For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    Plan for the future and make the preparations to meet your needs before taking the time to make yourself comfortable.

    It is human nature. Time and again, we turn from God and sin. When we suffer the consequences of our sin, we turn back to God and beg Him to save us. All too often, our repentance was shallow and as soon as our troubles passed we returned to our sin. But God is gracious and merciful, He continues to offer His forgiveness and will welcome us home if we ever truly turn from our sins (and not just from their consequences).

    Paul writes about how our faith in God should change how we live our lives. Every time he writes about this, he follows a similar pattern. First he writes that we should completely avoid sexual immorality, lust, impure desires, and greed. Repeatedly, Paul lumps various sexual sins together with greed. In addition, he makes clear that greed is a form of idolatry. Greed is the worship of material wealth. The reason Paul emphasizes these sins is because they little by little fill our time so that gradually the efforts we make to do God’s will are undermined by these sins.
    I want to point out again how Paul lumps greed in with sexual sins. He writes about sexual immorality, lust, evil desires, and impurity. The latter two are not exclusively sexual in nature, but are certainly related to sexuality. Then he adds greed to the list. Greed is not a sexual sin at all, but it goes along with it. If we look at society around us we will notice that those who are caught up by greed are usually sexually immoral as well. And those who are caught up in sexual immorality are often greedy as well. These are sins which tend to travel together. It is worth making this focus because there are all too many people who want to separate challenging sexual sins from challenging greed. There are those who preach against sexual sins while ignoring greed, and there are those who want to ignore sexual sins while challenging greed.
    I try to keep what I write short, but I need to make one more point. All too many of us, in our attempts to call people away from the sins above give in to anger, rage, and slander. There is an entire second “constellation” of sins for which we need to watch out. These are all related to anger. We need to be careful not to give into them. We often forget that if we allow ourselves to be justifiably angry it can easily lead us into sinful behavior. We are called to work for the good of others. Anger encourages is to work for against the good of others. If we are angry with someone, we will seek to “punish” them. This will cause us to act maliciously, or say things to cause others to think badly of them, or do other things which detract from doing God’s will.
    Having written about what we need to avoid, Paul goes on to tell us what to do instead. If we focus on filling our lives with virtues we will not have time for the sins he mentioned. If we act with humility, kindness, compassion, gentleness and patience we will not be easily sucked into those sins Paul had just written about. We are not to pursue these virtues for their own sake. Rather, these virtues should grow out of our love for one another. If we truly love others we will treat them with these virtues. All together Paul clearly shows us how we can judge our own behavior and act according to God’s will.

    Oh how this passage strikes me as applying today. Those who are supposed to teach us about God’s word twist it to say what they want it to say. They offer superficial answers to problems which require hard answers. They assure us that there will be peace when there is no peace. They are proud of distracting people from the real dangers of the world, rather than being ashamed. The common people and the leaders are equally guilty. They lie without a second thought. They deceive and cheat one another and then wonder why the economy is doing poorly. The people have refused to obey God’s commands so the time is coming when God will punish those who are “circumcised” in the body, but “uncircumcised” in the spirit. Those who make a pretense of doing good while selfishly seeking their own interest will suffer.

For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    An honest answer is a better indication of care and respect than a kiss.

    The psalmist reminds us of the importance of teaching the stories of our past to each new generation. When I was growing up, my family, and many others in my church, had a book called “The Martyr’s Mirror”. This book was an account of Christian martyrdom from the first century through the 17th century. By reading this book I learned the price that many have paid for following Christ. Furthermore, I learned that they paid that price joyously.

    When we came to Christ we were figuratively circumcised in that our spiritual nature was cut away from us. In that sense we died with Christ when we were baptized and were resurrected with Him. Our sins, and our sinful nature, were nailed to the cross with Christ. Now, God has raised us spiritually with Christ to a new life. We should not allow people to convince us that we need to follow certain dietary rules, or observe particular rituals, or hold celebrations on specific days in order to be saved. The Gospel message is not one of “do not do this and do not do that.” The Gospel is not a set of rules which govern our behavior. Instead our behavior is guided by our love of God and of others.

    God has offered people guidance. He has told us to follow the old way, the good way, but people have responded, “No, we want a different way. We don’t want to follow the path followed by the godly men and women of the past. They were fuddy-duddies. We want to follow the new, cool path. We need to be culturally relevant.” God has sent us watchmen who tell us to respond to the sound of the trumpet, but people have declared, “We have more important things to do. We will not listen for the sound of the trumpet, let alone respond to its call.”
    God warns us that He is raising up an army in a far away land. That army will be a destroying army and it will march upon us. There is no force that will stand in their way. Yet, even now, there is still time to turn from our sins. There are those who look at what is happening and are saying, “That cannot happen here.” Do not be fooled. It most certainly can happen here. It will happen here if we, as a people, do not start treating each other with justice. God is calling us to stop exploiting foreigners (think about why the Chamber of Commerce does not want immigration laws enforced), widows, and orphans.
    Do you really think that you can cheat and lie, steal and murder, commit adultery and other sexual immorality and never suffer any consequences? All of those actions have consequences and if we do not turn from them and start doing good, we will experience those consequences. Let us look at what has happened to other nations which were once mighty. The consequences of their evil came upon them and they were destroyed. I will pray for the people of my nation that they may turn to God.

For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    Plan ahead and make sure you know how you will pay for it before you start building or buying a house. The same concept can be applied to any large project, make sure that you have figured out how you are going to feed yourself while you are undertaking the project and plan the project before starting work on it.

    Are we like the ancient Israelites, who saw the wonders God performed, yet refused to trust Him? Will it take God starting to kill us for the people of the United States to turn to God? And if we do turn to God, will we do so with sincerity, or will we merely give lip service to Him? Trouble is coming for the people of the United States and the rest of the world. There is still time to repent of our sins and turn to God, but we must do so with sincerity.

    I prefer the NIV translation of this passage. We have been raised with Christ, so let us set our minds on things above, on the things of heaven. We died with Christ on the cross and our life is now with Him. Just as we are not yet completely raised in our new life in Christ, neither is the death of our sinful nature complete. We need to continue to put to death those things of our sinful nature which live within us. Those things which we need to put to death are sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed. The first four of these are variations on the same thing. These are all perversions of our God given sexuality. Paul lumps greed in with these distortions of sexuality and identifies them all as idolatry. The first four are the idolatry of worshiping ourselves. Greed is the idolatry of worshiping things, whether it is money, or food, or some other possession. In all of these the sin is serving our own pleasure ahead of serving God’s will.
    However, it is not enough to put aside and avoid these sins, which are readily seen as the sin they are. In addition to putting to death the idolatry of self contained in those sins, we must also put aside the desire to see others as less than ourselves. That is what the other sins really are, they are the attempt to put others below us. Anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language are all attempts to put others beneath our control, to make them less than ourselves. If we have truly allowed the Holy Spirit to strip off our old selves, we will not lie to one another. We will be honest about both our joys and our sorrows, about our successes and our failures. We will admit our sinfulness to each other and not try to pretend that we have it together.
    God has chosen us to be His holy people despite our unworthiness. Our response ought to be: compassion for others who are struggling with sin as we did and are; kindness towards those who are suffering the consequences of their mistakes; humbly recognizing that our mistakes are just as bad as theirs, even if we may have escaped some of the consequences they are experiencing; gentleness and patience in showing others how their sins are causing the problems they see in their lives. Let us always remember that we are no better than anyone else. The sins which God forgave me for are no less terrible than the sins which others need His forgiveness for. Considering that God forgave me for how badly I treated Him, how can I not forgive those who have done me wrong (especially since it may only be that I think they have done me wrong)?
    We cannot go wrong if we let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts and actively love those we come into contact with. In all of our actions let us remember that we represent Jesus to those who have not yet met Him.

    People twist the word of God to say what they want it to say, then proclaim themselves wise for doing so. They offer aspirin to those suffering from hemorrhagic fever and tell them that all will be well. But all will not be well. There can be no healing from the hurts people are suffering as long as they go on doing the things which have caused their hurt. People habitually lie to one another. They do not seek success through honesty, rather they attempt to take advantage of one another by lies and deception. We will do them no good if we continue to tell them that everything will be alright because God loves them. Everything will NOT be alright if people continue in the path that leads to death. God is willing to forgive, but His forgiveness does us no good if we continue to sin.

For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    Giving an honest answer is an act of love. If you truly love someone, you will not lie to them. Since we are called to love our neighbor (which Jesus defines as everyone we come into contact with), we should give everyone honest answers.

    It is important to tell and retell the stories from the past. They can serve as a reminder not to repeat the mistakes made by those who went before us. While each generation must make its own mistakes, it is worth trying to learn from the mistakes of those who went before us. Let us teach those who come after us the mistakes which we made, so that they can avoid them. Let us not give up just because they have not listened to us before and have already repeated some of the mistakes we warned them about.
    The people of Israel in the Exodus story repeatedly saw God’s mighty hand work on their behalf, yet time and again they doubted His ability to deal with the next hardship which came their way. This sort of behavior is not limited to the ancient Israelites, people of every generation have made the same mistake. Time after time throughout history people have experienced God’s miraculous aid, then when a new problem arose they complained and whined, rather than asking God what new wonder He was going to show them.

    When we come to Christ, He cuts away our sinful nature and removes its authority to rule our bodies and lives. We do not overcome our sinful nature by rigorous bodily discipline. It is not by strict ascetic behavior that we are released from bondage to our sinful nature. The cleansing of our sinful nature does not happen by avoiding certain foods or drinks, nor by eating certain foods or drinks. It is not accomplished by following certain ceremonies or rituals. We should neither condemn others for what foods they eat or drinks they drink, nor should we allow others to make us feel wrong for those things. Following such rules makes us feel that we have earned our salvation and such is not the case. We do not become righteous by following rules and rituals. It is only by Christ that we receive righteousness through the Holy Spirit. We will not defeat our sinful nature by our own pious self-denial. Such things will only give our sinful nature another way to control us. It is only by surrendering our whole being to Christ that we can be freed from our sinful desires, our sinful nature.

    When we chose a path for our life let us choose the old godly path. All too many people when it comes time to choose a path do not want to follow the old, tried and true path of godliness. They want to find a new path to righteousness. They think the old path is stodgy and boring. They want a path that is exciting and new. They want to demonstrate that they are better, brighter, wiser, more cool, more hip, more with it than those who went before them. Be that as it may, the old, stodgy path is the only one there is, if you want a path to righteousness. I will tell you that it may appear stodgy and boring, but it is more exciting than you can imagine. In order to discover that you need to be willing to travel down that path some distance. If you stay within sight of the other paths so that you can change your mind, you will never see the excitement which the old godly path has on it.
    God has posted watchmen to sound the alarm when trouble is coming. Those watchmen are now calling out that trouble is coming, but the people have chosen to ignore their warnings. They rejected the idea that the watchmen God posted could tell them anything. People have become like the person who works in a building who ignores the fire alarm because they think it is just another drill. There is a reason we conduct fire drills. God has sent prophets to warn us before. As in a fire drill, people responded and turned to Him. The danger they were warned of never materialized, so they are convinced that it will not materialize this time either. They do not consider that perhaps the reason it did not materialize was because they turned to God.