Peter’s Readers

In the first book that carries his name, Peter writes as an apostle of Jesus Christ and he writes to believers who have been scattered all over the Roman Empire by persecution. When you read all of the names of the places where these churches existed, it reminds you of Peter’s first sermon in Acts 2, where there were Jews from all over the Roman world visiting Jerusalem for the Passover. The same names of these places are mentioned in Acts 2 and some of the 3,000 saved that day went back home and took the gospel with them, starting churches. It is to these pilgrims, chosen by God that he writes to help them understand some important issues of the Christian experience. These believers were suffering the severe adversities foretold by Jesus (Jn16:33) and some of them were very discouraged because they didn’t understand why God was allowing such intense and difficult circumstances to challenge their faith. Peter writes to explain what was going on in their lives.

You might also be suffering with tremendous adversities in your life and wondering what good purpose God might have for allowing these things to occur. Read on as we follow Peter’s discussion and explanation of the eternal plan of God.

Three Important Issues

Peter writes to these suffering believers to discuss three important ideas that he has learned from walking with Jesus in His earthly ministry and then later from walking with the Spirit in his daily life. Peter has experienced his own suffering and intense adversities and he writes to share what he has learned.

The first issue he writes about is the foreknowledge of God that chose them in Christ and was aware of their suffering. The foreknowledge of God takes us all the way back into eternity past where God issued His divine decrees. The second important concept is the sanctifying ministry of the Holy Spirit. From our new birth until we are transferred into eternity with God, we are involved with the sanctifying process that God uses to purify us from our old life and initiate us into our new life in Christ. The third issue is the fruit of sanctification, our obedience to the Lord and the sprinkling of the blood of Christ that cleanses us on a daily basis.

In this article, we want to discuss the first important issue, the foreknowledge and eternal plan of God.

The Foreknowledge of God

God is the most amazing person in the universe. As part of His essence, He is eternal life meaning that God has always existed, forever and ever as we think of time. For all eternity God has existed in three persons, Father, Son and Spirit and all three have lived in perfect harmony, with perfect knowledge and with a perfect plan. Peter

The Plan of God

In eternity past, God-Father devised a plan to share their glory and character with creatures that they would create. First they would create angels, allow 1/3 of them to fall through Lucifer’s leadership, bring them under judgment and then allow Satan to appeal the judgment. Then God would create mankind, allow them to fall in the same way and then use man to demonstrate all the issues of the appeal. Satan would be allowed to present his arguments by influencing man to follow his philosophies and showing that any creature would rebel if treated as unfairly as God treated him. God would present His side of the appeal by showing that some men, born as sinners would choose to humble themselves by accepting His grace gifts and that the fallen angels could have done the same. God’s plan foresaw every detail of both angelic and human history before any of it happened, but His foreknowledge did not force any creature’s volition to choose any specific course of action. One of the great mysteries of God’s plan is that He foreknows everything, maintains Sovereign control of everything and yet allows every creature to make his/her own choices. The following discussion about God’s knowledge will help us understand how He could do this.

Omniscience, Divine Decrees & Foreknowledge

God’s knowledge exists in two categories, Omniscience which is God’s knowledge of everything both actual and possible and foreknowledge which is limited to only actual future history. The Divine Decrees is God choosing to make what was only possible to become the actual history we are now living. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Omniscience

God’s Omniscience knows everything, the possible and the actual. He was able to examine every variable of every possible way that He could devise creation. He knew that if He changed only one variable how it would have changed every other variable that would have resulted from it. He saw that any change, every change would have resulted in a totally different scenario of events unfolding and therefore a different angelic and human history. Using His Omniscience, He examined every possible scenario of every possible historical result and when He saw the history that is actually unfolding, He chose it and decreed that it would become actual history. Before God chose to create anything, He visualized every possible history and then chose the one He wanted to happen.

Divine Decrees

After God had eliminated all other possible scenarios and decided on the chain of events we are now experiencing, He declared that this actual history would come to be. God is Sovereign, meaning that at all times, in every circumstance, God remains in total control of everything. His Sovereignty, based on His Omniscience, decreed the angelic and human history He wanted and His decree makes this chain of events certain to happen.

Foreknowledge

God’s omniscience knows everything while His foreknowledge knows only what is going to actually happen. His Foreknowledge looks at His decree and simply acknowledges every detail of the decree as future history. When Peter speaks of God’s foreknowledge, he is referencing God’s perfect plan that He decreed in eternity past and that is unfolding every day in our experience. Foreknowledge is knowledge of future history.

Foreknowledge Knows Everything about Us.

When Peter tells his readers that they are chosen according to God’s foreknowledge, he is reminding them that God knows everything they are going through and has made perfect provision for their circumstances. His letter is written to inform them about God’s plan and encourage them to trust Him through the adverse circumstances they are suffering.

Peter wants them to remember that God knows what they need financially, what they need physically, what they need relationally and we could go on. He knows everything about your life, every detail and He has gone ahead and set in place every provision needed to take care of us and to glorify Him in every circumstance. There is never any reason to be afraid because our God who loves us is never taken by surprise by our adversities. In fact, He knew about all of our circumstances long before they happened and His sovereignty is in complete control. He only allows the events of our life to go so far and then only under His control. God is in control!

In the coming verses, Peter will explain what God is doing in our lives and why He allows adversity to come our way. His explanation will arm us so that we can use our adversities for growth and glory.

In our next article we will discuss the sanctification process of God-Holy Spirit.

Growing through Challenges
This year has been challenging on many fronts for my extended family. Many in my family are unemployed this year, which is very unusual. Both my family and my wife’s have strong work ethics imprinted on their DNA from generations of hard working, barely surviving men and women. We have discussed the Father’s plan and realize that he is in the process of changing us, transforming us into the image of his Son. He has to tear down the false ideas in our hearts to build up the true ideas within us. If we don’t allow the adversities to reveal our flawed thinking so we can reject it, we will try to build the truth over the lie. We will use the form that looks like the truth but we will still be motivated by the lie, by the selfish, by the human idea of what happiness is and where it comes from. My brothers and I agreed that God is boiling us down and separating the wrong so that we can be made right. I am amazed at their courage to face their own lies and allow God to change their hearts. I am encouraged.

Relativity
Our nation is in deep, deep trouble. Everything is upside down and inside out. What is clearly foolishness is applauded as virtuous and what is true is seen as prejudice and bigotry. This is what happens when there are no absolutes, there is no true/false, right/wrong or good/bad. The nation Israel went through times like this as is indicated in the book of Judges by the phrase “there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes”. This phrase is a wonderful description of relative thinking. Relative thinking says there is no right or wrong, only opinion and every one of us has one. While this approach might seem to be the result of enlightened thinkers, it is actually a formula for chaos.

Absolutes
God offers mankind absolutes that reveal those things He has created that do not change or move. An absolute is totally true, always true, never changes and can be counted on to be the same. The Captain of a ship steaming at night saw a light ahead and radioed, “this is the Roosevelt, a 100 ft. steamer and we seem to be on a collision course, I suggest that you give way”. The radio returned fire with this, “this is the Bronson Bay station, and I am a lighthouse, I suggest that you give way.” The lighthouse is an absolute that doesn’t change or move, by which we can chart our course knowing where we are.

When absolutes are watered down or abandoned as they are today, we lose the ability to chart a clear course because everything changes with circumstances. Without absolutes to go by, every idea is relative to its context and situation. Right is right because it serves our purpose, not because of an unalterable idea of what is right and what is wrong. USA has given up its absolutes and replaced them with political correctness and hypocrisy wrapped in pretty paper. Congress is in the process of enacting economic suicide and they call it healthcare reform. Our president is willing to say anything from both sides of his mouth in order to push us into a one-world government. He serves the evil one but knows it not.

Adversity makes us Choose
Yet, in spite of the evil of our government, I am encouraged. I am encouraged because I believe what my bible says, that God uses adversity to grow His people and uses persecution to scatter His message. The day is coming and it will be sooner than we expect, when any Christian who holds to absolutes will be branded an enemy of the people. We will be called bigots and small minded because we refuse to include everyone in our theology. When we assert that homosexuality is wrong we will be called homophobes and guilty of hate crimes. When we asset that Jesus is the only name given under heaven that leads to God, we will be ridiculed and admonished to come into the 21st century. In my lifetime, I expect that ministers will be imprisoned for their faith and believe it or not, I am encouraged. We need harsh pressure to make us choose who and what we really believe and where we will stand. The adversities of our day will work good for the church, not bad. Be encouraged.

Sticking with the Truth

My church seems to be shrinking in numbers. Some of our people have been going to other churches. These churches offer bigger and flashier ministries with more people for their social life and for the singles, a better chance to find a mate. My church is not flashy and perhaps we are stuck on a method and need to change, perhaps. We could change the way we present the Lord’s message but we won’t do so to accommodate those who would have us shorten our message of truth and replace truth with entertainment. The reason is that the only way to be successful in life is to live by absolutes. When life gets tough which it is certain to do, the only thing that will hold you up is the Lord and His word. It is the truth that will free us from the pain and fear of an uncertain world because we know how to interpret the times and His will in the times. My church is committed to teach these absolutes as we know them and even though we could shine our packaging up a bit, the core of truth is there, it is steady and it will remain as long as my Pastor and I have anything to say about it. I am encouraged.

We can always find reasons to feel discouraged. Life in the devil’s world is difficult to say the least. As we grow older, life seems to get even harder. Health trouble, loss of loved ones, financial difficulties and uncertainty about the future. If you use your circumstances as your happiness, life will feel like a roller coaster ride, up and down. Instead of deriving happiness from your life situations, look to God’s word and the absolutes He offers for your comfort and encouragement. Christmas marks the birth of our Savior who has redeemed us from all of our troubles and offers us victory over the difficulties of the devil’s world. His victory over sin and death is shared with all who will believe that he did for them. We have the victory in Christ and that gives us good reason to be encouraged.

Questions: What does the bible say about God’s provisions when the economy is down? My company is laying off and I might lose my job. I am concerned that we might lose our savings and even our home.

God is in Control
God brought the universe into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo) with a spoken word. One minute nothing existed, the next minute, the whole material universe came into being because God told it to do so. God’s creation also came into existence with natural laws like gravity and the laws of physics to govern it. When He created the earth, He made the earth, the seas, the air and the plants and animals after their kind with natural laws to govern reproduction. He made man after His own image and put into effect laws that govern the effects of sin and evil. God is the Creator, the maker of everything and the maker of the natural laws that govern everything. He is also the maker of nations, their economies and the laws that govern economies. He understands our economy, governs our economy and controls our economy. He is actually using our economy to discipline the church and offer us an opportunity to wake up from the spiritual stupor we have slid into over the last years.

Let’s discuss why God is allowing our economy to suffer, His control over the economy, the opportunity for us to learn from these times and God’s promises to sustain His children in any and every economic situation.

God Trains His Children
First, I believe God uses adversity to discipline His children to train them in righteous living. Heb 12:5-11 explains that sometimes God whips His children to help them change their ideas. In America, over the last 60 years, we have believed lies about materialism and happiness through financial prosperity. The American dream of happiness through financial prosperity is a false idea that the devil has promoted and we have accepted. One of God’s goals is to help the church corporately and believers individually rethink this view about prosperity. He wants us to understand that He has given us far more than we need and that what we call needs are really wants. He wants us to realize that we can live happily in Him with far less, in a lesser home, with an older car, with the same clothing, with less retirement, with less insurance, etc. God is training us to understand that He is our happiness and security, not houses, cars and savings accounts.

Government is of God
Second, God is in control of human history in all of its facets, including the world economy and national governments. When an election appears to reflect the will of the people, it actually reflects the will of God. Listen to the book of Romans

Romans 13:1 Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.

God is the ultimate authority over every authority system in the world. In the first century, Rome was the controlling power over the nation Israel. Jesus and His apostles didn’t fight Rome, they complied with the laws of Rome and Paul even used the laws of Rome to defend himself in court. The point I am making is that God controls the governing economic policies in a nation and therefore the rise and fall of the financial status of nations. While the 6:00 news reports nothing but bad news the truth is that God is in control. He allows the economy to rise and fall to teach us His word and His ways and He can change it anytime He decides. We should not allow bad reports and the stock market to determine the way we think about what God is doing with the economy.

Hard Times are Good Times
Third, hard times can be good times and in fact, they can be the best times for families. God uses difficult circumstances to teach us to trust Him.

James 1:2-4 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

To lose our dependence on financial gain and redirect it toward God is a blessing of great magnitude. When children are raised during times of scarcity, they have a greater appreciation for what they do have and what is required to earn it. When we lose hope in financial gain, we can then place our hope in God’s promises and enjoy the simple things of life together. We can learn that the blessings of inner peace, capacity to love and happiness apart from circumstances are far greater and more enduring than the pleasures that money can buy. Instead of worrying about the material losses you might suffer in this difficult time, focus on what God is graciously teaching you through adversity.

God Provides for His Children
Finally, God’s promise to supply all of our needs are unconditional and not dependent on a good economy. When God brought a 3-year drought on the nation of Israel, the prophet Elijah caught in the same drought, was provided sustenance by God’s grace.

1 Kings 17:2 And the word of the LORD came to him, saying, 3 “Go away from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. 4 “And it shall be that you shall drink of the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to provide for you there.”

God provided water from a stream and birds flew in bread and meat morning and evenings for Elijah. When the brook dried up, God sent Him to a Gentile widow and made miraculous provision for him and her family. In an agricultural economy like Israel, years of drought meant starvation for people and animals. The economy was not down, it was almost non existent during this time and God was not hindered from providing for His children. Regardless of how bad it gets for us in this economy, God will provide our daily bread. The question for us is if He allows us to be reduced to daily bread and we lose many of our material blessings, will we be content with His provision.

Philippians 4:19 And my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

God will supply our needs and even our wants depending on what He decides to teach us through this economy. Trust Him for what He has promised and tell yourself that material prosperity will not bring happiness. Tell yourself that His love that sent His Son to die for you will bring happiness in this life and in the next. What He has given us for eternity is so wonderful and so secure, that nothing we might own in this life can compare. If God is trying to teach us that lesson and give us the reality of it so that we feel that way, rejoice as James says that He has decided to free your from being a slave to what you own. When we can be content in any circumstance, we are truly blessed.

As in every other discussion we have on this site, let me encourage you to devote yourself to spiritual growth through learning and using God’s word. The bible studies and resources on this site are intended to help you build a foundation in the faith and enable you to grow to be a mature Christian. There is much to learn and every promise and principle we learn about God blesses us with joy and peace.

Our natural tendency it seems is to wish that life was easy, without problems, and where we get everything we want without a struggle. That sounds a lot like heaven to me or like the images I have in my mind about heaven. I am not sure that even heaven will be without challenges. The reason I suggest such an idea is that problems, conflicts and challenges are what motivate us to grow. To be more specific, hurdles standing in the way of what we want, forcing us to overcome them to get what we want is what motivates us to tackle them and in doing so, we grow. Let’s put a few simple thoughts together about growing through taking the challenges in life. This article will discuss our desires which are the root motivation of the human soul, our problems that stand in the way of what we want and finally overcoming our problems by developing new skills and strength to obtain what we want.

Designed to Desire

God’s Design – Needs
First, it is important to understand that God designed the human soul to have needs. God made us with needs, some that only he can meet and some that other people are intended to meet. For example, only God can meet our spiritual needs and only another person can meet our marital needs. Keeping these needs separate is rather important because we don’t want to confuse how these different needs are met. Look to God for what he provides and look to God to provide the right people for what man can give us.

Needs Feel Like Wants
Our needs are experienced within us as desires. Our God given needs feel like longings, hunger, yearnings, cravings ie desires. The bible makes it very clear that it is desire that motivates us to action. We have desires that are sinful and that we choose to fulfill through sinful actions. If we are saved and growing spiritually, the Spirit will also produce desires in us to please God and to love God. If we are discussing our sin life or our spiritual life, desire as an expression of our legitimate needs is what drives us to action to meet our needs. A clear passage teaching this concept is Gal 5:16-17.

Gal 5:16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, & you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. 17 For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, & the Spirit against the flesh; for these oppose one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.

Desires of the Spirit
The Spirit defeats the flesh and both the flesh and the Spirit produce desires as motivators of actions. When we embrace the desires created by the Spirit and walk by means of what He says, we will say no to the desires of the sin nature and act to please God. Notice that it is by giving in to desires, the desires produced by GHS that we win the war against the sin nature. A point to ponder, focus on what you want, the wants that God puts in your heart, not the desires you feel apart from Him and your actions will follow His will and you will please Him. The point of this article is that the desires we feel inside us are what motivate us to take all the actions we choose all of our lives. We, by design, want and use our wants to guide what we think, say and do.

Growing Through Adversity

Too Easy = Boring
The second idea to think on is that there are always problems that stand in the way of us getting what we want. Dang it!! You say, I wish life were easier and that nothing would stand in my way of me getting everything I want. I want it all and I want it now!! Yet life would be so boring if it were that easy. We would wish for something and there it would be for the picking, without any effort and therefore without any growth.

God Given Hurdles
Those things that stand in the way of what we want are the God given hurdles that He uses to inspire us to grow. To get what we want, we have to find a way over, around or through the problem. To get past the hurdle, we often have to use what we have learned and bring it online in real life. For example, God has given us promises that correspond to every problem in life that when used by faith to face these problems will give us total victory over them. It is the hurdle in our way that caused us to use the promise, to believe it to deal with the problem that allowed us to see it work and therefore expose God’s power and faithfulness. Without the problem to overcome, we would not have had to use the promise and we would not have seen God’s power work through His promises. The problem blocking our desires was actually God’s grace gift that caused us to grow in our knowledge of His power invested in His promises. Thank God for our problems, in fact James says they are an occasion for great joy when we visualize the good He will bring about through them.

James 1:2-4 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

God Given Imagination
Consider is the Greek word hegeomai meaning to guide your imagination or to purposely choose the images you visualize in your mind and the ideas you verbalize in your mind. God promises to use everything in life to produce divine good (Rom 8:28), even our difficulties. When problems occur, James says that if we will intentionally visualize and verbalize God creating this good, it will bring us joy. He also explains that the adversities are the hurdles that exercise our faith making us stronger in endurance and building us into the mature, complete Christian warrior ready for battle and able to overcome and obtain the desires the Spirit has put in our hearts.

Grace Giving
Problems standing in the way of our goals make us grow to overcome them. When we grow, we gain strength, knowledge, wisdom and most importantly, we grow in our capacity to love, forgive and give to others in grace. We grow in our ability to relate to our loved ones in ways that help them grow and in ways that build them up, not tear them down. Giving in grace means to give expecting nothing in return. Just like God gives to us, with no strings attached, His only desire is that we accept His gifts and benefit from them. One of God’s goals for us is that we develop the capacity to give like He gives, generously without reservation, freely without hesitation, confidently without fear of having enough for ourselves and in grace, expecting nothing in return. Giving without expecting a return is called grace giving.

God’s Promises are Grace Gifts
God’s promises are gifts that he gives all of His children, earned by the work of Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. These gifts are freely given and His only desire is that we use them and benefit from them. He never wants us to feel like we owe Him in return for letting us use His promises, He only desires what is best for us and only desires that we accept what He offers. Again, giving to help others, expecting nothing back is called grace giving. We please Him by taking His promises and using them by faith to enjoy total victory over every problem found in the devil’s world. We further please Him by understanding His grace giving and choosing to become grace givers as imitators of Christ. Our problems are a necessary part of building the capacity to give in grace. Rejoice that God loves us enough to give us problems that inspire us to grow to be like Him, grace givers.

Today is the Day
To finish, today is a good day to stop complaining about the problems and hurdles God has allowed into your path. Today is a good day to finally believe what he has said in His word and apply the principle that He uses all things for good. Our problems, even those we have self-induced are part of God’s plan to grow us into His own image, like His son Jesus Christ. A life without problems would be a life without growth, a life without change and we would stay the same losers in Adam for life. It is time to see our problems as opportunities to prove out God’s promises by using them to overcome the devil’s schemes to tear s down. He wants us to lose heart, complain and fold up. He wants us to use our own abilities to deal with life so that he can neutralize our witness and cause us blend in with his people in the world. Today is the day to stand firm against his schemes by trusting God for what He has promised. Today is the day to believe that your problems are God’s gift to make you a grace giver like Jesus.

What is Depression?
Depression, oversimplified, is the loss of hope. It is experienced as a down feeling that comes when we stop believing that life will be good for us in the future. Hope can be defined as a belief that life will go well with us and we will receive what we want in the future. Hope is confidence about the future. When we stop believing that our future will be good and believe that our future holds nothing but disappointment, we can spiral down into a depressed state. When we stop trusting God for our future and allow our doubts and fears to dominate our conscious minds, we can become discouraged and depressed.

Inner Dialogue
When people are depressed, they often are not sure why or how they got that way. They may think and feel that “no one feels the way I do”. We can ask, “Why am I so sad and why can’t I get over this”; “Why did this happen to me”, “Where is the light at the end of this tunnel”? Christians who become confused about God’s goodness when He allows them to suffer can go through a crisis of faith that leads to depression. Their inner dialogue will be filled with hurtful and angry discussions about why God allowed them to suffer the painful event. Every Christian who endures the spiritual journey through their life will go through some form of discouragement to some degree.

Physical Connection
Depression also can have a physical connection along with the mental and emotional suffering. When we are depressed, the neural receptors of our brain can be damaged, making it very difficult to pull out of it. Psychologists are not certain which comes first, the mental or physical, whether the mental causes the physical or the physical causes the mental. It is clear that there are genetic and environmental links from one generation to the next because children of depressed mothers and fathers often experience their own depression in adult life. The physical aspects of depression can be alleviated through medications that can even help the mental and emotional difficulties of depression.

Let’s summarize a few ideas to make sure we understand depression. It is deep discouragement that we go into when we suffer the loss of something or someone important. Depression can occur if we get stuck in the grieving process and don’t reach the resolution phase. The key trigger seems to be a loss of hope about the future. If we begin to anticipate continuing disappointment in the future, we lose hope that God will provide the things we want in the future. We lose the motivation that drove us ahead, the drive to pursue our goals and we go into a low place. The good news about depression is that God has a sure solution for it if we will get serious about His plan.

Heb 12:5 and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, Nor faint when you are reproved by Him;

When God allows loss to train us in His will, we can faint and lose heart, which are bible terms for discouragement and depression.

Causes of Depression
Let’s further examine what we have already stated about what causes depression. First, it robs us of the happiness that we can have in life. It is a result of mishandling loss by believing negative sayings and images about the future and failing to believe positive images about the future. It is inevitable that we will suffer loss and the loss of someone we deeply value or something we see as necessary for happiness. When we do suffer loss, it is important that we grieve and get over it in a reasonable amount of time. We can get stuck in our grief when we refuse to accept God’s will and right to allow our loss, so that we grieve without hope.

1 Thessalonians 4:13 But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope.

We can become angry with God for our loss and then become angry with our self for fighting with God. This process can cause us to lose confidence in our self and even in God’s good intentions to bless us. If we will tell our self that we will be reunited with the one we lost because of the resurrection, we can regain our hope for the future. The truth of God’s word is always our answer for every problem in life.

The idea of loss can be connected to many things in life. We can feel loss if we fail to achieve a goal or we begin to have health problems. We might react to the imagined loss of future opportunities or even real losses. The difficult truth is that God doesn’t mean for us to hold on to anything or anyone in this life. Everything comes and goes, even life itself and the only permanence is found in the next life with God. When we are earthly attached and focused, we are vulnerable to depression and anxiety. As we grow in the Lord and detach or hearts from the things of this life, we find freedom to be content and more able to accept the losses we endure.

Intensification of Depression
Many people who suffer from depression feel ashamed of it and believe the lie that tells them that only the weakest of us get depressed. Those who feel ashamed of being depressed try to keep it a secret so that their weakness won’t be exposed. Shame about depression only adds to depression and secrecy to hide weakness cuts us off from the help we desperately need. When depression is kept secret it increases and intensifies feelings of shame and hopelessness. The brain becomes overloaded and we sink into a deeper hole within our own hearts. We can live for years with a low-grade depression that hinders our ability to manage our responsibilities and causes us to miss the opportunities to enjoy the pleasures life has for our lives. It is difficult to function as a good mate or parent when we are depressed and trying to hide it. In the most extreme cases, deep depression leads to suicide, the ultimate harm to family and loved ones.

Coming out of Depression
Depression is a breakdown in our faith in the Lord and is really a series of mental sins. One of the first ways to come out of depression is to stop hiding our problems and be honest about them. John tells us that honesty about our failures begins with God.

1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Confession means to admit and be honest with God about our sins. Depression is a downward spiral in our thoughts and feelings that results from believing lies and committing the mental sins of self-pity, fear and shame. When we recognize that we have chosen to think our self into this hole and admit it to God, we are making the first move to correct the problem.
Secondly, God has provided the body of Christ with its individual members with their individual spiritual gifts to edify one another. Depression is a state of soul that often can be helped by encouraging words of truth from gifted believers. Depression is the result of believing lies about our self and the future and when we are supernaturally encouraged with truth by gifted believers it can help move us in a better direction. Recovery from depression is a journey not a one shot decision.

Ephesians 4:15 but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ,

Finally, the journey out of the hole of depression is a journey of reestablishing hope and confidence in God’s grace and love for us. Hope is the product of trusting God’s good intentions and believing that he has a positive future for us. The bible gives us the truth about how to find hope in the difficult environment of the devil’s world.

The bible teaches us that we find hope in the gospel (Col 1:23) because we are given eternal life when we believe it. This hope comes from God’s love for us (Rom 5:4-5), is laid up in heaven (Col 1:5), is connected to our calling in Christ (Eph 1:18), is learned from the promises of the bible (Rom 15:4), is the work of the Holy Spirit and is experienced as confidence when we trust the promises of God (Rom 15:13).

Depression is a result of telling our self lies about our future when we experience the pain of loss and disappointment. These lies paint a bleak picture and distort the truth about God’s love and good intentions toward us. The lies cause us to lose hope in His care for us and we find our self in a deep hole wanting to give up. We combat and defeat our lies by learning, believing and telling our self the truth of God. The truth is found in His word, revealed by the Spirit and renews our hope when we choose to tell it to our self and believe it instead of our lies.

Telling Self the Truth
I have helped many people who were depressed and talking suicide. When we discussed the inner dialogue they were circulating in their minds, telling themselves, it became clear why they wanted to end their lives. They had gone though some type of painful loss, couldn’t seem to get past the pain and had concluded that they would never feel any better within their hearts. When we were able to list the lies they were telling their self, we were then able to confront these lies and fight them with truthful, hope filled thoughts. When a client would choose to be alert to their inner voices and take charge of what they said to themselves, they were able to turn their depression around in short order. Some refused to stop telling themselves the lies and preferred to remain in their hopeless state. I felt for them but when they refused to be responsible for their own hearts, I knew I had done all I could do. Each of us must decide what we will believe, what we will tell our self and how we feel inside. We come out of depression by choosing to reject the ideas that make us feel bad and replace them with ideas that make us feel good. God wants you to know the truth and the truth will set you free.

What is Stress?

Stress is caused by anxious and fearful reactions to difficult circumstances. Difficult situations come when we take on adult responsibilities that hold increasing importance to us. During a normal American childhood, our responsibilities are limited. We are responsible to make our grades, clean up our room and perhaps a few chores assigned by our parents. As we reach adult life, we take on the responsibilities of marriage and rearing children, which place much greater pressure upon us. Circumstantial pressure increases as the importance of our responsibilities increase. Stress, which is anxiety related to our pressures, increases as we choose to worry about the outcomes of these situations.

God Is Prepared
Long before God created the universe, with His genius, omniscient mind, He was able to look ahead into human history and see every moment of our lives. He saw our bodies being formed in the womb, the moment of birth and every moment since. He is fully and totally aware of every aspect of our lives. In fact, he is totally aware of every life, every situation and every problem that any of us will face in our lifetime, and He has made provisions for us to handle every situation with His grace. The pressure we experience from the important responsibilities we have taken, have a solution, a way that God has provided for us to deal with these situations and be at peace, instead of feeling stressed.

In this article, we will discuss some of the different pressures that come with simply being alive, the provisions that God has made to give us victory over daily life and the way He has designed for us to practice His solutions to experience inner peace and joy in spite of difficult circumstances.

Pressures of Life
I am defining pressure as the weight we feel associated with the responsibilities normal to every stage of life. In our early life, we have the pressure of everything being new to us and having to learn how to deal with things we don’t know how to do. We have to learn how to make good grades, relate to others in school and how to compete within the social structures we experience. Looking back, the pressures of childhood look small, but when we were in the midst of them they didn’t feel small, they often felt overwhelming. As we enter adult life, the scope of our responsibilities increase and with them the pressures increase. Marriage and family carry bigger pressures than making good grades or having to compete on the playground. Most of us consider these relationships to be the most important of our lives. As the importance ratio increases, the temptation to “stress out” also increases.

Every stage of life carries its own difficulties and burdens. Early life has the pressures of everything being new, mid life the pressures of everything being so critically important and older life holds the pressures of seeing it all come to an end. God designed human life and is fully aware of all the pressures that come with each stage. All along the way He has made provisions for us that enable us to handle the pressures with class and make decisions that edify everyone around us. When we use God’s promises and principles to manage our souls, we are relieved of stress within and we are able to give freely to others. His promises guarantee us a way of looking at pressure that makes dealing with it fun and beneficial. Instead of feeling stresses, we can feel challenged and use the pressure as an occasion to grow. Only God could turn difficult circumstances into something good.

Provisions of God
God knows what is coming next. He knows what is going to happen to everyone, the choices that each of us will make and how these choices will interact with one another to motivate us to make other decisions. He knows the end before it begins. God, knowing how human life works has made promises relating to life that He always honors when we believe them and use them for life. What God who cannot lie has promised, He will certainly perform whenever anyone trusts Him for them. For example, God has promised to meet all of our daily needs for earthly life, ie food, clothing and shelter.

Phil 4:19 And my God shall supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.God’s glorious riches supply all of our needs.

Notice that this is an unconditional promise and not dependent upon any action we must perform. He takes care of all the needs of His children, like any good father, even when they are in a state of disobedience. Notice also that His promise pertains to our needs, not necessarily our wants. What we think of as needs and what God knows are our real needs can often be very different. This promise is a real comfort to those who trust Him when we are struggling financially. To know that God will take care of us and our family can give us inner peace if we will believe the promise and not doubt it.

God has given promises and principles pertaining every stage of life. He knows us in the womb, knows when we will be saved, when we will struggle with any and every issue in life and He is prepared to handle them. We feel stressed when we don’t know how our situations will turn out. We imagine them turning out for the worst and visualize scenarios of disaster resulting in disappointment and pain. With God’s promises that enable us to deal successfully with every problem in life, we can eliminate the negative images. Rather than imagining negative images, we can rightly imagine successful images and be at ease about the outcome of any situation. When we trust God’s promises, they take away stress and replace it with peace. This is true about everything in life and every stage of life. Let’s look at the ultimate problem we will face, or own death. For the Christian, those who have trusted the death, burial and resurrection of Christ for their salvation, death means that our soul leaves our earthly body and goes to be with the Lord. Listen again to Paul,

2 Cor 5:6 Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord 7 for we walk by faith, not by sight 8 we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.

While we are here on earth, we live inside the body we were born with. When we leave this body, the promise is that we will immediately go to heaven to be with Jesus, who will one day give us a new body that will last us forever. What a wonderful promise from God that can alleviate our worry and fears when facing death or when a loved one who is a believer dies. God’s promises answer every problem in life and give us peace in any problem in life, when we will believe them.

Practicing our Faith
God in grace has provided for every problem life holds. God’s grace means that He has done all the work and offers us the benefits of His work as a free gift. We benefit from His work when we believe what He has promised. Christ paid for our sins and offers His work as a free gift, which we accept by faith. Christ has also provided for every other problem in life and offers His grace provision as a free gift, which we accept by faith.

Faith is how we utilize God’s grace provisions. The writer of Hebrews explains how faith is mixed with the promises of God.

Heb 4:2 For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard.

The writer tells us that faith is united or mixed together with the promise of God and when it is, the believer is benefited. All of us have faith and can choose to connect our faith to any idea. When we choose to connect or mix our faith with God’s word, He benefits us by blessing us with whatever He promised. The more we know about God, His word and what he has promised His children, the more we can mix with our faith and the more we can be blessed by God.

Summary
Pressure from our responsibilities grows as life progresses and the temptation to feel stressed grows along with it. Stress can grow if we don’t handle pressure well and can even take over our life. God has given us promises that enable us to deal victoriously with every difficulty in life. When we mix our faith with His promises, He blesses us with inner peace and contentment. His promises have made a way for us to avoid stress even though we can’t avoid the pressures of life. If your life is filled with stress, consider talking to God about your problems and learning His promises to deal with your difficulties.

These articles were written to help prepare us to properly respond to our present situation. The outline I followed was, pray, purification and preach. It is a time for prayer, it is necessary for the church to be purified in order to have a credible witness and it is time to preach the message God has left with us. The previous articles have dealt with the issues of prayer and purification. Now I would like to talk about our responsibility to preach the gospel and the word of God to the world.

First, when I say preach, it brings up images of a man at a pulpit preaching the word. This is certainly part of God’s program but not what I am proposing for most of us. By preaching, I mean simply communicating the truth of the bible in conversation. It is time to pray, it is time to exchange our old ways for the ways of God and it is time to become the aggressors in the marketplace of ideas. It is time to speak up. It is time to lose our fear of rejection, fear of being horse laughed and inject the message of Christ into the conversation. Our daily conversations, conversations with family, conversations with neighbors and even that which is reported by the media. Check out the courage of Tim Tebow. He is clearly not ashamed of Jesus and speaks His holy name every chance he is given on national TV.

In the following paragraphs I would like to suggest a course of action that will prepare us for the spiritual opportunities ahead. First, we need to pray for ourselves, second we need to prepare ourselves with pertinent information and finally, we need to persist in the work of presenting God’s perspective to those He sends our way. 2Cor 5:14-21 is our guide as we prepare ourselves to be bold witnesses for Christ.

14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Prayer for Ourselves
First, in 2009, let us commit to ask God to give us real opportunities to share His word. Pray that God would prepare the hearts of those we will encounter along the way of our daily lives. He already knows who we will see and be with every day. He knows their problems and the areas of their life that would best give us an opening to speak. Ask Him to highlight these areas in their lives before we meet them. Ask Him to send us people who are at that place of interest and need.

Pray also that He would give us boldness to speak as He would have us speak. This is what Paul requested for himself when asking others to pray for him.

Ephesians 6:19-20 and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

Remember, he was in jail as he wrote those words. He didn’t ask to be released from prison. Instead he asked to be emboldened to use the opportunities he was given every day. Speaking for Christ requires that we lay aside our fears and allow the Spirit to replace fear with courage. Fear comes from believing we will lose something valuable if we speak. Some fear what others will think of them and how others will brand them within the community of people they travel (religious nut). Others feel inadequate to the task of speaking the word and fear making a mess of the witness. The point is that we have assigned too great a value on being accepted by others within our peer groups. We believe that being accepted by the world is an important part of being happy and content. To diminish the power of this idea we must first recognize that we have believed this lie. Second, call it the lie that it really is and third, tell yourself that you are not going to believe that lie ever again. Finally, look to the Holy Spirit for the truth. The truth is that our inclusion in Christ has provided all the acceptance we will ever need and that we do not need the acceptance of people to be happy. At this point, I visualize my position in Christ and hear Him telling me that He is pleased with my boldness to speak for Him

Whenever you feel afraid to speak up about Christ, go through this drill of throwing away your lies and embracing the truth. As you continue to practice this, the Spirit will change your heart and you will find that your fear will fade away and courage will take its place.

Finally, pray that God will produce love and compassion in you for the suffering of others. Ask Him to remind you of your great wealth of love in Christ and motivate you to share His love with everyone around you. It is this great love of God that motivates us to perform the ministry of reconciliation. Christ does not send us out to speak because we are afraid not to or even because He commanded us to speak. He was motivated by love in all that He did for us. The Spirit produces that same love in us as we walk with Him and this love grows in us as we grow spiritually.

Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Prepare Ourselves
Having prayed that God will prepare the hearers, that He will give us courage and love, we must prepare ourselves for the opportunities that will surely come. What should we say, when should we say it and what results should we look for having said it? Let us look at a few ideas about preparation for ministry.

First, the greatest issue facing the human race is where each of us will spend eternity. There is a heaven and there is a hell, so says the bible and especially so says Jesus. He spoke more about hell than any other person in the bible. The first issue to address with anyone in your life is, what does a person have to do to go to heaven when they die? What must a person do to be saved? The bible answers these questions for us.

Romans 1:16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

Paul explains that the power of God to save us comes through the gospel when anyone believes it. When any person believes the gospel, God uses His power to save them. The next question we must ask is, “what is the gospel”?

1 Corinthians 15:3-4 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

Paul tells us that the gospel is the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This gospel was foretold in the OT scriptures and was fulfilled in His earthly ministry. It is by believing that Christ died to resolve the sin issue, was buried and raised from the dead to resolve the death issue that we are saved. Whenever a person believes in the work of Christ as the only means of salvation, God gives them the free gift of eternal life which can never be lost or rescinded. There are some in the church who preach a gospel that doesn’t include the resurrection and don’t believe it to be a necessary part of the gospel. If you hold this position I am not seeking to offend or argue, but to simply encourage you to read the sermons in the book of Acts. All of the first sermons given by the apostles in the book of Acts emphasize the resurrection and none of them preach Christ without it. After wrestling with this issue myself, I simply decided to include the resurrection in all of my gospel presentations to make sure I had covered all of my bases. I don’t see how including it could possibly hurt anyone and not including it could be disastrous. I like playing it safe when dealing with God’s word.

Second, we live in a land with many confused and hurting people. Whenever a people turn away from God, they begin a journey into degeneracy. This journey takes them either into legalism (moral degeneracy) or debauchery (immoral degeneracy). Turning away from God causes us to operate on human will, human ability and our human trends take us to extremes. The people of the US are deep into degeneracy and have either become religiously evil which causes them to be self righteous and condemning or immorally evil which causes them to over indulge in pleasure seeking. Both of these extremes destroy relationships and cause families to come apart. As a result, we are into multi-generational divorce situations. Many of our children are now being raised in one-parent homes by parents who were raised in one-parent homes, with grand parents who were raised in one-parent homes. Divorce has become normalized and homes without dads have become an accepted way of life. It is not difficult to see why so many people feel empty and long for a better life. Millions in America today have been love deprived and have not been given strong but loving male role models. The one-parent home has become the norm and living in deep soul pain has become the norm. The gospel and the love of God are as relevant today as ever, maybe more so.

As you pray for your hearers, pray that God will boil their pain to the surface and make them achingly aware of the need in their lives. Aching hearts look for answers. Aching hearts that have tried everything else sometimes are willing to hear the truth. What do we say to hurting people that might bring them to the Lord?

For those who were abandoned, we might offer the promise of Hebrews 13:5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”
For those who are starved for love we might offer the love of God, 1 John 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
For the many who grew up fatherless, our spiritual adoption has great meaning: Romans 8:15 For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

Finally, there is seldom a need to rehearse answers to specific questions. Simply prepare yourself by learning and obeying God’s word and He will give you the right words when you need them. One of the ministries of the Holy Spirit is to bring the right words to us to say to meet the need of the moment, as in Matthew 10:19: But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say.
Learning to hear and follow the voice of the Spirit is the spiritual skill needed to operate this way.

We have discussed prayer for our hearers and ourselves. We have briefly discussed preparing ourselves to meet the needs of those that God sends our way. In closing I want to encourage us all to persist in or readiness and never give up on a person or the process.

Persist
A critical spiritual skill in the Christian life is the skill of enduring and not quitting when times are tough. Endurance (Grk hupomeno) literally means to remain under the weight and practically means to keep trusting God’s promises even when the situation looks hopeless. Persistence is the first virtue produced by the Spirit as we grow through adversity (Rom 5:3-5; Jam 1:2-4). We first learn to “keep believing” God when He stretches our faith by making us wait for deliverance under different types of adversity. When He finally delivers us either from the adversity or through it, we learn that He makes us wait but never abandons us. We learn to wait on Him while the storm swirls around us. It is this acquired strength of faith built in us by the Spirit that is necessary to make it through the more difficult stages of growth unto maturity. It is this same endurance that never gives up on people and continues to express God’s love and truth to them even when they reject us. I witnessed to one man for over 10 years before he finally accepted the gospel of Christ and allowed the Lord to save him. During that 10 years he consistently rejected the idea that he had done anything that warranted the work of the cross. He believed that because he was a good person that God would compare his good deeds with his bad deeds and allow him into heaven based on his good deeds. I didn’t give up on him and simply continued to offer him the truth until God opened his heart to see it. Paul discussed the enduring nature of love in 1 Corinthians 13:7 (love) bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Our love for those who need Christ motivates us to bear up under their rejection, keep believing in who/what they can be, keep hoping that they will believe the truth and endures until the very end.

As we begin 2009 under the fear of a failing economy, many people in America will be looking for answers and solutions. As we pray that God will use adversity to open the hearts of many, we must be preparing ourselves to speak up with spiritual solutions and faithfully endure whatever God allows by continuing to show God’s love and speak God’s truth.

Heavenly Father, I ask you to give our new leaders the wisdom they need to make decisions that are compatible with your will. I ask you to bring circumstantial pressure on the people of the U.S. and open their hearts to hear the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I also ask you to give the church the love, courage and wisdom to demonstrate your love and boldly speak your message of reconciliation. May what we say and do edify others and glorify you.

We know that everything the Lord allows in the life of His children is intended to produce agathos good. Agathos is good that causes us to grow and God to be glorified. I think the good that God is working now in USA is the awakening of many to their need for Christ. Only God can awaken those who are spiritually dead and only God can enable them to see Christ as their temporal and eternal solution. God will awaken and God will enable, but it is the mission of the church to give the message.

The church has been entrusted with the euaggelion, the “good news” that Jesus died for our sins and rose again to offer eternal life to whosoever would believe. As Christians, it is our mission to proclaim this message to the lost so that they can be saved and live with God forever.
Paul, in his letter to Timothy shares God’s desire with us:
1 Tim 2:4 who (God) desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

God has left us here after salvation as Ambassadors for Christ. An ambassador lives in a foreign land, represents his government to another, speaks the message of his king to the people of another land. Christ has entrusted the message of reconciliation to us so that we can share it with the citizens of the devil’s world. Again quoting Paul:

2 Cor 5:18 Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, 19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

We have the mission, we have the message and we have the power. What the church of Jesus Christ in the USA does not have is credibility. Our words do not match our actions. We as Christians say the right words, but then we don’t live consistent with what we say. We believe the bible but have not used biblical principles to change our hearts. We still operate with the same values, priorities and strategies that we used as unbelievers. This must change for the church to establish  a credible ministry.

This article will be written in 2 parts. The first part here will build the case for our need to be purified. The second article, coming next will discuss the means that God uses to purify our hearts and minds.

The Need for Purification
The message of an invisible God who will take us to live in a yet to be seen heaven in the next life is difficult for many to swallow. The idea that man needs a savior and that 2000 + years ago Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected to save our souls is also difficult. To those who are spiritually asleep, it sounds at best like make believe and at worst as mental illness. Paul wrote that to those who are spiritually blind, it is foolishness:

1 Corinthians 2:14 But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.

The natural man refers to the man who was born spiritually dead (Eph 2:1) and has yet to wake up to the spiritual world. Spiritual death is a state of being separated from God and therefore being unable to understand spiritual ideas. God, who is righteous, cannot compromise Himself by being joined to anyone who is unrighteous. Adam’s sin caused him to become unrighteous and forced God to separate Himself from him and all of his descendants (Rom 5:12). Without God, man’s human faculties are incapable of comprehending spiritual ideas or performing spiritual works (1Cor 2:14). To those born in this state of spiritual death, the gospel message sounds like foolish talk. For man to understand the gospel and believe it for eternal life, God has to intervene and enable him to do so. This enabling is an act of grace that God offers to “whosoever will” and is taught as the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit. Jesus explained the Spirit’s ministry to the lost to His disciples:

John 16:8 “And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment;

The Spirit convinces man of His need for Christ. He performs this ministry through the message of the gospel as given by Christians in the church. Part of this act of grace that awakens the dead to the spiritual world is the evidence from the life of those who bring the message.

Another consequence of Adam’s sin was the corruption of his body, mind and nature. The presence of sin itself has a corrupting force on whatever it touches. Sin violates God’s perfection and when sin is present, it causes death. In addition to Adam’s judicial separation from God, his nature that was designed like God’s own was changed to a selfish nature. Designed to worship and serve God, Adam’s nature became self centered and self-serving. At the same time his nature had been changed, his body also began the natural process of decay that resulted in his death 930 years later.

Allow me to summarize before we proceed. Adam’s sin caused him to become spiritually dead, separated from God and incapable of processing spiritual phenomena. His nature became totally self-serving and his body began to die. Adam’s sin had horrifying results on he, his wife and every one of his children. All of his children even to the present generation are born in the same state.

Every human being is born incapable of perceiving spiritual phenomena. Before we are saved, the gospel sounds foolish to everyone. In order for God to wake us up, the lives of the messengers must demonstrate the reality of the message. It is necessary for the Christian to live like a Christian to establish credibility. Paul speaks about his commitment to demonstrate the reality of his relationship with God:

2 Corinthians 6:3 We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. 4 Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses;

He does nothing that might cause anyone to be tempted to sin so that his ministry won’t be discredited. Instead he commends himself or demonstrates his Christian character in any and every type of adversity. His purpose is so that others can see the reality of Christ in his life hoping that they will be motivated to seek Christ for themselves.

In the upper room before they left for the garden of Gethsemane for the last time in His first incarnation, Jesus explained that the unity of the church would bring credibility to the message of His sacrifice and God’s love for mankind.

John 17:20-23 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23 I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

If reading these verses, which reveal God’s intentions, doesn’t make us weep for the church with its 20,800 denominations, then we have become numb to reality. Unity? The church in the 21st century is anything but unified. If credibility is established by unity, then it is no wonder that the world sees us as hypocrites.

Lost people are born separated from God and unable to make sense of the gospel message. It sounds foolish to them. When they see Christians fail to live out the gospel they preach, these Christians look like hypocrites. The lost have a difficult time hearing the message from a person who looks like a hypocrite. Now, I believe that most Christians know this and would like to live a life that is more consistent with the message. I believe that every one who is truly born again has a desire to live out their lives in a way that honors Christ. The problem is that it looks like it should be easy but it really isn’t. From the outside the Christian life looks like no more than a system of rules that one can just adopt and perform at will. The world’s view of Christianity as I discussed in an earlier article is simply doing more good deeds than bad deeds. If living for Christ were really that simple, then it would be easy.

The real issue here is that the Christian life is far more than rules that man can follow at will. Christianity is a total exchange of beliefs/behaviors from our original selfish ideas to the belief system of God. For us to give up our old beliefs and embrace the ideas of God, we must go through a growth process that can only be accomplished by learning the word of God and using the power of God. The real Christian life is a little more complicated than adopting a new set of morality and rules – just a little!

Our old beliefs, attitudes and behaviors have to be purged through this growth process. As we choose to reject our old ways through the power of the Spirit, He purifies us from our selfish, sinful beliefs and behaviors. Only when we have been purged from our lies are we able to embrace to truths that Jesus believed and used to live His life. It is by using these truths as our own belief system that we are able to express the character of Christ through our lives. In Gal 4:19 Paul calls this process “Christ being formed in us”. He describes the process in Eph 4:22-24:

Eph 4:22-24 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in righteousness and holiness from the truth.

In summary, the Christian church in the US has little or no credibility because:

1. Those to whom we must give the message are separated from God and His power.
2. Without God’s power they are unable to understand the gospel message.
3. Without God’s power to reveal the truth of the gospel, the message sounds like foolish talk to the unbeliever.
4. Those who give the gospel message have not understood the growth process that God uses to transform them into the image of Christ – their churches have not taught them.
5. Those Christians who have not been transformed are trying to live the Christian life using the strength of their human will – their churches encourage this behavior with Christian programism.
6. Those still living by the power of human will are still living under their old selfish beliefs and behaviors – living like they did before they were saved.
7. Those trying to live the Christian life in the flesh with their old ideas look like hypocrites to the ones to whom they are giving the message.
8. We hypocrites in the church have destroyed the church’s credibility.

The Solution:

1. Believers in the church must be purged of their old beliefs and behaviors.
2. These believers can then embrace the beliefs and behaviors of Christ.
3. When believers have been transformed into the image of Christ, the character of Christ can be expressed through them.
4. Christ formed in us allows us to love unconditionally and give in grace like Christ.
5. Only under these conditions can a believer live consistent with the gospel message and establish credibility with the lost world.

I close this article with Paul’s admonition to the Colossian church

Col 3:9-10  Stop pretending with each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.

The next article on credibility will discuss the method God uses to purify the Christian heart.

Many years ago I decided to live honorably so that I would have few regrets when it was all over. In many ways I have done well. When it comes to my prayer life, I have little but regret. The reason is that I have failed to use the time God has given me to pray consistently for what I believe and for those I love. It is my goal for 2009, to change this pattern. I have decided to ask God to guide our new leaders, to provide circumstances to waken our nation and to allow me to participate in a spiritual revival in America.

Jam 5:16 The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.

When Paul wrote his first letter to Timothy (AD 63), the Christian sect had become widely known and had aroused the suspicion of Rome. Nero was the Roman Emperor at this point and would prove to be no friend of the church. In his letter, Paul reminds Timothy of the need for the church to pray for political leaders:
1 Tim 2:1-4 I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone– 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

Paul tells us to pray for the President and those who hold positions of authority over us. What are we to ask God to do? He wants us to ask that these men rule in such a manner that it provides an environment of freedom and peace. In this environment we are free to worship without censorship and free to share the gospel without interference. My prayer for our new president is that his policies will enhance the church’s freedom to publish the gospel, not hinder our efforts to make Christ known. I am also praying that all the false ideas about separation of church and state that are common today, will be discarded. I especially hope that public schools will open their doors to the bible as literature and to speakers bringing the gospel message.

In addition to prayer for political leaders, Paul also expected prayer for Pastors and spiritual leaders. The church can only go as far as their leaders are prepared to take them. We live in a day where the church seems to be a mile wide and an inch deep. The church appears to be consolidating into mega-churches with smaller churches dying off through attrition. Large churches have large resources to advertise and package their services so that they appeal. Large appeal brings large numbers. Large numbers decreases intimacy and discipleship. My prayer for our churches is that their Pastors would learn and teach the depths of God’s word. Our people are starving for the word but don’t even know it. They have been fed on milk for so long, they don’t know that meat even exists. The pastors of America have been trained to inspire but not instruct, to manage but not lead, to motivate but not train. The call from the pulpit is to give money and perform tasks as a means of spiritual growth. Christian works are always the result of growth, never the means. Spiritual growth is the result of feeding on the milk and the meat of God’s word.
Peter explains that we grow through the word:
1 Peter 2:2 like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation,
The writer of Hebrews admonishes us to leave the basics behind and grow to be mature Christians:
Hebrews 6:1 Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God,

My prayer for the pastors in America is the same as Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesus:
Eph 1:16-19 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 18 I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength,

We are praying for our political leaders to provide the environment of freedom and our pastors to prepare our people for service. Now we must pray for the people of America to awaken to their spiritual need. How does God wake people up to their need for Christ? One of the ways that God reveals need is through providential circumstances. Providence is defined as God’s gracious care of others. God uses difficult circumstances to humble us and cause us to reach the end of our own resources. When life becomes more difficult than our human resources can handle, we are forced to look beyond ourselves for aid. My prayer is that God’s love for man will motivate Him to allow very harsh circumstances that bring the masses to the end of self and opens their hearts to the gospel of Christ.

James 5:17-18 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain; and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months. 18 And he prayed again, and the sky poured rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

Elijah prayed for providential adversity to come upon his land so that his people would awaken to their need for God. The drought caused many to starve and die. Those who survived were awakened to their need for God’s grace and mercy.

Finally, I am asking that God help the newly awakened to be positive to the message of the gospel and the word of God. The drought in Israel revealed man’s inability to help himself. It opened the eyes of many to their need for someone who could control the rain so that crops would grow and people could eat. When the people saw the work of God, they fell down and said, “the Lord is God” (1King 18:39). The people turned to God.

Let us pray for our political leaders to give us freedom to worship and evangelize. Let us pray for our Pastors to seek the depths of God’s word to prepare us for the ministry. Let us pray for Providence to provide circumstances that exhaust our human resources. Finally, let us pray that God will give the masses ears to hear and eyes to see the truth of the gospel and the word of God.

I have committed to pray this every day for the next year. I am asking you to make this same commitment. If you agree with this article and agree to make this commitment, then please e-mail me and let me know.

In the next article, we will discuss purification of our hearts as preparation for the ministry.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama announced that he was a Christian. He explained that for 20 years he had belonged to Trinity United Church of Christ, a church that teaches ‘Black Liberation Theology”. Black Liberation Theology is focused on Jesus as a social reformer and as one desiring to bring social justice to the poor and underprivileged. BLT appears to be mostly concerned with man’s social and economic situation more than his spiritual situation. I don’t present this as fact but only as my impression from what I have read on the internet. With this understanding, it is not hard to see where Mr. Obama’s economic philosophies have originated. In this article, I want to discuss what many people believe makes one a Christian and compare that to what the bible says about being a Christian.

There are many different versions of what we think of as being a Christian. According to the Dictionary of Christianity in America [Protestant] (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1990): “As of 1980 David B. Barrett identified 20,800 Christian denominations worldwide. I am not sure how Mr. Barrett was able to count all of these but if his numbers are even close, that is an astounding number of different ideas as to what constitutes a Christian. It is not my purpose to address all of these different ideas.

If you will allow me, I would like to simplify this discussion by dividing these 20,800 different ideas of Christianity into two different categories. Believe it or not, all of these different ideas can be divided into just 2 categories. The first I call Christianity by Works and the second I call Christianity by Grace. Let’s look briefly at both of these and as we do, decide which of these is your own type of Christianity.

The overwhelming majority of these 20,800 denominations can be classified under the label of Christianity by Works. The following statements are representative of the core ideas taught by churches that believe in Christianity by Works:

· God’s plan for us is to practice good works and it is the doing of good works that wins God’s approval & our acceptance into heaven.
· Man must perform good works so that God will accept him.
· It is by performing good deeds and avoiding bad deeds that we earn forgiveness from God.
· God is viewed as holding a set of scales that He uses to weigh out our good/bad deeds. Whichever weighs the most, the good/bad, determines whether God accepts us or rejects us.
· A person is considered a Christian because of the conduct he/she practices in their daily life. This view sees Christianity as a code of conduct, not a relationship with God.

Christianity by Works as implied by its name is focused on choosing moral & ethical actions to conduct relationships and live out life. Moral action is taught as the means of making a person spiritual and also the means of making up for the sins that violate the Justice of God. In many churches, the teaching is that if our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds, God will accept us into heaven when we die. This teaching is very similar to many other world religions where the follower is instructed to perform some work or ritual to appease the wrath of their gods. One wonders if these similar philosophies and methods don’t have the same origin.

In contrast to Christianity by works, Christianity by Grace emphasizes God’s works instead of man’s works. The following ideas are representative of the core teaching of the churches who believe in Christianity by Grace:

· Every human is a sinner & unable to perform enough good to make up for our sins or to be worthy of God’s acceptance.
· Because man is unable to make himself righteous through his own efforts, God’s love made a way to do it for us.
· God sent His son Jesus to the cross, where He paid for all the sins/wrongs done by mankind. These sins are what will cause God to reject us.
· After He paid for our sins, He died & was buried. Then He defeated death itself by rising from the dead three days & three nights later.
· Jesus defeated sin on the cross, death by His resurrection and in doing this, He earned acceptance for us in the sight of God.
· The work of Christ (D,B,R) is offered to all mankind as a free gift that can only be accepted by personal faith.
· When His grace gift is accepted by faith, the new believer is credited with God’s own righteousness (Justification).
· As the possessor of God’s righteousness, the believer is made qualified to be forgiven, reconciled, and accepted by God.
· His grace makes us good enough for God to accept us into heaven if we will simply believe that He did this for us.
· Christianity by Grace also emphasizes good works, but as a result of being right with God, never the means of becoming right with God.

Christianity by Grace considers a person to be a Christian if they have accepted the work of Christ by faith. When anyone believes that Christ died for their sins and rose again, God forgives all of their sins, declares them righteous in the courtroom of heaven and adopts them into His own family forever. Justification makes us acceptable to the Justice of God and allows Him to accept us into heaven without compromising His perfect integrity. The apostle Paul explains this concept:

Romans 3:21-23 But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, 22 even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus;

Notice that justification is a gift offered to undeserving sinners, apart from performing any works of the Mosaic Law and given to those who choose to believe in Jesus Christ as their savior. Forgiveness of sins and Justification are part of 50 different things that God Himself does at the moment we accept Christ as our Savior. Notice that Grace Christianity is focused on what God does to make someone a Christian, not on what man does to make himself a Christian. These 50 actions that God performs in heaven and inside the new believer are permanent, eternal and the actions of a Sovereign and Supreme Being, not the actions of a frail and fallible human being.

Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, that no one should boast.

It is always what God does that counts and it is what God does that makes someone a Christian. In grace, Christ did all the work to satisfy God’s righteous requirement. Man is unable to add anything to the finished work of Christ, only accept it by faith. In fact, man is not ever allowed to add His works to God’s to secure His salvation. Grace Christianity teaches that after being given salvation as a free gift, God does want us to perform good works but never as a means of earning salvation. Christianity by Grace teaches that all good works done by believers are an expression of God’s love and are a result of being a Christian, but never the means of becoming a Christian. Those who have been saved by God’s incredible mercy will respond with love and gratitude. Their good works are intended to manifest God’s love so that the recipients can see God for themselves and come into the same eternal relationship.

To those outside of Christianity, these 2 systems look the same but they are actually diametrically opposed to one another. The first, Christianity by works places all the emphasis on man and requires that man elevate himself to a place where God can accept him. Churches that hold this view teach their people to be involved in social justice and righting all the wrongs of the world. By doing these good deeds, they hope to make the world a place where God might feel at home and Christ will be willing to return. These churches de-emphasize the spiritual world and focus on the church as the agent for fixing the material world. While helping the oppressed is a worthy goal, to teach that doing good deeds can earn a ticket to heaven is a horrible lie that has deceived many. Paul discussed this very lie as taught by the Jews of his day:

Romans 10:1-3 Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation. 2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. 3 For not knowing about God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.

Rather than submit to God by receiving His righteousness by faith in Christ, the Jews of Paul’s day tried to earn their own righteous standing with God by keeping the Mosaic Law (good works). Paul explains that their zeal for God was misguided and not according to knowledge. The same can be said for anyone who tries to earn a righteous standing before God by doing any kind of good works. The bible says that no created being can earn their way to heaven by keeping a code of conduct, even the code that God Himself gave to Moses.

Galatians 2:16 nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.

Keeping the Mosaic law or any system of rules compiled from the bible will never induce God to bless or save anyone. If a person calls himself a Christian because he follows a code of conduct but doesn’t trust in the death, burial & resurrection of Christ as their means of justification, is he really a Christian according to the bible?

The second system, Christianity by Grace, places the emphasis on what God does. Man is always the undeserving recipient of God’s mercy. The only way to be righteous before God is to accept the gift of righteousness through faith in Christ as discussed above. The focus is on the spiritual aspects of our relationship with God and less on what happens in the material world. When Pilate asked Jesus about His kingdom, Jesus explained that in His 1st coming, the kingdom would not exist as an earthly kingdom but as a spiritual kingdom.

John 18:36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting, that I might not be delivered up to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.”

The kingdom of Christ, which is Christianity, is first a spiritual kingdom before it is a kingdom that impacts the material world. In the present earthly order, God has chosen to allow human suffering and to use it for His own spiritual purposes. Jesus, when confronted with the issue said this:

Matthew 26:11 “For the poor you have with you always; but you do not always have Me.

Jesus knew that His first earthly mission was to resolve the spiritual issues between God and man. It is the spiritual issues resolved in time that determine our destiny in eternity. He taught us that eternal benefit was far more important than material equality and that the church’s mission in the present order is spiritual before it is economic or political. When discussing this issue, he said this:

Matthew 16:26 “For what will a man be profited, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Jesus was not saying that the church has no responsibility to help the poor or speak to social issues. The church in fact is the true voice of compassion and grace to the helpless and oppressed. When the church is effective in influencing man’s spiritual life, it always causes society to move toward righting inequities and injustice. A perfect example is the impact of Jesus on the status of women in the Christian world. Before He publicly recognized and elevated women, their position in society was little more than property. It was the teaching of His Apostles that gave women a position of equality in Christ. In the Muslim world, women are still oppressed and considered the property of men. It was the church that brought about the elevation of women, not political action.

Understanding the distinction between works and grace is the most important life task any person faces. Literally, the decision one makes about this issue determines his eternal destiny. The bible is clear on the issue, salvation is by grace through faith and not from ourselves, not of works so that no man can boast. If we add our works to the work of Christ, He disqualifies us from receiving the free gift that He earned for us. The Apostle Paul, intending to make the issue clear, wrote to the church at Rome:

Romans 11:6 And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.

Grace and works are mutually exclusive systems. It is either one or the other in spite of many attempts throughout history to reconcile the two. If a man chooses grace, God will give him the free gift of eternal life. If he chooses works, he will come up short when he faces God at the Judgment. I pray that God will reveal the truth to all who read this.

Or next President says that he is a Christian. I wonder where he stands on the issue of works and grace. The Church of Christ traditionally teaches Christianity by Works. His intentions to socialize our country’s medicine and economy seem to align with a works approach. Does he believe that his “good work” of equalizing the economic situation of the poor will recommend him when he stands before God? Is he truly born again and indwelt by the Holy Spirit or does he consider himself a Christian because he follows a certain code of conduct? I don’t have the answers to these questions.

If Obama has accepted the free gift of salvation, then he is indwelt by the Spirit. The Spirit will be seeking to open his heart to the biblical view of governing a nation. We can pray for the Spirit to lead him to the truth. We can ask the Spirit to speak to his conscience.

If he considers himself a Christian because he follows a “Christian” code, then he is certain to fail. His intended policies, which do not line up with the bible, will cause an increase in our economic problems. Having hyped himself almost to savior status, when he falls, he will disillusion many. If this occurs, it is my prayer that God will open the eyes of many to their need for the gospel. We need to be ready.