Tag: Allah

DECEIT

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DECEIT

By Rick Mathes

Acts 13:10 and said, “You who are full of all deceit and fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease to make crooked the straight ways of the Lord?

The devil keeps his prey in sight and on friendly terms until the time is right to strike and make him a child of Satan. Jesus said, “I AM the way, the truth and the life.” Satan is the wrong way, a father of lies and an executioner of your soul. When you sin you are declaring, “Satan is my Lord.” Let that sink in a minute.

The sewer of truth is deceit and we all have a place for it in our hearts that we are not willing to give up. It’s this resistance to repentance that hinders knowledge. Didn’t the Word warn, “My people perish for lack of knowledge?” The lies you choose to nurture keeps you from God. Oh how He wants to hold you in His arms and love you but the slime of deceit, dripping from your soul makes God gag.

It’s buying the lies Satan throws at us that leads to pride. We have success with a little lie; get more things so we escalate our lies and deceit to get a bigger slice of the world’s toys and trinkets. We become like a decorated Christmas tree blinking and beautiful. But when the decorations are put away we notice that the tree is dead. It was all a false façade with no living substance to sustain it.

Everything contrary to truth is a fraud. When Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Jesus didn’t waste is breath explaining it to him because all Pilate was doing was concealing that hate that throbbed through his heart. Most inquirers are only conceiving evil plans and distracting truth by semi-truth twisting or circular reasoning. It’s all relative they claim because they don’t want the light to shine on their darkness.

Lies and deceit can only encourage sin. They have no other motive but to slash that whip on the Lord’s back one more time. The dirty-duo grinds that crown of thorns into His head again and again. They thrust the sword of death into His heart again and again all because you have polluted your souls with unconfessed sin.

In the last analysis your heart hardens I was shocked to learn I had four hardened arteries. Within two days I was on the operating table and my physical life was extended. But a hardened heart has no cure but to repent, submit and obey Him. Otherwise you are going to burn baby burn!

COMFORTER

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COMFORTER

By Rick Mathes

John 14:26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.

Islam teaches that Jesus sent Mohammed to be our counselor and teacher not the Holy Spirit. Talk about scripture twisting, they also claim that Abraham was to sacrifice Ishmael not Isaac. How out-there can one get. Yet, most people you ask haven’t a clue what or who the Holy Spirit is and what His involvement is in our lives to this moment! I won’t even begin to suggest to you that I am the final word on this issue but I have made a few observations the teachings of the Bible that makes the Holy Spirit a critical component of my life in Him.

The Paraclete is definable to the extent that we understand Him to be equal to the Father and Son. Now I have read many books and articles trying to explain that the three independent personalities are one person and none of them make any sense! But just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean God doesn’t know it. I just accept the Trinity by faith in the Word that says it is so. I like the analogy that the Father is the sun, the Son is the illumination and the Holy Spirit is the warmth between them. Or how about one times one times one equals One?

What can I say with certainty is that the Holy Spirit is the Comforter. He brings the warmth of the Son into your heart and being. He embraces us with the confidence that everything is going to be ok. It’s a real blessed assurance not a counterfeit that the devil cooked up. You can’t touch the flames without pain and where there is smoke, there is fire. But when the dove lights on your head, the peace that surpasses understanding washes your soul and enlightens your heart with an appreciated confidence that strengthens your resolve to press on.

The Comforter provides comfort to the comforted!

This is a real life experience with the Holy Spirit that is felt, actuated and confirmed by the Word of God and the lives of the spirits submitted to the Lordship of Jesus. The unbelieving doctor said, “Can you see, smell, taste, hear, taste or feel the Holy Spirit?” The Christian answered, “I can feel Him.” “That makes it 4 against and one for. As a doctor of medical science, I won’t accept that as fact.” The Christian countered, “Can you see, smell, hear, taste or feel pain?” The Doctor admitted he could feel pain. The Christian countered, “Then it’s a fact the Holy Spirit is as real to me as pain is to you. I pray you believe and the pain will pass!”

CHURCH CORRUPTIONS

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CHURCH CORRUPTIONS

By Rick Mathes

1 Corinthians 1:2 (NASB77) 2  to the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours:

Every denomination has a “Church of Corinth” that has drifted in its leadership and lost its first love and focus. There are a few basic corruptions that know no religious distinctive. When Satan gets his nose into your church fellowship, his body is soon to follow.

Following humn leaders, that are humanists, only provides you with a veneer of a carnal communityof self-gratification. The devil knows that to disrupt the church he needs access to the pulpit he is often relegated to a leadership position because of our shamefuil apathy.

When earthly wisdom is favored, spiritual absolutes are compromised and wateed down to relative absurdities. A twelve inch ruler is 12 inches long and not 11 or 13 inches long depending on your personal law or rule of measurement. The same applies to salvation. Jesus is the ony way and you can’t be part saved by believing otherwise.

Like a fish out of water, the Word of God. You are signing hour own death warrant or rather certificate of dying in flames continuing action. Without the “Rock that don’t role,” your faith will only have the substance and constancy of cotton candy. It will tase good but there is nothing thee.

There’s no sense o flattering yourself with self-gratifying deeds, prayers or rituals. When you are your own god, you will have to deal with your own hell all by yourself! Pride of self dropped Lucifer from the highest plateaus in glory down the rungs to the dungeon of glow-torch flames from hell.

The culprit is lack of discipline. You are sovereign over you. The sin you have you want becaue if you didn’t want it more than you do want it, you wouldn’t have it! It’s that simple. Love the Lord more than the sin.

All the above shaken up and spread out is a fragmenting of the Body of Christ. When the head is sick the whole boy suffers. When lall yur body parrs are bruised, battered and broken, they can no longer work together in harmony. The corruption of your church has polited you too. Don’t be a Corinthian Church that even 50 years after Paul wrote the third letter to them, things got worse because of the younger members disrespecting the elders.

BY YOUR DEEDS

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BY YOUR DEEDS

By Rick Mathes

Acts 26:20 but kept declaring both to those of Damascus first, and also at Jerusalem and then throughout all the region of Judea, and even to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds appropriate to repentance.

Pray this: “Father God, by your grace I have been saved; Brother Jesus, by your stripes I have been healed: Holy Spirit, you know the mind of the Father and the heart of the Son, What does God want me to do?”

For openers, it is an answer to prayer when the Holy Spirit convicts you of the sin you have been hiding in that dark closet in your soul. Our deepest desire should be to be wholly holy. Any compromise is spiritual prostitution. A little lie with the truth or a little truth in the lie is deceitful beyond compare: neither integrity nor character. In either case the simple law of non-contradiction occurs: A cannot be non A. Sin is spiritual cancer and it must be removed or you will die and eternal death while still on your feet.

The Lord sees us in ways our natural eyes are unable to. If you could see my heart as the Lord sees it, you would run from me and I would be terrified to see yours. We really are sin-machines and our deeds show it. It is only in His shed blood that we receive a full pardon. When Father God looks upon us all He sees is His Son interceding for us. We truly are forgiven and our sins forgotten.

This is how it works; 1) You approach the Cross and as Jesus for forgiveness, 2) He will extend His blessing, 3) You receive the forgiveness (no guilt) and 4) You become a forgiver. The tough one is to walk away from guilt and become a virgin all over again. Flush your toilet and move on.

The vital life is exhibited by the works we produce. I know it’s by grace we are saved not by works but as James taught, if there aren’t any works there is good cause to question the health of this barren tree with no fruit. As the verse clearly teaches, we must repent, turn to God and prove that transaction by deeds. I wouldn’t trust it any other way.

God inhabits His praises like the fragrance of a rose. He also activates good works like a kaleidoscope of good deeds. I would rather see the sermon over hearing it, wouldn’t you? If you aren’t walking your talk, your talking is moot. It’s a waste of oxygen. The Comforter will bring you comfort in the highest degree.

The proof of repentance is a gift of the Holy Spirit. He is to infuse Christ and His efforts into you. You cannot do it without the Holy Spirit and it won’t get done without you. Your hands pick up the baton of continued blessing. Don’t drop it: press on!

CONQUERERS

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CONQUERERS

By Rick Mathes

Romans 8:37 (NASB77) 37  But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.

C.H. Spurgeon: Jesus is the representative man for His people. The head has triumphed and the members share in the victory. While a man’s head is above the water you cannot drown his body.

All the hope of ministry lies in the

Spirit of God operating on the spirits of men.

Jess disciples in His absence. The Holy Spirit then is all the Christ we need until His return. We pay so little attention to the Spirit of God that maybe now, in this devotional, we can give credit where credit is due.

Can you even imagine they removed the head of a trained monkey and attached it to a headless body of another monkey and it retained all its knowledge and training! A surgeon removed the heart from a patient and put it into a pan and then returned and put the silent heart into the man again and it began to throb with life. Where is life if all our body parts can be replaced? In Christ!

This inner vitality from Him makes us “able not to sin.” We have put out the flames of hell and have been resurrected from the dead. There was a time we walked around looking for a place to be buried but we were cowards to take our life. Now we cherish the Lord because His is the way, the truth and the life. We can defeat the most evil demons of hell and not even fear Lucifer himself because we win!

Sin cannot have dominance over us any more than darkness can put out light. All of hell, all sin, all demons and Lucifer himself is nothing more than an itch on God’s nose! So why are you surrendering to the losers?

Finally, we have a Commander-in-Chief that leads us to certain victory. We join Him as family, His family and full heirs to His estate. It is this eternal Glory in His Kingdom that we pledge our life, liberty and fortunes.

It all begins at the beginning: we are more than conquerors because we put on the full armor of God and fight our battles on our knees in prayer. Imagine that! We have His ear, His full attention anytime we need Him. What more assurance do we need that the battle is ours?

STREET SMART

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STREET SMART

By Rick Mathes

1 John 2:15-17 (NASB77) 15 Do not love the world, nor the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life,is not from the Father, but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God abides forever.

Fools go to fools and ask foolish questions of fools who give foolish answers for the fools to pass on to other fools. This is how the kingdom of Satan is preserved. You see it everywhere. Losers hang out with losers and continue the descent of spiraling loses. The rolling stone does truly gather the moss of earth’s excrement.

Much of this in enticed by Satan’s deceptions and temptations. The unaware and ignorant masses follow the hand that feeds them, the “feel good” goodies. One of my false shepherds from the abyss we called the “Candy Man” had all a blackened heart could desire: nails in the coffin of flames.

Satan has the same MO (method of operation) he has always had from the beginning. He was most successful with Adam and Eve, he failed miserably with Jesus in the desert and he had me fooled and in his clutches for 25 years.The first thing he does is to capture the focus of your eyes on the sin he knows you are most likely to weaken to. The he gives you just enough taste to create an insatiable appetite for more. Then he finishes you off with being so ashamed that you did the deed that you are too prideful to make it known much less to repent of it.

The eyes are the “window to the soul”. The look isn’t the sin the lingering is. As you fix your gaze, you deepen your addictive sensitivities and your knees buckle to face Christ.

Was Jesus able to sin? Yes! But in the Spirit, He was able to not sin as you are when you are “born again” and baptized in the Trinity of God.

When you are “street smart” you have an uncanny ability to sense and see the trouble brewing and headed your way. Capture that “Kodak moment” and see the punch coming, then counter-punch with the Sword: the Word of God. “It is written, it is written, it is written!”

It’s your perseverance in being adept at knowing Satan’s turf that will alert you to the survival skills you need to survive the temptations of the evil one. Just consider the whole issue a testing from the Lord and press on in the most dreadful of situations.

When you walk by, Satan better tremble because your “Home Boy” is the King of the hood!

WHAT IS MAN?

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WHAT IS MAN?

Psalm 8:4 (NASB77) 4   What is man, that Thou dost take thought of him? And the son of man, that Thou dost care for him?

Man lives on the fragile edge of life. His future can cut either way as God permits. The dilemma is in what he is made of. Prior to the fall he was God’s image and likeness but after the fall a deadly transformation occurred. The man became a monster!

His heart is wicked beyond measure and there is no good in him at least not enough good to be worthy to step into the Lord’s presence. Unless the mind is in motion the body and soul won’t respond. When you are blind to the Holy Spirit the Bible is just a volume of useless words. In this condition your affections are prostituted from our Lord’s approval to the devil’s revelries and shameful enjoyments.

The blind mind, paralyzes the body, pollutes the soul and enslaves the will. Satan knows exactly how to take you down. His only goal is to strip ou of every shred of righteousness so that your condition is deplorable and so unattractive that Christians will pass you by in your anguish.

The moment of truth comes when you realize you cannot better yourself. In a thought, you are not able to not sin. Helpless to every temptation, you are merely a puppet in the hands of any demon assigned to you: a plaything for sordid amusement. You cannot, I repeat, you cannot no nor ever work out your salvation by what you do. It is by our Lord’s gracious mercy alone that you can be spared an eternal death in the furnace of hades. Your only relief is to be born of God.

To survive man must have an understanding of the Word and be supernaturally enlightened. His heart needs to be renewed and his will emancipated. Then he will be able not to sin in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Face the facts:

Jesus saves us from the:

  • Penalty of sin
  • Power of sin
  • Pollution of sin

Be the man of God He created you to be and break the cuffs that are leading you to Satan’s mansion, the Department of Corrections.

BLESS VS. CURSE

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BLESS VS. CURSE

By Rick Mathes

Romans 12:14 (NASB77) 14   Bless those who persecute you; bless and curse not.

Everyone, including myself, have an obvious motive and an ulterior one. Both or either can be blessed or cursed of the Lord. The motive on the table could be self-sacrificing or under the table, self-gratifying.

There is the form and the essence. The form of God we see with the eyes of the Holy Spirit is the body and life of Jesus. His essence, or what He’s made of is found in God’s breathed Word, our Holy Bible.

A double blessing is a double grace.

Bless the Holy Spirit with all that is within you and He will reciprocate with all that is within Him: the words and works of Jesus Christ. We know His efforts are successful because He is God: all-knowing, all-powerful and all-present. God never fails with His intentions. You might pray, “I’m not having a good time,” but you are in His perfect will nonetheless.

Your heart beats with His and His instructions for your life are perceived and accepted. The Words He has for you leap off the pages of the Gospel according to Jesus Christ. Our Lord’s Words and Works. Try my system: read and parse all the red parts of your Bible with as many commentaries as you can carry. I did. I was a red-letter theologian.

Born-again means you die to the old life which hardly any professing Christians do. They continue to drag that rotting corpse along behind them. His power, the very power of creation itself, think about this, is in you!

  • How big is your God?
  • How much room is there in you for the Holy Spirit?
  • How much of Him will you allow in?

Your yielding to divine grace is absolutely irresistible. Like metal drawn to a magnet, you are being drawn to the foot of the Cross to repent of your sins in the mud, the blood and the tears of those that preceded you to this holy ground of forgiveness.You may not see, hear, taste, touch of smell our Lord but as heaven is real, so are all your feelings of His presence in the Holy Spirit. The blessing is Him and the curse is sure to follow if you stand at the foot of the Cross and give Him the finger!

BELIEVE IN HIM

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BELIEVE IN HIM

By Rick Mathes

Romans 4:24 but for our sake also, to whom it will be reckoned, as those who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead,

What we do with our belief is not prescribed by manmade rules or rituals such as the Church of Rome are so choked by. No, real belief results in a real spontaneous response from our mind, to our heart and from our soul. Hands up, down, folded, all this is not something to follow because others do it that way.

What I do know about believing in Him, worship just happens. So as not to be distracted by others, when I want to approach Jesus and worship Him I close my eyes and get into my own little private chapel. I also have observed that everyone who approached the Lord fell on their face and were overwhelmed with shame at the sin they were still infected with. How horrible can it be to be transparent before our Lord and have Him see us as no one else can?

Repentance is the issue believers constantly wrestle with. Repenting of our sins is the absolute opposite of what our natural self wants to do. It is down-right ugly how we resist the holiness required of us by God’s breathed Word in the Bible.

Once we make an honest confession as believers in the Holy of Holies, we are supernaturally to let Him live through us. We imitate in our flesh the Lord of heavens that is clothes in our skin. When people get to know us, they get to know Him. As a bond servant, it is not too hard to conclude that we are to live to serve Him.

This can be done in a number of ways but it all begins with selflessness and sacrifice. The Lord knows all that needs to be done by us to advance the Kingdom but the heart of all efforts is our relationship to Him. It isn’t what you do t counts, it’ who you are in Him that is everything. St. Francis of Assisi said it so well when he said, “All I want to do is go about the Lord’s business and not know it.” That’s what I call humility.

Would make this suggestion to you, “Do the best you can for Jesus and let someone else get the credit” or “Replace thyself.” It’s all about Him not you.

BELIEVE

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BELIEVE

By Rick Mathes

Acts 16:31 and they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved, you and your household.”

Faith is reaching beyond your grasp and when you do in Christ you become a believer. So the Christian faith begins with you believing in Him. Once I knew I knew He rose from the dead, I believed and have never turned back since. It is finished business because the Lord said so from the Cross but it isn’t done. He doesn’t announce that until after the white throne judgment when He will say, “It is done.”

The bone chilling consequence of this is that there will be a moment, a blink of an eye from that point forward no one will be able to be saved. It will be too late for those that have put it off and rejected Jesus as their Lord. The Muslims, Roman Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science and other eastern cults will drop into the flaming pit, the abyss of the dark-side with evil personified in Father Satan.

Receiving our Lord’s offer is the best choice you will ever have to make. His grace is handed to you and all it costs is everything you have and you are. In fact, the rest of your life is none of your business. You didn’t come to Him, He extended His hand, the Master’s hand and you reached back a slave evermore subservient to His slightest wish. This is the biblical truth! Don’t let anyone “soft-soap” you out of this fact with any scripture twisting.

He earned your trust through the witnesses of the sixty-six book library we call our Bible. They looked forward to the Cross and now we look backward to the same Cross.

WE do this to hear His voice ring through the ages in word and deed; As Josh McDowell has put it in his book “Evidence Deserves a Verdict.” Is Jesus a liar, lunatic or Lord? Let the Holy Spirit open your eares to hear the saints as they speak to you from the precious pages of His gospel.

“Look and be saved!” Moses had a foreshadow of His crucifixion. By His stripes we have been healed. Once you look into those pitiful eyes of our dying Savior, what choice is there but to yield to His call, “Believe in Me and be saved.” What is your plan B compared to Him?