Tag: born again

 

TEMPT OR TEST?

By Rick Mathes

Luke 4:2 (NASB77) ² for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And He ate nothing during those days; and when they had ended, He became hungry.

The barren desert of the deserted is the devil’s natural habitat. Dry, dusty, forlorn and desolate is the garden of Satan. It’s a place of howling tomb stones covering the suffocating caskets of those encased in a liquid inferno of hysteria, chaos and insanity personified in estreme.

Satan can’t make you forsake Christ but he can attack unexpectedly with the circumstances that weaken your resolve to faithfulness in our Lord. If you just blink and make sin an option, you will eventually exercise that option and cave in to the temptation of counterfeit pleasures.

He attacks you at your weakest point because he knows that that is the shortest distance to the grave because the wages of sin is death no matter how small the infraction. Just a drop of lethal poison in a cold glass of sparkling clear spring water will do and he knows what makes your knees buckle before his smoldering throne. No mercy!

Satan disguises himself in deceitful friendliness. He’s your best friend and favorite neighbor: your spouse and yes, even your pastor. This angel of light, Lucifer, fools even the most cautious because he is the father of lies and you believed him all your life until you met the Way, the Truth and the Life.

The devil’s favorite tactic is to quote Scripture falsely and out of context. He thinks you won’t know the difference because he knows the Word better than you do. His entry level to your fall is doubt which is the opposite of faith. With flagging faith your trust in Jesus fades and you see the power of our own means to mislead yourself and others.

It all stems from the spiritual pride of deceiving others into believing that you are a Christian in good standing when it is nothing more than the selfish ambition to be your own god. This is what caused Satan to fall from glory and it is the temptation he uses to cause you to fall into the undying caldron of boiling fire in hell.

It is my fervent belief that believers cannot be tempted. My logic is that darkness cannot enter light so if you are “born again” the Light of the Savior shines in you and the darkness of the devil cannot invade it. What you experience as a temptation is really a test from the Lord. He has let the devil have a go at you to show all the depth of your faith and love for Him.

So the next time a sin fleetingly breezes through your consciousness, stand against it, say “Depart from me Satan,” resist the sin and then say, “This one is for you Lord!” Pass the test and defeat the tempter.

 

 

TEACHER

By Rick Mathes

John 13:13  “You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am.

No one can rob the bank between your ears. Jesus said that we perish for lack of knowledge. So it behooves us to choose our teacher very carefully. We all must learn from someone. We need to learn from a Paul and pass it on to a Timothy. What could be more appropriate but to go to the Teacher of Paul, the one He called Master Even today, I strongly encourage you to follow the Pastor that follows the Master. Better yet, get into the Word and the Holy Spirit will guide to truth in His bloody footprints.

Most likely you are a seeking sinner that is towing around an evil nature. Your sinful gain has been found to be cold and lifeless. You have become a dead man walking around, looking for a place to be buried: no tears left. Even what you do understand in the Word has become dry bones and lifeless. At this point your best “plan A” is to sit at the feet of the feet of the Teacher and use our ears and mouth proportionately.

Why is He our Master, you are asking? He saves the lost! You have quite a dichotomy of confusion to deal with if you are not lost and not a Christian. You are going to Hell is Jesus is not your Lord (Master) and you are not His servant (slave).

Jesus ascended alive into the heavens while 500 witnesses watched His feet leave the ground and fade into the highest glory. He finally became the King of Israel in their sight and His Church’s Bridegroom. As this transaction of atonement unfolded, you are His and t he rest of your life is none of your business. He has become your hand and you have become His glove; God with skin on.

We are now as believers satisfied with our destiny knowing He loves us and our life is to serve His purposes here now and in the New Jerusalem later. One day, if you are His, you and I will be walking those golden streets of glory together. No pain, no wars, no sorrow and no sin.

You can rest assured that He is coming again. This is the glorious hope we believers press on for. No matter how your life has been in the past, you are writing the Epistle according to you right now. How you die will illustrate how you lived. So I encourage you to put a bow on your life and confess Him as your Lord to all who will listen.

TAKE HEART

By Rick Mathes

John 16:33 (NASB77) ³³  “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

While you are asleep tonight, Satan will be doing push-ups! His every moment of diabolical passion is to steal your joy and assurance of salvation no matter what it takes or no matter what he has to do. He is a master of lying by omission; that is putting enough truth into a lie to make it believable and then persuade you to act on it. Or put another way, to leave out some truth to give you a distorted understanding that suits his purposes to destroy your relationship with Jesus.

What is a person who loves the Lord to do? Look up! The glass is half full and it overflows from above and a stooping God that blesses us with His graces. Any other direction of your view will only give you a variety of reflections all of which will defeat the evil one as long s you keep your focus on Jesus and His elect.

Look downward and you will be encouraged that the dead in Christ will rise first into the heavens to be met by our Lord and ushered into their everlasting eternity of joy and the ecstasy of seeing Him as He really is.

Take a glance around you but be sure to look closer to what is not so obvious. It has been my experience that the silent warriors have first claim to be invited to the front altar of that Holy Mansion in heaven. They are the ones you would never expect to be there in fact you never even noticed them go about the Father’s business. They quietly obeyed Him in prayer, financial support and service so quietly, no one even noticed.

Then take a look within you and take a real look at jhow far you have come from what you have been. The light in you is displacing the darkness very noticeably and in a public way. Others puzzle around what has happened to the old you. The Son is rising on your spitural horizon so looking ahead is so much more pleasant than you ever thought possible.

You have a very real and living hop of eternity in the heavenlies with all the eternal friends you made in this brief earth experience. Oh, how much we love Him. Take heart!

SURVIVING HATE

By Rick Mathes

John 15:18 (NASB77) ¹⁸  ” If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.

The Word of God says that if we love the world, the love of the Father is not in us. So isn’t it ironic that the world we are so tempted to love hates us in direct proportion to our love of the Lord. The more we grow to love Him the more those who are not His hate us and I am extremely grateful for that. I don’t want to be one of them, do you?

Not in any particular order but the world, without Godly restraints, is destroying everyone physically with not only bad diets and dangerous foods and eating habits but with alcohol and a banquet of drugs that make you feel good while they are killing you. Isn’t that just like Satan?

One he’s weakened you physically, he will go for your mind and plant doubt and fear or anxiety there which are the keys to hell. The keys to heaven are faith and trust. Even in the midst of a prayer the evil one will slip in a sick thought and the last place the world wants your mind to focus is on the Word of God. That book becomes the devil’s public enemy number one!

The world will do all it can to affect your carnal interests with success and approval but effect your every effort with worldly, material desires, goals and achievements. All this is temporal or world views are narrowed through the prism of hell. Bad becomes good and good bad. Defecating on the Cross becomes fashionable.

Divorce, week-end marriages, recreational sex, and even bestiality become the in-things with homosexuality in the lead; anything goes if the adults are consensual and no one gets hurt. It’s all relative with no moral absolutes except those that are relative to the social context.

Get a handle on this. Religion is making God in man’s image and likeness. It is a matter of bringing God down to our standards of depravity. You can call it legalizing sin. God is dead and mankind rules!

So if there is only one God it doesn’t matter what religion you have or rules you follow, if He is the God of love, He will never send anyone to a hell. Just love everyone and you will go to heaven? Hogwash!

STRONG KINGDOMS

By Rick Mathes

Ephesians 2:2 (NASB77) ²  in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Satan offered Jesus the kingdoms of this world if only He would worship him. Jesus, of course, refused but sometimes we don’t. He couldn’t offer them if he didn’t have them to offer. So the world system is not at all compatible with the heavenly system. But Satan at least temporarily has a grip on his sinful world that is destined to end in fire according to Peter.

Jesus knew all of this when He took His first step out of His carpentry shop to deliver us from evil. The current world-view or much of this worild is shaped by the devil’s various religions. You have to search very carefully for true Christianity. Satan is allergic to Christians and upon any contact he breaks out in flames!

Jesus stands with us and by us as we press on regardless of the quantity tht number themselves with us. He keeps us in the circle of His protection. It’s a nasty planet for we Christians to live in but it is only for a season and one day it willall be made anew. WE just need to stand firm and let the Holy Spirit have its way in our life.

Knowing that Satan only has his power because Christ is temporarily permitting it is a real comfort. In the Lord’s time, whenall that are His have confessed Him as Lord, thenand not a moment sooner will the trumpet sound and the sky explode in His glory.

The lust of the flesh is the “fresh meat” bate the devil uses to lure its prey into the trap. It all beginswith your eyes being captured on something sinful but oh so enticing until you taste of it and then you become hooked for more.

These sins of your mind, heart and even your soul confirm you are a child of evil. You can only break the iron bars of hell with a belief in Jesus as your Savior and Lord. With no Savior, you will have no promise, no hope and sadly no God. You will suffer the flames of Satan’s kingsoms forever and you will remember again and again, “I told you so!”

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!

 

 

 

STRANGERS

By Rick Mathes

John 10:5 “And a stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t refer to Ezekiel 34. Here’s just some highlights to wet your appetitie:

Ezekiel 34   “As I live,” declares the Lord GOD, “surely because My flock has become a prey, My flock has even become food for all the beasts of the field for lack of a shepherd, and My shepherds did not search for My flock, but rather the shepherds fed themselves and did not feed My flock; ⁹ therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: ¹⁰ ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I shall demand My sheep from them and make them cease from feeding sheep. So the shepherds will not feed themselves anymore, but I shall deliver My flock from their mouth, that they may not be food for them.”‘

What is the common denominator of these few verses? The so-called shepherds are weak to the enemy. Doesn’t the Word command us to put on the armor, pick up the sword and dig in our cleats for the battle? Sometimes I feel like choking the weak-willed ministers that have drained the blood of Christ from the gospel. It’s not politically correct to feed, clothes, shelter, comfort and visit. Shame on us!

They will be punished in the last analysis. These cowards for Christ have all but rolled out the red carpet for the world to roll on in on it. This apostasy will not escape the notice of a righteous and Holy God. These flaming hell-hounds with a pastor’s mask on will be punished in a hotter place in Hell. It would be better that these minister’s of “another gospel” were never born.

In my humble, blatant and steamingly demanding way, I believe the false prophets should be deported to that Hawaiian island the navy uses for target practice! If this opinion is a sin, I will repent the minute I feel any guiltiness over it. They should be castrated and removed by the sheep who clearly recognize a false shepherd when they see one.

My greatest heartbreak over this whole matter is the sheep who are not being fed the Gospel according to Jesus. They have laid out before them a buffet of garbage and the dimmer switch is going down: the lights are flickering out in most churches. The sheep are not being fed.

Let me talk straight talk to you. These strangers will be destroyed when the Day of the Lord arrives. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” and He really means it!

STOP SINNING

By Rick Mathes

1 Corinthians 15:34 Become sober-minded as you ought, and stop sinning; for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse in American courts; those who continue to sin when they know better, know better and are without excuse. “The fool (imbecile) has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’ and that’s exactly what we do when we leave good sense in a ditch and sin without abandon. When there is no remorse of sin, there is no knowledge of Jesus. If you will be honest with yourself you will have to admit an aunt, mom, friend or stranger has been used of God in your past to convict you of sin and draw you to repentance. Your iron heart zigged and zagged a path to fight the Godhead magnet of unmerited election. Looking back you can see how hard the Holy Spirit had to work to get you to this place of reading this article.

When you return to the foot of the cross not only do you have a deep remorse over sin but a mighty sense of trust in Jesus returns. Doubt and fear are the key to the gate of hell. Faith and trust are the passwords to glory. The armor gets heavy and our sword drops and our knees buckle from time to time. We are only human.

But with renewed trust, we step out of the boat with overpowering peace. Whatever happened to Shalom, Salaam and Peace be with you? All three faith groups; Jews, Muslims and Christians claim they worship Abrahams God of peace and then they continue in war. Go figure?

When was the last time you had an overwhelming joy? When did your dopamine level surge without the boost of cannabis? When was the first time you got a real rush of the Holy Spirit? Have you been flat-lining lately? Then come home fellow Christian, come home. The foot of the cross is a great place to start your journey to glory all over again.

Have an intense sorrow for having wandered away. Tears wsh the soul and it rises to exhilarating praise. The Holy Ghost dynamite will once again explode within you and your zeal for ministry will return. Welcome back!

 

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

By Rick Mathes

Luke 4:18-19 (NASB77) ¹⁸ ” The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are downtrodden, ¹⁹ To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

The Bible teaches us that Jesus grew in stature and wisdom. That means he went from less to more in both. His childhood textbook was Isaiah and the following verses must have sent a thrill up His spine as He realized that they were talking about Him!

Isaiah 42:1 (NASB77) ¹ ” Behold, My Servant, whom I uphold; My chosen one in whom My soul delights. I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice to the nations. Isaiah 61:1-2 (NASB77) ¹ The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, Because the Lord has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to captives, And freedom to prisoners; ² To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord, And the day of vengeance of our God; To comfort all who mourn,

When I put my hand on the scriptures in Isaiah I sense a kinship with a brother in Christ that I will be very happy to meet when I go home. His prophesy is electrifying and the Lord must have been wide-eyed and excited when He realized that He was the Servant God spoke to. I was very skeptical of church, religion and the Bible. But since I had given my heart to Jesus I thought the least I could do was to learn all I could about Him so I read just the “red parts.” It only takes 3 hours to do so.

Then I outlined that all I needed to know was:

• Was He really born God of a virgin?
• What did He do while He was here on earth?
• What did He teach His apostles to do?
• Did He really die for my sins?
• Did He really rise from the grave alive?
• Did He really ascend into heaven?
• And is He really coming back for me?

If all those answers were in the affirmative column then the only question left was, “What does He expect me to be doing when He gets here? His “Statement of Purpose” is quite clear as to what you and I should, as believers be engaged in if “the Spirit of God is upon us.”

• We are to bring good news to the poor.
• We are to set the captives free.
• We are to provide recovery of sight to the blind.
• We are to set free the downtrodden.
• We are to proclaim that today is the day of your salvation!

Well, is the Spirit of God upon you? Then get with it; the Lord is nearer than you think!

STARGATE

By Rick Mathes

Matthew 3:2 (NASB77) ² ” Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

There is a famous movie and follow-up TV series titled Stargate. It is an ancient Egyptian arch with the entry, a wall of shimmering water. What the film adventurers do is bravely step in and through this glistening wall into another whole new world. Well, I love to daydream about stepping through the Gate into heaven. I know this is not biblically described as a Stargate to glory but this imagery serves the purpose of satisfying my imagination. I pretend I am stepping through that wall of water into glory and seeing Jesus and the New Jerusalem.

This amazing vision of stepping into glory was trumped by a real vision I had one night. I was on my knees in the pitch black darkness of my bedroom repenting of my sins back to the day I was born! I wanted to attain a new level of holiness not like anything I had ever reached to before.

Suddenly, I burst into an expanse of blue sky with wispy clouds that I could sense were alive. I was aware of all my body parts but I couldn’t see them. I just knew I was there in a body. I hung on nothing but this beautiful sky.

Have you ever been totally immersed under water? They you must know what it is like to be fully encompassed by liquid. Well, that was my experience except the liquid was love. I can’t explain it any other way.

Now just as I was basking in this wonderful feeling, it got much better!

I became love.

That’s right, like sponge absorbing water I soaked in love completely. I became love! This is the best I can describe this “taste of heave.” I know that the Lord is love and he is as near as a repentant prayer.

You may not have this sampling of His glory a I had. Your reward may be entirely different and in fact you may not feel anything at all this side of Stargate as I did. But rest assured that if you repent and step through the Gate, the reward of heaven will be yours.

You will discover that heaven is the fellowship of the love the Holy Spirit flows between the Father and the Son. Repent and you will know you know the Lord is nearer than you thought!