I love you all who Jesus has put around me.

Amy B

Receiving God’s Life

“Who will ascend to the hill of the Lord,

and who will stand in His holy place?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

who has not received my life in vain.”

Psalm 24:3–4a

“The Spirit is life.”

Romans 8:10

There is such a thing as receiving the Spirit, God’s life, and then losing your soul.  We must continue in holiness to obtain eternal life.  Being born again is wonderful, but Jesus said that “he who endures to the end, the same shall be saved” (Mt. 24:13.  For “we are made partakers with Christ if we hold fast our first confidence firm until the end” (Heb. 3:14), that is, if we “believe to the saving of the soul” (Heb. 10:39).

There is such a thing as becoming a believer, and then, through disobedience, have it be in vain.  Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I remind you, brothers, of the gospel that I proclaimed to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are being saved if you are holding fast that message which I preached to you; otherwise, you believed in vain” (1Cor. 15:1–2).  Of a believer who does not hold fast to the gospel, Jesus said that in the Final Judgment he will cut him off “and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites.  In that place, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth!” (Mt. 24:51).

We must receive God’s life, His Spirit, in order to have any hope of salvation.  And what a precious hope that is!  But we receive His life in vain if we are disobedient after receiving it.  That is why the man of God said that the resurrected Jesus “became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb. 5:9).

May God grant us the grace to receive His life and then fulfill our purpose.  Let us rejoice in the truth and bear good fruit to God!

From the Darkness

“Behold, the wicked are bending a bow!  They have fitted their arrow

to the string to shoot from darkness at the upright in heart!”

Psalm 11:2

“He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

John 8:12b

Faithful children of God are open and sincere because they love righteousness and desire fellowship with others in the kingdom of God. They know that “if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1Jn. 1:7). This is the kind of life to which God calls all His children.  Even in the Old Testament, the prophets called upon the Israelites to live this way.  Isaiah cried out, “O house of Jacob!  Come, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!”  

Unfaithful children of God, however, drift toward secretiveness, and if they do not return to openness and sincerity, in time, they will be shooting barbed words from the darkness at those who are upright.  And because they are in spiritual darkness, they do not realize the spiritual condition into which they have fallen.  David said that “the wicked do not know; neither do they understand; they walk about in darkness” (Ps. 82:4–5).  And Solomon explained that “the way of the wicked is like darkness; they do not know at what they stumble” (Prov. 4:19).

This is a very valuable lesson to learn because if we learn it, we might catch ourselves if we ever wander off the right path, and repent.  Preacher Clark did that.  When he was young in the Lord, he met a brother one day that he had gossiped about, and he felt ashamed.  He could hardly look him in the eye.  And he made up his mind from that moment on, he would never say anything to anyone about another child of God that he would not say in his presence.  In other words, he would never again shoot from the darkness at anyone.

Communion with God through Dead Things?

“He cuts down trees of a forest.  He plants a fir,

and rain makes it grow.

He warms himself.  Yea, he makes a fire and bakes bread.

But then, he makes a god and worships;

he makes it a graven image and bows down to it.

Half of it, he burns up in a fire. 

Over that half, he cooks a roast, eats meat and is filled.

Moreover, he is warmed and says,

‘Ah!  I am warm.  I see the firelight.’

And the rest of it, he makes a god, his graven image.

He bows down to it and worships,

and prays to it, saying, ‘Save me!

For you are my god!’

They do not know, nor do they understand,

for He has besmeared their eyes

so that they cannot see, and their hearts,

so they cannot understand.

Yea, no one takes it to his heart,

nor has the knowledge or understanding to think,

‘Half of it, I burn up in a fire, and on its coals I also bake bread,

roast flesh, and then eat, and with the rest of it,

I make an abomination, that I might bow down to a block of wood.’

Communing with God through ashes‽

A deceived heart has led him astray, for it will not save his soul.”

Isaiah 44:14–20

We might say the same thing about water.  Christians drink some of it, and with the rest, they wash their sins away.  Or fabric.  With some fabric they make blue jeans, and with some of it they weave holy garments.  Or wafers.  Some wafers they eat with peanut butter, and with other wafers they commune with God.  Some light candles on a birthday cake, and others they light as prayers for dead people.

Communion with God through water and fabric?  Communion with God through wafers and candles?  Is there no knowledge of God anywhere?  How can a man commune with the living God through dead things?

We have communion with God only through the Spirit of life, which Jesus died for us to have.