Tag: Christian

GOD MAN

By Rick Mathes

Romans 1:4 who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord,

Through the Spirit of Holiness, He was declared with power to be the Son of God. I can’t even get my mind around this incredible fact. The Creator took on the humanness of the flesh as you and I have. This leaves me breathless and numb with awe.

Make no doubt about it, Jesus is God. He couldn’t say, “I am God” because it would have been considered the absolute sin of blasphemy. He said He was God in every other way He could and neither Jew nor Gentile had any doubt about who He claimed to be, and neither should you.

What would it be like to have walked with Him those 3 plus years? His precious feet rested on the dust He created us with. The Eternal One became man and dwelt with His creation. He is doing the same today through the Holy Spirit that resides in you. This unifies and binds the Body of Christ in one accord. If He returned to walk in the flesh once again, could you look Him in the eye and confess Him as your Lord? If not, even Father God cannot help you from the wrath to come.

Because He was and is God, He is unchanging. That is why the written Word is so important to us. What you see of Him there is here now. We just don’t have the heightened senses to see or hear Him and His angels hovering around us and interacting in our day to day affairs. What a comfort to know that the they are here and He cares about us now in our present circumstances.

As God He knew from then until now what we would think before we thought it. He is all knowing; even our darkest thoughts are on the Imax screen for Him to see. We may have a false front we put on for others for our benefit but that means nothing to Him because He swee our hearts as they really are. God forgive us!

I don’t understand it  but God bled and died on the cross like the man I would have been had He not taken the cross in my place,. The Holy Grail of His love was His person. He came in the flesh and left in the new flesh. He’s coming back and we will return to our first nature and walk in the Shekinah glory of God Incarnate declared to be ours by Father God.

GOD IS

By Rick Mathes

Titus 2:11 (NASB77) ¹¹  For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men,

God appeared to all men in the form of a man. This is call hypostasis. How can Jesus be fully God and flly man at the same time? I didn’t know but that doesn’t mean God doesn’t understand it. What we do know iis a lot about god and a lot about the man from Galilee. Let me take a moment to list few attributes of god and similar words that may give us both a fuller picture of Him.

God is:

• Personal          human, internal, secret, novel, characteristic
• Eternal             divine, nonmaterial, lasting, timeless, permanent, unfailing
• Spirit                life force, ghost, emphasis, seat of feeling, courage
• All-knowing     divine, well-informed, omniscient, ruling, governing
• Sovereign        masterful, national, dominant, ruling, governing
• Unchanging     eternal, permanent, stable, regular, infallible
• Good               skillful, desirable, benevolent, obedient, moral, innocent
• Righteous        right, moral, judicious, accurate, wise, principles
• Just                 legal, impartial, judicious, accurate, wise, principles
• Truthful            correct, honest, realistic, literal, naïve
• Holy                 virtuous, perfect, etical, irreproachable, impeccable

God has:

Saving Grace: It is entirely of His choosing that we are saved. I know don’t like to accept it but the truth is that you had absolutely nothing to do with your getting saved. It was all entirely of His doing.

Schooling Grace; The Logos comes alive when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and the lessons learned from the Word of God get deeper and deeper the more you study the Word. We will be studying God forever.

Sanctifying Grace; The pursuit of holiness is futile. We can’t chase it, find it or cquire it apart from the imputation of His holiness on us.

Serving Grace; The natural result of unmerited favor is to bless those who don’t deserve it. This is a clear sign of a real life change and that is to love the unlovely without their asking to be loved.

GO!

By Rick Mathes

Hebrews 4:12 (NASB77) ¹²  For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Read the Word of God to:

• Know
• Grow
• Glow and
• Go!

It is the mirror for the Father’s heart and guidance for all those He loves and sent His Son to die for. His character and integrity is on every page with His blessing and best wishes for you to pursue holiness and the joy of your salvation.

Every word that falls on good soil will grow and prosper but it’s our calling to spread the seed. Shockingly the most fertile ground is in your church! Our post-modern watering down of Christianity has starve the souls of believers and has given unbelievers a false sense of security. Most of the condemned in hell were faithful church attendees. Too many demons have found their way into the pulpits and leadership of churches because the sheep could care less about sin, hell and death or the absolute truth.

The Word of God, like fresh water, will nourish your spiritual thirst and wsh away your sins so that you can be a sparkling clean lamp on a hill to enlighten all to the narrow way to glory. When danger approaches clean, above board, bright and in an attack mode, the Word of God becomes a Sword that slays evil by “It is written!” The Holy Spirit is the upholder and defender of the Father’s instructions and He will not tolerate the devil to move the street signs and guide us into the flames.

But back to the basics: a new baby Christian needs milk to grow on not a sword for combat. Bless the Holy Spirit for being so tender in His teaching and guidance through the volumes of the Bible. The Word is deep enough to drown an elephant but shallow enough for an infant to splash around in.

It time we grown and need to feed on the meat of the Word; If you have a Pastor that follows the Master, hang on to him! You need a Paul to learn from and a Timothy to pass it on to. That’s how faith to faith has worked these last 2,000 years. Jesus is the bread of life and it’s in Him that we grow strength and press on to His return!

 

 

GIVE ME SOME

By Rick Mathes

John 4:15 (NASB77) ¹⁵ The woman •said to Him, ” Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw.”

We cannot exist physically without water nor can we exist spiritually without the living water that only Jesus has to offer. Water is a word used to denote cleansing by the Word of God as in baptism or doing spiritual laundry. The woman at the well wants it but isn’t sure what it is. We are told we need to be baptized with water and fire: repentance and spirit-filled. The Holy Spirit is the fire but that’s for another devotional. Let’s focus here on the attributes of this living water.

It is thirst removing. Nothing can satisfy nor quench that burning thirst in our soul but what the Lord has to say in our Holy Bible. We hunger and thirst for this refreshment and our Lord graciously put His 66 books of heartfelt appeal to grace in our hands to read, listen, learn, apply and evaluate.

It is life preserving. We try to get our life together on our own and the more we try the more it disintegrates. Only from what proceeds from the mouth of God will keep us in Him until the Day of the Lord arrives!

It is filth purging. You can’t remain stained in sin when you are washed in the blood of Christ. His words cleanses from all unrighteousness in the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is softening. Even the biggest men with the hardest hearts will fall to their knees and cry out, “Lord, save me!”

It is fire quenching. Amen! The Word gives us fire insurance and even the gates of Hell cannot prevail against us.

It is spring creating. You will be filled to the brim and your cup will runneth over. Your veins will just pumped with the Gospel until you shout out, “Jesus is Lord!”

It is fruit producing. You will know them by their fruit. If He is truly their Lord, their walk will speak more loudly than their talk.

It is heaven ascending. Like the fragrance of a bouquet of flowers, your reading, speaking, singing and thinking the Word is very pleasant to the God whose hand wrote the holy pages of our Bible, whose Son lived the spoken word of God even unto death, and whose Holy Spirit quickens the message of our eternal Creator in your mind, heart and soul.

GIVE AND GIVE

By Rick Mathes

Philippians 4:15 (NASB77) ¹⁵  And you yourselves also know, Philippians, that at the first preaching of the gospel, after I departed from Macedonia, no church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving but you alone;

I was blessed to preach a service in a well-known national shelter for the homeless. The chapel was paced out with toothless, smelly, rag-tag winos to be there. I preached my heart out on encouragement and then an unexpected thing happened. The staff took an offering! I was shocked because this was a multi-million dollar ministry and the men were penniless indigents.

After the service I blew my top at the officer in charge, “How greedy can you get to squeeze the last drop of blood out of these poor homeless men? He explained, “Giving is a vial part of worship and that bum’s quarter was sure worth more in sacfificial giving than was your check fo $25 last Sunday. They are learning an important lesson in worship aren’t they? Wow!

WE are not under the law anymore so anyone who says yu must tithe, give 10% of your adjusted gross income to the church is mistaken. We are to give to Him what we don’t ned and I call that the “ouch!” level then it is a sacrificial giving: no pain, no gain.

Cheerfully give that amount freely and without worry about how you will get along without it. The Lord will provide and show you the way. So when you go to church with $20 in one pocket for McDonald’s and $10 in the other for Jesus, give $30 and joyfully sacrifice the lunch. You won’t miss it!

Now there has to be a consistency, so give an a regular basis systematically every Sunday or once a month but pray on each gift and give joyfully. This will give you joy especially if you don’t worry about how you can live on less. You need to send a few dollars for investment in the Great Commission.

So simply give what the Holy Spirit lays on your heart regularly and cheerfully. This really pleases our Lord. I  know as a ministry leader that I can earnestly pray all day but if I don’t pay the bill with tangible money, they will turn out the lights! AMEN?

GIFTS TO MEN

By Rick Mathes

Ephesians 4:8 (NASB77) ⁸  Therefore it says, ” WHEN HE ASCENDED ON HIGH, HE LED CAPTIVE A HOST OF CAPTIVES, AND HE GAVE GIFTS TO MEN.”

Who doesn’t love Christmas morning when it’s time to gather around the tree and open gifts? We all love gifts throughout the year for any occasion such as birthday or for no reason at all. It takes a very special love of one person to lavish another with gifts and not expect gifts back or any favor in return. That is a rough definition of grace.

At the top of God’s presents to us is Christ the Messiah Isaiah wrote about. What a fabulous confirmation we received with the Dead Sea Scrolls that included a full copy of the Book of Isaiah exactly as we hve it word for word today over 3,000 years old! This gift was the gift of eternal life. It was the gift I would hold back from my kids until last. We always saved the best for last but God gave Jesus first, there are no other gifts.

Hand in Hand Jesus and the Holy Spirit, gifts from God, will guide, assist and lead us on the narrow way home to our first nature. Salvation is ours because we are His and the “gift giver” will never take us, God’s gift to Jesus, from Him. You heard me right. We are the Father’s gift to His Son and in the care of the Holy Spirit.

The gift of eternal life in glory is totally just that, “a gift.” You and I had absolutely nothing to do with it or it wouldn’t be the gift that it is. It is a real object lesson of grace, undeserved favor. Just think. If you were God look down on you sinning right and left, what would you do with you? We deserve the worst agonizing torture of eternal flames and He showers us with spiritual gifts. God figure!

We are all gifted with a ministry to serve Him which makes us all ministers. A life of all good things wall to wall and endlessly packaged and lined up as far as the eye can see. This is true ecstasy. Like little children we run from gift to gift and encourage others to follow us and do the same. Do we deserve this unearned grace? Of course not! But I’m no fool. I may not deserve to win this heavenly lottery so to speak but I’m coming to cash the check anyway. Don’t just stand there, cash yours also!