When the world doesn’t make sense,
When we search but find no answers,
When we are afraid of what may happen,
Remember these rocks of hope as your anchors:
God is in control. He always has been and always will be.
When we are without understanding, take heart that God knows all things.
There is nothing beyond His knowledge, beyond His control, beyond His ability to complete His perfect will.
Just as he laughed at Edom for thinking they were invincible in their high mountain homes, so does God laugh at man who puts his trust in his military might.
Man makes nuclear weapons,
God makes the sun.
No man can do anything without God allowing it
Yet no man can stop God’s sun from burning.
Let us not grow arrogant in thinking that we know the will of the sovereign God. For we do not and cannot know His will aside from His revelation to us.
Peace comes amid turbulent times when we trust in the Lord and have faith that He is indeed sovereign over all things.
Let us not worry over what we cannot control but rather commit our trust to Him who can do all things.
No matter how frightening the world may get, never forget that God is in control and man can never wrest the world away from God’s mighty hand.
Have faith that He still controls and let us sleep well at night in that understanding,
For faith is sweetest when it is present in the midst of man’s uncertainty.
God will always perform His will.
I am back in the book of Acts in my daily Bible reading. It is interesting that we see the Gospel unfold over 8-10 years to finally reach the Gentiles. And when it does, Peter and the Jews have to be convinced that this acceptance of Gentiles is from the Spirit.
Yet, from the beginning of the church, the Apostles preach the coming Gospel to the Gentiles. The Spirit inspired them to preach its coming to them from the day of Pentecost on, and even though they preached it, they didn’t get it until the days of Cornelius.
Consider these foreshadowing verses that should bring comfort to we Gentiles who read about God’s eternal plan to bring us all into His family:
“For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” (Acts 2:39 ESV).
We were those who were far off. Even on the day of Pentecost when the Jews were first let into the Kingdom of Christ, the Spirit said that Gentiles would be let in too.
And then, after Peter healed the lame man and was questioned by the rulers, he said this:
“You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’” (Acts 3:25 ESV).
This harkens back to the original promise to Abraham, 2000 years prior to the Kingdom of Christ coming and 4000 years from our time. Even then, we see that God’s plan was to bless all families of the earth, including Gentiles. Peter preached it but had yet to understand it.
And finally, when they were back before the council, Peter again foreshadows the coming of the Kingdom of Christ to Gentiles before he fully understood it:
“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12 ESV).
The name by which men should be saved was the name under heaven- not just for the Jews but for all under heaven.
What a wonderful God we serve. A God who always intended to bring the creation made in His image back to Him. I am a Gentile who serves a God Who never saw me as an afterthought or Who never forgot me. I was always part of His divine plan. And my Lord died for me, as He did for the Jews, on the cross for the sins of all mankind.
Praise and thanksgiving be given to our Lord and Savior for His unspeakable love He has for all mankind.
There was war yesterday. There is war today. There will be war tomorrow.
There was famine yesterday. There is famine today. There will be famine tomorrow.
There was disease yesterday. There is disease today. There will be disease tomorrow.
There was peace yesterday. There is peace today. There will be peace tomorrow.
There was plenty yesterday. There is plenty today. There will be plenty tomorrow.
There was healing yesterday. There is healing today. There will be healing tomorrow.
All over the world, war and peace, famine and plenty, disease and healing exist somewhere on the earth.
The world has good and evil. Some are blessed to live in areas of goodness while others suffer because they live in areas of trouble.
There go I but for the grace of God.
To those who suffer, there is no word but to put their trust in the Lord Jesus.
To those who rejoice, there is no word but to put their trust in the Lord Jesus.
Together, Jesus will be glorified when we submit to the Lord’s rule in whatever state we will be called.
It is not for us to ask “why?”
It is for us to submit and serve the Lord.
We serve an almighty God who knows how to administer justice when justice is absent.
We serve an almighty God who knows how to administer mercy when mercy is absent.
There is nothing that man can make crooked that God cannot make straight.
God watches all that man does and says and He lays boundaries upon man's ability to act.
In the end, we serve an almighty God who truly is sovereign.
Fear not what man can do to you, but fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
For the same One Who can destroy both body and soul in hell is also the One Who can save both body and soul by His own power.
Put your trust in man and his power, and you will have the extent of your reward here upon earth.
Put your trust in the God of heaven, and you will enter eternity with treasures laid up in the Father’s house. Treasures that no one can ever take away and will never be corrupted by time.
No matter how bad man makes things upon the earth, God will always shield His people with His mighty hand so that the things of man can never take away what God has entrusted to His children.
Praise the Lord and God of heaven, our refuge and our hope forever.
“Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” (Hebrews 12:14 ESV).
Here is a chilling thought: We understand the importance of pursuing holiness. But do we understand the importance of pursuing peace?
Can we find holiness if we are not people of peace?
I must ask myself if I am a man who brings strife or a man who brings peace?
Must I argue and win or have I learned to defer to others, even if that means I suffer loss in the name of peace and holiness?
Do I value my rights over others? Must I impose what I want rather than yielding to others?
Arguing, fighting, name calling, humiliating others, sharing things about someone else that is better left unsaid… all of these things pursue strife and cannot be a part of someone pursuing holiness.
And here is the scary part we must see and remember:
“without which no one will see the Lord.”
If we are not people who pursue peace, we cannot pursue holiness, and that can cost us our opportunity to see our Lord.
There are a lot of people who read the words of Paul and John and struggle with the balance of faith/grace vs works. And I suspect that most of the people we talk with believe that we do not have to do any works (but to have faith) and we will be saved.
No baptism.
No charitable deeds.
No keeping ourselves personally clean from the world.
Because, they reason, salvation is a gift and if we say we must do anything, we are earning our salvation.
Well, I searched long and hard to find a commentator who could make this tension between grace/faith and works simple to understand, and I am glad to admit that I have found one. I’d like to share His thoughts with you on this misunderstood tension. Hopefully, after reading what He says, things will become much clearer.
“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (John 14:21 ESV).
“Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me.” (John 14:23-24 ESV).
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15 ESV).
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.” (John 15:10 ESV).
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.
And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27 ESV).
Jesus makes it very clear that we must obey Him. The question is not whether Jesus expects us to obey Him or not, the question really is do the works we do merit the grace He gives.
Paul, John and other writers tell us that the gift we get is so great in comparison to what Jesus expects us to do, that no person can walk away and say that this is a fair trade. We get a billion times the value as a reward for the obedience we give to Christ.
Yet, it is still the Lord’s expectation that we obey Him. Can we even call Him Lord if we refuse to obey His words?
So don’t let the comparison of the value of our works and the value of our reward confuse us into thinking that because we are saved by grace, there is no responsibility to obey the Lord.
Eternity is a long time for us to dwell on the fact that we should have listened to and obey the Lord King Jesus, especially when He was so clear in His expectations for us.
I just finished the book of Acts in my daily Bible reading today. Now, I’m no Paul, but I find comfort in seeing the work that he did in teaching the Gospel. He certainly planted many churches, and the sum work over his life was amazing.
But when you focus in on the specific theaters he engaged in, it was more often than not true that the vast majority of the people he preached to rejected his message. Very few walked away converted, and there were times when no one repented and turned to Jesus.
Why does that bring me comfort? Not that people did not repent, but that even if someone like Paul struggled to convert people, then I should not focus too much on the results of sharing the Gospel with others, but rather the effort I should put into sharing the Gospel.
In Acts 22, Paul testified about Jesus before the Jewish council. Guess how many people were converted from that testimony? None. Yet look at what the Lord says to Paul when he was through testifying:
“The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage, for as you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome.” (Acts 23:11 ESV).
That reminds me of what the prophet Isaiah says about God’s Word. He says that it will not return void but accomplish its purpose:
“so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isaiah 55:11 ESV).
Sometimes testifying about Jesus will return with a few who hear and believe. Other times, it returns by sharing the words that will give someone knowledge and leave them without excuse when they reject the Lord.
Either way, we need to focus on our efforts, like Paul did, and not on the results we hope for. If we’re not careful, we’ll begin to whittle on God’s end of the stick:
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:6 ESV).