Tag: Christian

BY YOUR DEEDS

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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!

STREET SMART

Tagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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!

BLESS VS. CURSE

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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

Tagged , , , , Leave a comment

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?

BELIEVE OBEY

Tagged , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

BELIEVE-OBEY

By Rick Mathes

Luke 6:46 And why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?

When you confess Jesus is Lord you have attained intellectual ascent. But when you reach down 18 inches to your heart and confess Jesus as Lord, you have put him on your throne and made Him the boss: you are under new management. There are a few guidelines along the way that you should use as a check-list and it is my purpose in this article for you to live under His Lordship and leave easy-believism in the dust of your history and step into His-story.

Jn. 3:7 There is no justification without regeneration. No matter how politically incorrect it is, you must be born-again. This is the catalyst for all that follows.

Jas. 2:20 Faith without works is a dead faith; no faith at all. For every cause there is an effect. When I’m happy I smile, sad I cry. When I love Jesus I work for Him.

Mat. 10:22 The mark of true justification is perseverance in righteousness. This means that if you are truly born-again and He’s your Lord, you never give up.

Lk. 6:46 Faith in a Jesus who is Savior but not Lord is a faith in another Jesus. It is an inevitable experience of a true believer that if you believe you obey.

Lk. 9:23 If one wants to serve Christ: pick up your cross and follow Him. You have no one to blame for your sins and their consequences but you alone.

Heb. 12:14 We must pursue holiness. To be holy we must be wholly His. We can’t hold anything back. You can’t be part saved. Indecision is a decision: you remain in the filth of sin.

In total these sign-posts are there along the way to measure your relationship to Jesus. Satan’s greatest delight is for you to live the illusion that you are saved when you are not. That’s what carnal religion is. It is a faith in Father Lucifer’s doctrines, ceremonies and traditions.

Satan uses men to invent a religion when they make God in the image and likenss of God. They turn your eyes out instead of out. You begin to obey the Lord of Hell and in short you become a Satanist if you confess you believe and don’t obey. (Read this last sentence again.)3

BELIEVE IN HIM

Tagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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 HIM

Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

BELIEVE HIM

By Rick Mathes

John 11:40 Jesus •said to her, ” Did I not say to you, if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

Do you want to step into glory? The key to heaven’s gate is belief. It’s too simple. Why do we have to complicate it with so many man-made distinctives? He simply instructs us to have faith and to believe. Faith, for His purposes, is beyond our grasp. What I mean is this: when we say “I can’t” He says, “I can” and if we act on that faith in Him it is called belief and we have stepped out of the boat. It’s all about Him while we walk on Living Waters.

The most obvious inquirer is the questioning unbeliever. What a blessing to have someone approach you and ask, “What must I do to be saved?” Now they may not use those exact words but the message is the same. We all want to be loved and we aren’t to our satisfaction until we believe and are loved by Jesus. Our love for each other is self-gratifying will our love for each other through Him is self-denying.

The most exciting confrontation with Christ is the anxious seeker. Follow this logic:

  • I don’t know I don’t know
  • I don’t know I know
  • I know I don’t know
  • I know I know

Which of these is the inquirer you are being confronted with?

Let’s take a look at the suffering believer for a moment. Life can be quite a drama with its ups and downs. The real world has some tough places we have to pass through on our way home. When you believe in Him you see Him being glorified in all your experiences of sickness, stress, fear and the world of unbelievers. Just stand fast and it will pass.

I can speak for me that I have often been a discouraged worker. It’s taking me many years to learn and accept that God has never had a bad day. I may not like how things are going now bujt when I look back at all that has happened; my life has been a masterpiece of His genius.

Last but not least is the dying Christian. How you die displays how you lived. Believers die believing.

BELIEVE A LIE

Tagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

BELIEVE A LIE?

By Rick Mathes

Romans 5:5 (NASB) 5  and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

God makes a promise, faith believes it, hope anticipates it and patience quietly awaits it. Our hope is that we can discern the lie and it’s by our faith that He will lead us out of the flames into the living water.

Thomas Scott

No affliction nor temptation, no guilt nor power of sin, no wounded spirit nor terrified conscience should induce us to despair of help and comfort from God.

All unbelief is the belief of a lie.

Think. What would you do without Jesus? Do you really believe the lie that you can do it your way and earn your own right to heaven? What god will you turn to? Jesus said that He would lay His life down for you and then pick it back up. He did it, that settles it, and I believe!

Jesus said from the cross, “It is finished!” and after the white throne judgment He is going to say, “It is done.” When He does not even God will be able to save you. That’s right! Not even God Himself. There is no “Plan B” in hell; no options. I don’t like that so I chose to live and at least make an effort to lift m myself back up and have a chance of making up for all the people, places and things I have damaged beyond repair.

Don’t wait. You never know when it’s your last chance.

Alexander MacLaren

Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature. Belief or unbelief is a test of man’s whole spiritual condition because it is the whole being of affections, will, conscience as well as the understanding which are concerned in it.

Make a choice. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the Life.” Then He said, “Do you believe this?” If you do then act like it. When people get to know you do they get to know Jesus or the devil. Don’t wait until there isn’t an option: this is urgent.

BELIEVE

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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?