Tag: hell

WALK THE TALK

By Rick Mathes

Ephesians 4:17 (NASB77) ¹⁷ This I say therefore, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind,

Most people will believe your walk before they believe your talk. Talk is cheap but let me have a close relationship with someone for a reasonable period of time and I will really be able to size them up. So I just jotted down a few of the flashing red lights that might be on your path and you need to pause and consider:

• Don’t try to get rich quick.
• Don’t follow the crowd.
• Be subject to authorities.
• Seek good for others.
• Don’t be enslaved to anything.
• Glorify God in everything.
• Don’t give Satan a chance.
• Use your tongue to edify.
• Work hard for Jesus

If you continue in the futility of unbelief, you will sin and fall from grace. That’s like running through an active mine field naked. You are open to huge disaster and you have no relief in sight. When Jesus holds back the Holy Spirit to make you open game for any demon in Hell: to alienate you from any form of a godly life not to mention eternal dying, crying and sizzling in the endless flames of Hell. Do you want an example? Put a blow torch down your throat!

To walk contrary to the Lord, for a believer, is a dereliction of duty. This can be expressed as follows:

1. Commission______________________ this is a blatant, in your face, willful sin.
2. Omission________________________ this is telling a lie with enough truth to make it believable
3. Permission_______________________ when you don’t do anything about your neighbors sin

Don’t be vain in mind, body and soul!

Don’t be vain in mind but humble yourself to your ignorance so as not to blind your heart with worldly lust that you find in those to associate with that are unclean and greedy. Walk in the presence of God seeking His approval and the shadow of death will never catch up with you.

WALK IN HIM

By Rick Mathes

Colossians 2:6 (NASB77) ⁶  As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,

At my age I am very conscious of age as the few years remaining quickly slip away. My matra is walk, lift, and live. I walk my dog a reasonable distance at least twice a day and I have weights near my work area to lift time to time throughout the day. As you can imagine this illustration rings well with the erse we are focusing on.

If you really take a good look at the components of walking, they are really all short lessons in walking with Jesus. You see, I am never alone. I have a partner in the Holy Spirit and He walks with me.

Most obvious to waling is that is is an action. Having a Bible collecting dust on your end table or in your brain dead mind is not going to do you a bit of good. There is cause and effect. You can’t have a blessed effect of holiness when you put your nose in the Word ro recall powerful verses in your head but inaction won’t do it. You have to give yourself a push.

This will give you the forward progress you need to go forward Duhh! It only takes the first step. Think about it. How long can you coast your bike uphill before yo stop ad start rolling backward. You have to keep pedaling. If you are not more of a Christian today than you wee yesterday you are backsliding and you don’t even notice it. But you will when you crash.

The last leg of true Christianity or as I refer to it as Calvinism is perseverance. This means we don’t quit! We get off the canvas, pick ourselves up and press on! There needs to be a steady action, a level progress and you will be rewarded by a continuance, one step at a time to glory. A nice faithful walk that the Lord can count on. No ups and downs and no starts and stops: only one smooth movement will keep you reliably in His will.

Once you put these three components: actions, progress and continuance in motion, it soon becomes a habit. I suggest that you accomplish this with a partner. Iron sharpens iron and an exercising partner may just give yo the motivation you need to have a strong Godly walk for Him.

 

WAG THE DOG

By Rick Mathes

Matthew 13:7 And others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out.

The sin you have is the sin you want because if you didn’t want it more than you do want it you wouldn’t have it. (Read this again) You are sovereign and your mind, words and actions are entirely under your control. You are not the victim you are the perpetrator of all you do. So even though you meet all the requirements of being a Christian in good standing, the cares of this world and how much they won of you will take you down. Everything you have owns a piece of you and your time. Even the spoils of your efforts such as; career, house, car, clothes, etc. only take a few minutes of your time to maintain, more and more will leave you with less and less time for devotion and worship of Christ.

So here you are in your house of worship worrying about what needs yet to be done such as mowing your lawn, paying bills, unfinished work and no time for family or friends. The hour passes and you rush out with no fellowship and race to the next thing that has stolen your time. This continues all through this day of rest until you collapse in bed, head swirling with all that hasn’t been done and that which must be done tomorrow. A dog returning to it’s vomit. No time for the work of the Holy Spirit?

What are some of those tools Satan uses to “take your Jesus away?” Here are a few of the thorns in your life: career, home, car, hobbies, clothes, prestige, wealth and appearance. This weed infested soil will not grow, nurture and sustain your attention to Jesus. All hell breaks loose on you to put off religion until tomorrow. You can have all of the best intentions but the road to hell is paved with those. What you need to address is priorities and all the fortitude to stick to your plan.

The priorities should be God, family, church and then everyone else; any deviation from this order will inevitably cause disorder and in fact chaos. It behooves you to be a relentless expert with time management. No matter how badly you have been swallowed up by things and their maintenance, you can always put Jesus back on top. My favorite repeated verse in the KJV is, “It came to pass.” Your gravestone will only have a dash between your birth and death dates. Just a dash!

It came to pass. The tail doesn’t wag the dog anymore, amen.

VICTORY

By Rick Mathes

1 Corinthians 15:57 (NASB77) ⁵⁷  but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Victory or winning is the competitive passion of many Christians. The problem is to decipher it among them. One may put a vote count to that test while to another it was getting out to vote. I have often preached that a Christian is sometimes better off to lose the battle to eventually win the war. WE need to be on the battle field and in combat to win. If we concede to a lost battle and leave the field, it’s all over!

Start out by enjoying the small victories and their blessing will soon compound and the tide of the war will turn on your advantage. A short boxer will exhaust his opponent by a constant and aggressive barrage of left jabs and a wide counter defense.

Natural law is on your side if ou take a small hammer continually hit the great pyramid of Egypt,, eventually it will become a pile of pebbles. So the issue isn’t will the pyramid go down but rather when will it be disintegrated to rubble.

Put all the facts about Jesus on the table: “Facts mam, just the facts,” as Sergeant Friday always said; nothing hypothetical, no guessing at what isn’t there and no prejudgments. All of this is impossible because of our inerrant bias but give it a shot.

I did the Solomon thing with two Cadillac’s, a 50’ foot yacht, partying around the world, etc. I wound up determined to blow my brains out. Death was my only option: my only way out. Death was the only solution. So you can understand how blessed I was when the ministry began to succeed. Seven years and many 10’s of thousands of dollars later we realized the experience of content. What would you pay for a lifelong reward of comfort and contentment? Who can separate what God has put together: marriage, children, home, employment, etc. It all adds up to much more than any of us deserve!

When you have overcome the weeds with flowers, who can separate that God has joined together? True victory is using God’s creation to continue the balaces of life including the real “victory in Jesus Christ our King.”

VICTORY IN JESUS

By Rick Mathes

Matthew 12:20 A BATTERED REED HE WILL NOT BREAK OFF, AND A SMOLDERING WICK HE WILL NOT PUT OUT, UNTIL HE LEADS JUSTICE TO VICTORY.

Let’s face it: strength is vanity, power is delusion and might is a lie. Just ask the fallen giants of the past and notice that the last man standing is Jesus Christ! Now turn your eyes to the shadows and count the alcoholics that have thrown down the bottle and picked up the Bible, the addicts that threw away their needles and picked up the cross of Christ. Watch the whores throw down their evil ways and lift holy hands to the King!

Those left behind have taken serious notice that money, talent and time can be exploited and corrupted leading straight to death. They can all so smoothly let you have more than you can handle then pull the rug out from under you. This leaves you bruised physically and smoldering spiritually.

Revival can begin with one poor man. It only takes one lit match to illuminate a universe and that lamp on a hill may very well be you. It takes a lot of intelligence to have it all and just a small amount of ignorance to lose it all. Been there, done that!

Any punk can soak his brain with alcohol, stuff his nose with coke and have sex like a stray dog. It takes a man’s man like Jesus to demonstrate how a man of God should act and really live in His image and likeness. Jesus can turn around any backslides in a New York minute. So you have no excuse for refusing the healing and holiness of the Holy Spirit.

Draw a circle around you with chalk and be a praying man. Soon others will intercede your prayer circle with theirs and the prayer chain will begin to grow. Be that first domino to fall before the cross and nudge the others to follow likewise.

USELESS PREACHING

By Rick Mathes

1 Corinthians 15:14 (NASB77)
¹⁴  and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.

Jesus said, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?” My wife answered, “Yes!” I responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I immediately attacked this fat an in doing so became a Christian in 1981. Now, however, I am reflecting back on what would change if his wasn’t true and I came up with a few scary aftermaths is if it was a fraud.

Most certainly all preachers would be dead in their tracks because any sermon fresh from the throne of grace emphasizes, “He is Rise.” Any sermon without emphasis is a fraud and sin against our Triune God. (Eloyim)

If He did not rise to life of His own volition, He was a liar and our faith would be dead. We would be without the hope of forgiveness and eternal life in heaven. All of our Christian doctrines would be for fools. These would leave all of us so called Christian still in sin and irrevocably destines to an eternity of frying on the skillet, flames licking at our flesh and into the bottomless abyss of the howling demons of smoldering darkness.

The only hope salvation vanishes with the death of God’s Son. Satan and his fallen angels would have been victorious. They killed the King. The devil’s rule forever would be certified by the rotting corpse of the Man from Galilee. From dust to dust, the Creator woud rejoin the dust He used for creation if He didn’t rise and step out of that tomb and ascend into the place He had with the Father before the beginning of time: on the throne of the universe and everlasting.

How miserable would life be if Jesus was not God and never rose from the dead? What is our plan B if plan A is still dead. The Jews and Greeks both laugh at us because we worship a God that was crucified!

This faith system of Christianity would make fools of us all. Consider all the promises Jesus made that would be false without the resurrection. The consequence of a false resurrection is to refute every pain and convincing evidence. You need more faith it didn’t happen that you need to believe it. In short, if you don’t believe He rose from the dead it is because you are ignoranct of the indisputable facts.

 

USELESS FAITH

By Rick Mathes

1 Corinthians 15:14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.

What if there was no Jesus, salvation or resurrection to eternal life? What an awful dismal condition of sin would we all be in? Irreversible death and damnation would be the universal consequences of our wasted life.

If there were no resurrection of the elect to glory we would have to write off all the preaching in churches to be fraudulent and worthless. I have to admit that the majority is Satan knows that to conquer the church he has to destroy or at least minimize the empty tomb and our hope of heaven. When dean men are ordained as dead ministers with the words of death, hell swoops in with its nets and the flames burn hotter with the new catch.

Our faith is dead if we have a dead Jesus. The cross is empty and so will our faith be empty if we are fed a useless faith of false dogma, distorted gospels and self-gratifying priests and carnal ministers of lies.

We would still be in sin and have no salvation. The only result of this temporal life ending would be the endless abyss of Satan’s furnace of flames and howling hell-hounds. It is an awful though to advance in age knowing that each heart-beat is one step closer to dying and going to hell. When we don’t have any hope of salvation we have no desire to stop or curtail our sinning. I know that without Jesus I would be dead, go crazy or be in prison. How about you? What is your “Plan B” or are you going to cast you fate to the wind? (Kismet)

We would be so hopeless and miserable without the gospel according to Jesus. Fools, we would be just plain fools being committed to Christianity without the resurrection. Without it, there is no possibility of eternal happiness.

The next time our faith drops and our trust weakens, we must return to the good old fashioned original gospel and know that our Redeemer lives. Oh, how I pray that it will be so!

UP THEN DOWN

By Rick Mathes

Philippians 2:7-11 (NASB77) ⁷ but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.  ⁸ And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  ⁹   Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE SHOULD BOW, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, 11  and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus was up and came down so that He could be down and go back up.His stooping grace and return to His rightful glory became our salvation. He’s surely a one-of-a-kind national treasure. Think about it. He stepped away from His throne a Kind of Glory, the Creator and lowered Himself to become a helpless infant at the breast of His teenager mother, born in poverty. How low could He go? Low enough for all to look Himin the eyes and confess Him as God incarnate; a Trinity of three strands that cannot be broken.

Imagine. He left heaven’s glory. The Creator became the created so that wecould be assured that He lived and died like a man. He went through what we are going through and emptied Himself to become our servant. He did this to example His image and likeness for us to go and do likewise. Now He lives in us and we live as an example of Him. When people get to know you do they get to know Him?

He was obedient from the cradle to the grave and He died in demonstration of His total commitment and love for you so that you might accept Him as yours.

Because of this obedience, God exalts Him now at the relief of all His faithful angels and saints who have went home before us. They were sick with worry and incensed by the disrespect His own inflicted on Him. Had it not been for His willingness to obey the Father, all of heaven wuld have descended to defend Him and destroy those who wanted to kill Him. Can you evein imagine the explosion of revelry when He ascended and came home in victory of death itself!

Jesus is our Savior, no doubt about it and His name is above all names especially Lucifer. Jesus is above heaven, hell, earth and all that there is. Words cannot express His glory nor can our imaginations capture picture or vision of it. All we have is a glimpse through the ancient prism and eyes of the Revelator John. Oh, that poor man!

Paul was lifted up to the third heaven and was sworn to silence. John stepped intot he seventh heaven and was commanded to write down all that He saw the best he could with all that was familiar to Him. One thing we know for sure, Jesus is Lord of Lord’s and King of Kings!

TYPES OF CHRISTIANS

By Rick Mathes

John 3:3 (NASB77) ³ Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

The world has successfully invaded the Evangelical Christian Church and captured the avant-garde of the movement away from the gospel according to Jesus. What really hurts is the limp and ineffective response and apathy of those that profess to be “born again.” I responded to an irate Muslim email and demanded him not to call America a Christian nation! We are not and sadly, neither are most churches. I would like to direct you to check out two editorials of mine entitled “Kentucky Fried Christianity” and “A Letter to Iraqi Patriots.” Let’s get down to defining the enemy: demons posing as Christians:

Joiners: There are those who when they see the newest church growing in influence “jump on the bandwagon;” Such as these would join most any movement, even communist or Marxist if it appeared to offer them advancement in their self-gratifying goals.

Spiritual Suicides: They shrink from any serious thought concerning religious truths which they do not want to face; truths which if followed through might involve them in arduous spiritual efforts.

Genuinely Naïve: For them, the beautiful music, majestic temples and eye-filling spectacles perform the office which the faith movement and charismatic maniacs designed to life them and lull sense in to the state of euphoria.

Practical Christians: They join for personal reasons and make a career following the church with the most connections.

Nominal Christians: They are those who are members of the church simply because they were born to be such.

Real Liberals: These are men of integrity who try to reconcile the teachings of the liberal church with their consequences as long as possible but eventually follow their conscience and walk out of the conservative fundamental churches in disgust.

Good, Honest Self-Respecting Christians:They are somewhat naïve but good neighbors to their neighbors regardless of their faiths.

I thrill at the bouquet of possibilities we have to share the truth of the Reformation to a dry desert of fellow citizens aching for nourishment. “All the lonely people, oh where do they all come from?” The Word is in my veins like fire. I cannot shut up!

Step out of the boat and let them know that Jesus is Lord!

TWO-TWENTY VOLTS

By Rick Mathes

Ephesians 1:19 (NASB77) ¹⁹  and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might

If one leaf could fall from a tree of its own volition and in its own power, God would not be God. Unless God is all powerful, all present and all knowing, He’s the God I will worship. Jesus is power, all-power personified. His slightest wish or even a hint is a command and demand that must be obeyed.

Nothing can satisfy God’s justice but Christ’s sacrifice for our sins. It is finished! He paid-in-full God’s price and He owns us without reservation. Your life is not your own anymore and never was nor ever will be anything but His.

When you are born again if the fullness of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit you get the whole bale. There isn’t anything left out. It is finished and done. You have the 220watts with a dimmer switch. It’s up to you how much voltage you will use for His purposes to deliver you from the power of Satan. You have all the artillery you need to outgun him.

That omnipotence will stand you on your own feet so that you can put on the armor of God, lift up the sword and give a green light for the Holy Spirit to jump on Satan with both feet.

We will have the strength for Him to keep us in His care a a hen huddles her chicks under her wings in danger. The fox can’t get to us because he is also a creature of God’s design and mut be obedient to his creator. The created down to every leaf on every tree stands ready to live or die at God’s request. We were created to satisfy our Lord’s every wish for His glory and honor.

When Jesus stepped out of the tomb He left every religious pretender whether he be king, pope or imam in the dust. ButHe raised us believers to be higher than the angels that will be under our command when we return to the original nature of walking in the cool of the day with God. How glorious!

In His strength we reach for and attain His holiness. God will never see the sins we have no memory of.