Tag: disobedience

YOUR CHURCH

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YOUR CHURCH 2

By Rick Mathes

Matthew 16:18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it.

Sad to say but His Church can and probably is a far different place than your church or the ones that Paul preached in. I can’t help but apply simple logic to my faith and understand form the Word that if my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, where I stand is Church. However, like metal drawn to a magnet, others of like blessing are drawn to each other to form the visible Body of Christ which is the fellowship we attend corporately. So there is the invisible Church within us and the visible Church where we can gather together.

Putting worldly merchandising and marketing strategies to building a successful church really depends on what we consider successful and the manner in which we seek to attain it.

Inevitably we end up with programs and no prayers. We feverishly do all we can to have classes on anything that will attract the masses to attend. Prayer, if there is any at all is manufactured, mechanical and without life. People go to church on Sunday morning because they love the fellowship. They go on Sunday night because they love the Pastor but they attend the Wednesday night prayer meeting because they love the Lord. If your church has abandoned the mid-week prayer meeting, run from it!

So the main effect of this worldly effort to stage church gives you religion (in the image of man) without regeneration. All it becomes is a lot of ritual that escapes the reality fo the pure Gospel that if perverted. Paul said you would be accursed. Can you see the deplorable condition of what we accept as church? It has become nothing more than as entertainment center in most cases. Anything to draw a crowd but too much like a bright blue bug light that is eventually the demise of the unsuspecting bugs that fly too close to the flame and get zapped!

The sermons offer no salvation to those in the congregation who are not looking for it. Preaching “turn of burn” is not politically correct. It is ancient and certainly old-fashioned to preach “Repent, the Kingdom of God is here!” as John the Baptist did followed by Jesus, Peter and Paul. Open your spiritual eyes and pray that the Holy Spirit will lead you to His holy ground.

MOM

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MOM

By Rick Mathes

Luke 2:19 (NASB) 19 But Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart.

His heart beat with hers and her blood flowed through His veins until He cried out His first breath and then the process began to reverse itself. He died so that she might live and He poured out His blood so that she could be born again. That was His mom, Mary.

Only barely a teenager she was found acceptable by God her creator to bear His Son What a privilege!

An unusual calm came over her as the glow in her bedroom grew brighter until the form of Gabriel became clear and His purpose of announcing her conception became acceptable with her submission and obedience. Her name was Mary and she was His mom.

The pain was worth the gain and baby Jesus smiled His toothless smile, Father God proudly looked and saw that this was good and the heavens exploded in praise because the angels couldn’t contain themselves. A silence hushed over the flames of Hell and Satan staggered out with a vengeance in his smoldering heart that he vowed to kill God’s only Son.

A word got out, some were wondering; “What in the world happened?” The afterglow of the departing angels still lingered a bit across the sky and the earth trembled at the Devil’s rage!

The Word teaches that innocent and exhausted Mary slipped into a world of her own and pondered these things in her private heart.

It was a protected moment that she treasured to her dying moment in the arms of the Apostle John in Ephesus; This onetime delivering God’s only Son gave her an introspection of her own heartfelt love for God and responsibility of pursuing holiness and raising His Son to do the same.

But at this moment, in the cave with her beloved Joseph holding her hand and loving on her, was a meditation with God that we will never know the depth of. I can only draw a conceptual understanding of her willingness to be God’s handmaiden and Joseph’s deep love for this truly one a kind Mom.

COFFIN NAILS

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COFFIN NAILS

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:

Paul’s companion Clement became the third bishop of the Church in Rome right behind Cletus and Linus. Fifty years afer the Church of Corinth was founded, Clement wrote to them after Paul had written the letter “3rd Corinthians” to sort out the internal dissention and abuse of the gifts. Clement had to rebuke them again because now the younger members were disrespecting their Elders and the whole mess was stirring up all over again. I might add that charismatic churches in your community have continued in this prideful destruction and here are some reasons that keep reappearing over the years:

  • Dissentions
  • Personality Cults
  • Cliquishness
  • Moral Compromise
  • Carnality
  • Sexual Perversion
  • Fornication
  • Incest
  • Adultery
  • Worldliness
  • Materialism
  • Suing Christians
  • Idolatry
  • Selfishness
  • Homosexuality

The sign gifts were being perverted to mimic the old rituals that included estate behavior and glossolalia. They became boastful of the gifts they claimed they had and they used them at times for personal gain as they do to this very day!

How awful must the Holy Spirit feel when so called “Spirit-filled full-gospel” churches do the same thing? It’s as if nothing has changed. This type of behavior is flat-out prostitution of the gifts and dangerously close to the unforgiveable sin of unbelief!

BE COMPLETE

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BE COMPLETE

By Rick Mathes

John 15:11 These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.

I can’t help but think of the donkey that carried Jesus into Jerusalem. What was the donkey thinking? If it was me I would be astonished beyond belief that out of all the donkeys in Israel, God chose me! Seriously, I know from whence I come and I know the wretch I am. If you saw my heart as He see it, you would stop reading and trash this devotional. I might add, if I saw your heart I would run away from you as fast as I could. Let’s get this straight: He chose us. WE had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. You and I have been personally closer because of Him.

A pregnant young lady walked into one of my ministry meetings saying that she was going to have an abortion. This was her fourth pregnancy from a variety of men she met at parties. My wife and I persuaded her to keep the baby. In time she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to prison. We helped her out and when she delivered the child in prison, we took it and came home with a two day old baby. When she turned three years old we adopted her as our own. When I go home to Jesus, my children will have to prove in court they are mine while my adopted daughter will already have that record available to the judge. In other words, my adopted child has preference over everyone else. Praise the Lord He adopted us and our family has been made full.

We abide in Him. Apart from Him we wither and dry up without value except to tinder a fire. This means the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives in making us complete. Here we are shattered and scattered in sin but thank you Jesus for my conscience convicting me of sin. We are an empty earthen vessel that is filled to the brim with all our Lord has to offer. That sure is a miracle in our lives that only His unconditional love could provide.

Now you and I need to be sensible enough to reach out to all the Lord has to offer. We can’t be a partial Christian. We can’t be partially saved. It is not an option. We must be complete in Him, period.

Once we surrender all we are for all He is we become compete in Him. This is impossible unless we tap the fullness of faith to be possessed by Him. It is worded that we are His servant to sooth some sensibilities but the word is truly not servant it is slave. It is the opposite of what your flesh craves but with the help of the Helper we can be complete and experience a relationship that can only be understood by someone who has experience in it. Press ON!

BAIT AND SWITCH

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BAIT AND SWITCH

By Rick Mathes

Acts 20:28 Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.

The sheep or our post-Christian era are being sheared by false shepherds that only care about themselves. I have attended enough Baptist minister breakfasts to know that the main topic of their passion is not baptizing new believers. I spoke at a Baptist pastor’s conference and scolded them. I said that they had fifty ministers in the room and collectively hadn’t had fifty baptisms in the last ten years. I even preached on, “Is Judas still treasurer of your church?” Needless to say, they gave me their left hand of friendship and turned their backs on me ever since.

I’ve had it with demons in the pulpit preaching another Christ. They have exchanged the Word of God for the words of men! Emperor Constantine began the smoldering sacraments and rituals of Father Satan and the Roman Catholic Church, cults and the carnal Protestant churches have continued the apostasy. It’s called religion. My unsaved, hell-bound half-brother once said, “All our world’s problems can be traced back to their origin in religion!” He was dead-on right.

Religion is man’s best effort to reach God, faults aplenty. Christianity is Christ’s faultless efforts to reach man. Believers reach back because we are made in His image and likeness. When someone insists on evolution I respond, “If you think your great, great, great grandfather was a monkey, I am inclined to agree with you.” So much depends on you believing that, “In the beginning was the Word, etc.”

Religion provides a manmade Poe or some other such officer that bloats with pomp, power and becomes a despot seeped in tyranny. We are misguided from faith to presumption and that we worship the creature instead of the Creator. It becomes a satanic cult community.

Christianity does not separate and isolate it’s followers. It unifies them in superior splendor far above the hell bound fallen angels. The true salvation of faith and fear can overwhelm trust Christianity has been marketed by bait and switch con-men. They will attract you with enough plausible truth to disguise the lies that are to follow.

DISOBEDIENCE

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DISOBEDIENCE

By Rick Mathes

George Elliott: “It is vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found; in loving obedience.”

We need to take the blows that come to correct us or those that we need to respond to fulfill the vision. At last we have a Daddy the will apply a belt to our butt as needed!

Phillip Melanchthon: “Since Adam’s fall, all men begotten after the common course of nature are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in Him and with fleshly appetites.”

There is a consequence of every action. This includes a response from the Holy Spirit when we insist “No” when Jesus says “Yes.” God so loved the world that He didn’t send a committee! When Jesus speaks we need to believe and obey or there is a loss.

To begin with when you say “No” to Jesus you lose your usefulness. When the tool refuses to be held by the Craftsman, it isn’t any good. No world can be done by it until it fits the Carpenters hand and obeys all the directives it is given to effect the purpose for which it was intended.

When you resist His drawing you lose His approval. We were created in His image and likeness to love and glorify Him. When we resign our sole purpose, we alienate ourselves from the light of His intentions into the darkness and despair of a useless nothingness.

Not only do we risk the loss of our eternal reward but our health, family and our very life is affected adversely. We are falling when we should be rising, resisting when we should be welcoming, disobeying when we should be obeying. Death is the reward.

Once our wealth is dissipated in sinful revelry, our reputation is true to follow. We can always recover our health, family, life and wealth but not so our reputation and respect once lost cannot ever return to its first estate. The sword never left David’s hand no matter how hard he tried to make up with God and his countrymen. It is never the same when you disobey.

PRESS ON!

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