Ever several months or so I am presented with a sermon that is so valuable to hear that I feel the need to share it with as many people as possible. You need to hear this sermon by Creflo Dollar. Take a leap of faith in my judgment and spend the 20 minutes that will explain everything that you need to understand about Christianity.
<Click here> It will be a revelation to you on some level, I guarantee it. (You will get the blog title if you take the time to view it – RT)
I recently saw this used in a presentation and it really stuck with me. It made me think that God does not give us a task to do without an ability to do it. That’s just what came to my mind…Take a second to tell me what came to your mind the first time you saw it…just curious…RT
There is a third of an acre of asphalt surrounded by a chain link fence in central Phoenix. The tarmac lies directly adjacent to the Central Arizona Shelter Services. Each evening the serial homeless and those with no place else to go gather, or, they are corralled by the local police into this lot. If you are one of the fortunate ones, you may get to spend the night inside the building. However, if you are violent or otherwise ‘less desirable’ you get the privilege of laying your body down on a blanket on the ground in this lot. (I wonder how much sleep you or I would get.) For the most part they are there not because they want to be, but the circumstances and consequences of their lives have placed them there. Doubtless that any had plans to wind up in this lot, yet here they are. I’m sure that if you could rewind the tape of their lives, for most of them, there was a point where their life turned toward this path, and left the path where they were in the arms of a loving family – a loving home.
Every major city in America has some place like this. Heck, every significant gathering of humankind has had places like this for centuries – the part of the community for those with no one, or nowhere to go – the place for those with no home. So, what is ‘home’? There are a couple of definitions I found that Continue reading
Ellie was at Wal-Mart today looking for some Thanksgiving decorations for a couple of baskets she is making – Thanksgiving baskets. (I love my wife – going in for her second hand surgery and still will not stop doing what she was created to do – spread love and hospitality.) Now, today is November 17 and Thanksgiving falls on November 28 this year, so that would be 11 days from now. So, she was shocked to see that most of the Thanksgiving themed merchandise had already been put away! And we haven’t even had a chance to give thanks! She said that it was full blown Christmas-land.
Does anyone else think that is strange? Maybe not strange so much as diabolical? I mean what does the holiday mean when we are not even given an opportunity to celebrate it through anticipation? Like, quick, let’s get Thanksgiving over already so we can focus our attention on the real selling season – Christmas! (That is even more of a joke.) So, I thought that I would also jump the gun a little bit this year with my own hollow-day rant.
Now, if you stop to think strictly from a spiritual point of view (which is the reason, you remember, we celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas) you need to ask, ‘who has the most to gain if mankind turns these holy-days into hollow-days: God or satan? ‘ The answer is pretty obvious. Get people to rush through the season, have them focus on the gifting and receiving and the stress associated with all that. (Click here to see my rant from last year about this.) Cloud their minds with images of the food, drink, gifts, Santa, snowmen, reindeer, turkeys, etc., and never mention God, or the Christ part for the season. Who do you think is lovin’ that? Our good ole boy – Lucifer. Satan is brilliant, the greatest of all of the angels. And subtle, he knows he has time on his side – slowly but oh so surely suck the Spirit out of our celebration and make it become more of a hassle than a joy. …And where do you think the inspiration came from for the term, ‘Xmas’? Jesus is the Christ, not the X.
This is where I end…you know what to do – see it for what it is and spit in the devil’s eye this year. And, if you see me, I would prefer a greeting of ‘Merry Christmas’ over ‘happy holidays’.
For many years I used to fantasized about winning the lottery – normally when the prize got over a hundred million dollars. (Like anything else would be a disappointment.) I used to dream what it would be like to have as much money as anyone could need to help all those poor souls out there who needed it. After setting up my family, of course, I could then spend each day figuring out ways to use the money to help all those people with any variety of problems that money could solve or at least help. So, I would wait expectantly, usually on a Sunday morning, to see the Powerball numbers and sadly realize that it was not to be. But, some day God would have me beat the odds because of my good intentions.
Then something happened. A friend told us there was this village right over the border that had no electricity, and that for something like $500, they could get the power lines one mile closer to the village. Coming from New York that blew my mind. Five-hundred dollars wouldn’t pay for the guy who you needed to hire to get the permit you would need to do the work. Then I found out that my friend’s aunt was helping these Mexican kids get through secondary and vocational school and it cost about the $400 for a full semester! It is amazing how living in the U.S and especially Scottsdale can warp your sense of what it takes to impact someone else’s life in a positive way…at least on a monetary level. Here I am thinking that I need to be a multi-millionaire to do something significant. It was probably a good excuse to Continue reading
(God delivers revelation through many sources. Thanks Bryan, God’s messenger that prompted this revelation.)
First consider this premise. Is there a limit to how far a father will go to save his child? Is there really a point when God, who has all of eternity, will give up on one of his sons or daughters? (Read Luke 15:4-7 – the parable of the lost sheep) It is God’s will that none be lost. So take heart lost souls – all is never really lost because it is God’s will that we ALL be saved. (Note to RT: Get that through your head!)
Next, the church is beginning to come to grips with the fact that when Christ came, He came for ALL of us no matter what our sin may be: “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” – Luke 5:32 Note that there is no descriptive adjective that gives any type of qualification to the word ‘sinners’. So, the question I need to ask follows, is not accepting Christ into your heart before you leave this earth a sin – a sin that Christ cannot call us from? This is where I need some help in understanding if our present covenant with God has any time limitations to it. Is physical death the ‘dead’line? Or is there another ‘life’ (sort of like our life in utero) in which we still have the ability to repent? (Don’t try to put a name to this other ‘life’, because it would never be anything that we could imagine. Just like a fetus could never imagine what our life here on earth would be.) So does our ability to repent extend beyond this world? Then consider the parable of the workers in the field – read the whole thing from Matt 20:1-16. Here is just the twist: Continue reading
The other night I was about to doze off. (Usually Ellie and I watch a half an hour or so of TV before we nod off.) I was flipping around and stopped at an old movie called, The Keys of the Kingdom, with a very young Gregory Peck starring as a Catholic missionary in China. It seems that Father Chisholm (Peck) has some medical skills and heals the young son of a local Chinese land baron. To show his gratitude the land baron, Mr. Chia, offers to become a Catholic, which in turn would cause many of the people subject to his rule to become Catholics. Father Chisholm refuses the offer, ‘because that is not the way it works.’ Then what happened next I found quite disturbing. As he leaves, Mr. Chia says something to the effect that he understands the good Father’s rejection of his offer, because he is unworthy to be a Catholic. I immediately expected Peck’s character to correct him and use this opportunity as a teaching moment. But no, the Father is silent and allows the statement to stand. Well, I just saw the scene as another instance of the lack of understanding of exactly ‘how it does work.’ I know the movie is close to 70 years old, but I know for a fact, and have said it time before in this blog, that there are still multitudes of people who consider themselves ‘unworthy’ to have a relationship with God because of what they have done or have failed to do. The cold hard fact is that NONE OF US ARE WORTHY to commune with God. It is only through God’s good grace that we are all permitted access.
Then today, not two days after watching this scene (I fell asleep right after.) the homily was just that notion. God has gifted to us our salvation, our opportunity to commune with Him. He offers it to all of us. He gifts it to Father Chisholm and to Mr. Chia equally. It has nothing to do with worthiness. That, my friends is the KEY TO THE KINGDOM – understanding that there Continue reading
To walk out of God’s will is to step into nowhere. – CS Lewis
We are taught from an early age the importance of free will and our ‘right to choose’. But, once you have accepted Christ into your heart things start changing, and for the better. There soon comes a time when you no longer are burdened with ‘choosing’. Rather, it is as if these choices begin to be made for you – made with apparently little of your effort yet still in harmony with your intent. Decisions that you once battled over before giving yourself over to Christ become fewer and less stressful. Let me explain.
When we are confronted with most moral decisions, we normally know what the right thing to do would be. However, what makes the decision difficult is some potential inconvenience or insecurity that prevents us from doing it. Now, once Christ comes into your heart, you get to that point where you just ‘know too much’ to allow inconvenience or insecurity to serve as a reason for not doing the right thing. These are never again valid justifications once you begin to see the depth of the love, the depth of the sacrifice that was made for you, and the size of the unmerited gift presented to us by our Heavenly Father. You may even become embarrassed by your Continue reading