​“For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”  (Hebrews 4:12).

Well, have you ever read the Bible known as the Word of God?  Maybe you have not read the Bible because you believe it is not relevant.  Yes, many people have said that to me over the years.  But it is a mistaken idea.  Others have said it’s not important; or it cannot apply to our current day and age. The problem with this logic is it is not theology, it is “me-ology”.   They're simply thinking about themselves.

This reasoning  is not only a matter for non-Christians, but it is also a problem in our churches today. There are those who say they believe the Bible. These people give lip service to the fact that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, authentic Word of God. But they don’t study it; they don’t know it; they don’t live by it; they don’t assimilate it; and they don’t stand on it. In the end their problem is the same: They are only thinking about themselves and what they want God to do and be for them.  There is dust on their Bibles and dryness in their hearts. It’s important for you to say, “I know that I know that the Bible is the Word of God.” But it means nothing if you don’t live like that is true.

May I encourage you today,  to dive deep into the Word of God. If you consider yourself to be a follower of  Jesus, then you need to know His Word!  Somebody said, the truth of the Gospel is so deep scholars could swim and never touch the bottom, yet so wonderful that a little child could come and get a drink of water without fear of drowning. That is God’s precious Holy Word.

Very simply: 

• The Bible has one overarching theme: SALVATION.
  
• The Bible has one hero: JESUS.
  
• The Bible  has one villain: the devil.
  
• The Bible has one purpose: to glorify God.
  

How do you explain the unity of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation apart from divine inspiration? That’s the reason we believe the Bible is the Word of God, because of divine inspiration.

It is not only unified in message but also in events.

The prophecies in Scripture and how accurately they are fulfilled are evidence of the truth of the Bible. When you read the prophecies of the Bible, you have to stand back in awe. The subject of prophecy is so big that I could not even begin to deal with it. It would be like trying to dip out an entire ocean with a teacup. So, let's just talk about the prophecies concerning the central character of the Bible: the Lord Jesus. There are more than three hundred precise prophecies that deal with the Lord Jesus Christ in the Old Testament that are fulfilled by Jesus in the New Testament. To say these are fulfilled by chance is an astronomical impossibility. Jesus infinitely fulfilled prophecy. The Bible is more than a book. Jesus is more than a man. Wherever you are in life, this Word of Life applies to you.

Whatever situation you find yourself in, Jesus is the hope you need.

The Bible is the Word of God.  So what is God saying to us?  What does His Word reveal to us? Let's take a look:

• The Word of God is the piercing sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6:17).
  
• The Word of God is the reflecting mirror of life (James 1;22-23).
  
• The Word of God is the burning fire  of conviction (Jeremiah 23:29).
  
• The Word of God is the pounding hammer which crushes the hardness of man’s heart (Jeremiah 23:29).
  
• The Word of God is the reproducing seed of the new birth (1 Peter 2:2-3)
  
• The Word of God is the guiding light of the believer (Psalm 119:105).
  
• The Word of God is the cleansing water  of sanctification (John 15:3).
  
• The Word of God is the measuring instrument by which one receives the approval of God (2 Timothy 2:15).

God sees and knows all things.  He knows if we believe in Him and His promises - or not.  He knows if we are making a false profession or if we truly following Christ. 

Do you know that the Bible tells us that God knows the motivations of our hearts. 

I challenge you to take a look at yourself today.   Are you aware of why you say and do things that you do?  Do you know what motivates you? 

Take some time today to read HIS WORD!  Know that it is powerful and living and right up to date.

There is an old hymn we used to sing in church which was titled:  This World Is Not My Home by Albert Brumley.  This incredible hymn starts by reminding us that: 
 
                    This World is not our home we’re just a passing through
                    Our treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
                    The angel beckons me from heaven’s open door
                     And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
 
The Bible says that for the Christian, this world is not our home (see Hebrews 13:14). 

The phrase not of this world is found in John 18:36 where Jesus says that His kingdom is “not of this world”.   We must stand and fight for what is truth and right on this earth, but we must never be so focused on earthly THINGS, and holding on so tightly to this world but rather we are to seek after the Heavenly Jerusalem.  Don’t miss the Kingdom of God to come...and don’t miss the KING.
 
America is important. The fight is important. But without a relationship with Jesus Christ, you'll be temporarily busy with no eternal impact. No hope for your future.  You will only believe that what we see in this life is all that there is.  Lift up your eyes and don't miss Jesus for the world.  Don’t say what others have said: “I’m  from Missouri I have to see it to believe it!”   We need to have faith.
 
Are you one of those people who say: Oh I don’t have faith.  BUT….you have faith that your alarm clock will wake you up for work.  You have faith that the brakes on your car will work when you are driving.  I can go on and on.  You get the point we have faith for the things we think are important.

Some 250 years ago, two young Moravian men heard of an island in the West Indies which was virtually owned by one plantation master. He was a violent man who treated his slaves with complete contempt. He would not allow them to know anything of Christianity; no minister was permitted to come and form a church among them. So these two young Moravian men, gripped with a burden for a group of people who might never hear about the love of Jesus, sold themselves into slavery to that plantation master. The money they received for their own lives they used to pay for their passage to get to the island. They gave up their lives to go and live among that community of slaves and bring them the gospel.

Their families came to the docks to bid them farewell, knowing it was highly doubtful they would ever see them again. As the ship pulled out of the harbor, with mothers crying on the shore, the last words ever heard from them was when one of the young men cried out from the ship’s deck: “May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering.” That became the catch-cry of the small Moravian community, who sent out 2158 recorded missionaries all over the world. Jesus had died for people who would never hear the gospel unless someone went to tell them.

Some of you are saying when we hear of those two young men, we are tempted to think “That is not NORMAL! Selling yourself into slavery? Leaving all behind, even your grieving family. That is not normal.

Let me ask you this, what IS the “NORMAL” Christian life?  Having searched through what the Bible has to say, I would describe it this way: the normal Christian life is one of FULL DEVOTION to Jesus Christ. Anything less than TOTAL devotion to Him is inferior and is NOT what Jesus intends.

Giving up all our rights. Following Him. That is the NORMAL Christian life, as described by the Founder, full devotion to Jesus Christ.

Well, what would that entail? What does full devotion to Jesus look like? One person who was living the normal Christian life was the Apostle Paul – the man who wrote half of the New Testament. Read some of the Books in the Bible he wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. and you will see what he said was full devotion to Jesus.

No matter where we live here on earth, we can claim the land we live only as temporary homeland. But scripture tells us that a time is coming when I will transfer my residence to my true home with my Savior in heaven.
 
This is what gives me peace and hope as I see world events unfolding.  We have to chose to give my life to Jesus, so that I could live my life for Jesus. Because of that decision, I know with certainty that I will not be here when the world passes through the coming great tribulation.
 
Everyone has that same choice, including you. You need to decide now whether, when the end times descend upon the people of this earth, you will be a heaven dweller or an earth dweller?

Are you a God pleaser or a man pleaser?  I have made my choice to reside with Jesus, and I pray that your choice will be the same.  Choose wisely and remember this world is not our [Eternal] home!

​Our spirit, is the only thing of value we have, is currently living in a temporary container called a "human body." This body ages, breaks, and eventually turns to dust. Fortunately, believers have the promise of a new life in eternity where our eternal spirit will get an upgraded container. This new container will be similar to Jesus' resurrected body:   [Jesus] who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory . . . —Philippians 3:21

The best thing about this "new" body is that it doesn't have the sin nature pulling us down.
 
There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him —Revelation 22:3.
 
And God promises we'll have this new condition "forever!"
to all generations forever and ever. —Ephesians 3:21
 
This is our hope as Christians!

Jesus said that your soul is worth more than the rest of the world all put together. He asked, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). It is impossible for us to grasp what is meant by “the whole world.” For this is not only the physical world or the geographical world. It includes the business world, the scientific world, the intellectual world. Jesus said that the soul is worth more than ALL the world.

Why is your soul so valuable?

First, the value of your soul is measured by its eternal quality. It will never die. You are going to live forever. Your body will die, but your soul, the part of you that is made in the image of God, will never die. Your soul—your spirit—will live forever. It is that part of you that has understanding and wisdom.

Today, as we come to the end of 2023, it seems as though all of technology is trying to do away with the soul of man.  That is what Metaverse (the old Facebook  re-named by Zuckerberg) is trying to do away with- yes the human soul and the sin problem we have since the Garden of Eden. Man is trying every which way to bypass the sin issue but they do not realize that what they are doing is sinning against a Holy God.  No one wants to accept that the evil they are doing is sin.  We close our eyes, we close our ears and we close our hearts so that we can say: “I am a good person,” when we really are not.  Remember even if you committed only one sin in your entire life you are still a sinner and not able to get into heaven on your own.

Many people have knowledge, but they don’t have wisdom. The Bible says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). A great British historian once said some years ago, “Man, by his knowledge, has brought himself to total annihilation.”  Knowledge without God and without wisdom is very dangerous. That’s one of the problems in the world today. We have a lot of knowledge; we have a lot of learning, but the Bible says you can be “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). We lack the wisdom to use our knowledge.

Your soul is that part of you that has judgment. It makes decisions—moral decisions—what is good and what is bad. Your soul also involves your will. Your will chooses or rejects things that are brought before it. Your soul is that part of you that has emotion, like love and fear. It has memory—the mental capacity for storing up knowledge of ideas and events. There is something down inside us that is beyond science to know. The Bible calls it our soul, and our spirit.

We tend to put all of our emphasis on the body with its pleasures and its physical appetites. But the soul also has appetites. The soul longs for God. Down deep inside every person’s heart is a cry for something, but he or she  doesn’t quite know what it is. There is an emptiness and hole because man is a worshiping creature. He instinctively knows that there is something out there somewhere, and he longs to know that something or someone. Your soul longs for vital contact with God. Your soul is valuable because it is eternal—it is forever!
Secondly, the value of your soul is measured by the devil’s interest in it. Jesus said the devil is the prince of this world. He is the god of this age. The devil is really at work in our world, and he is after your soul.  Do you see it?????  Do you see all the evilness going on,  all the chaos and manipulation and lies being told????
God created a perfect world. He and man were friends. God never meant that there would be suffering and war and death. But Satan came. he was a mighty angel, possibly the greatest of all of God’s created beings, and he rebelled against God.

When God created the earth. He put humans in charge of the earth. God wanted someone in the universe whom He could love and who would return love to Him. So He gave man freedom of choice. God said to man, “I put one tree in this garden—you are not to eat its fruit. If you eat it, you will suffer and die” ( Genesis 3:3). God was testing man. He gave man the freedom of will.  The freedom to choose.

But the devil told man, “God doesn’t mean what he says. You’re not going to die. If you eat of the fruit of that tree, you will be as great as God” ( Genesis 3:4-6). So Eve ate the fruit first and then Adam, her husband, ate it too. And that was the first rebellion by people against God. God had to keep His word or He would not be a just God. He had said, “If you eat the fruit of that tree you will suffer and die.” Man ate of the tree, and since then he has been suffering and dying.

HOWEVER, God did have a plan. God said, “In spite of their rebellion, I am going to save the human race. I am going to send my Son to this earth.” And every step of the way the devil tried to kill God’s Son, even when He was a baby. Finally, when God’s Son was on the cross, it looked as if the devil had won a great victory, but instead the devil lost his greatest battle. When Jesus died, the devil suffered a mighty defeat, because on the third day Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible says Jesus has “the keys of Hades and of Death” (Revelation 1:18). Christ is alive, and He is coming back to this earth again!

God is building His Kingdom, but the devil is also building his. Even though Satan is a defeated foe, he is still working. In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus said, “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart” (Matthew 13:19). Jesus pictured Satan as an enemy battling and bidding for the souls of people.

Third, the value of your soul is measured by God’s concern for saving your soul. God is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

“God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
 
“What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).
 
God sees your soul as the most valuable thing in the world, so valuable that He sent His only Son to the cross to suffer and die so that your soul may be saved. And if you were the only person in the whole universe, Christ would have died for you.
 
Fourth, the value of your soul is measured by the severity of its loss. It is terrible when a person loses his health, or his money, or his friends, or, worse still, his character; but what about the loss of a soul? 
 
I live in the mountains of Tennessee and many times in the woods or forests or near the large lakes and populated cities children are abducted or get lost. Many people come to help—the military sends helicopters and soldiers. They bring in specially trained dogs. Everything possible is done to find the child. The newspapers print the story, and the television and radio stations report the story. We get Amber alerts on our phones and computers and specially designed machines in our homes.  But if a man’s soul is lost, that isn’t reported by the media- no Amber alerts signal. Yet, the soul is worth more than all the world.
Suppose you had all the gold in the world and all the clothes you could ever dream of owning, and you lived in a magnificent home, and owned all the oil in the Middle East.   it was all yours, but you lost your soul. Jesus said it would be a poor bargain. Even if you could get everything you wanted, it wouldn’t give you peace. You would still be searching. Great riches cannot make you happy. Much pleasure cannot make you happy. Only the peace of God coming into your heart through Jesus Christ can bring peace and joy and happiness.

Fifth, the value of your soul is measured by the price paid for its salvation., its deliverance. The Bible says, “knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19).

I have a question for you:  What are you doing with your soul? Are you gambling with your soul, taking a chance with it?   I am asking you to make sure of your relationship with Christ.  Christ demands more than just churchgoing, more than doing a check off list, more than just baptism, more than just being good. He demands your total surrender—the surrender of your mind, your heart, your body, every part of you—to the Lordship of Christ. If you have a doubt in your heart that you have totally surrendered to Christ, do it now. Make sure of your salvation. Make certain that you know Christ.  Repent of your sins. Confess your sins, acknowledge them and turn away from them.  Accept and receive Jesus Christ into your heart by faith, making a total commitment to Him, and to Him alone.  So easy and so simple even a child can do it.  This is not for adults only. 

There is a chorus we used to sing in church:
          THANK YOU LORD FOR SAVING MY SOUL
          THANK YOU LORD FOR MAKING ME WHOLE
          THANK YOU LORD FOR GIVING TO ME
          THY GREAT SALVATION SO FULL AND FREE.

Can you sing the words of that song and truly mean it?  If yes, GREAT you have made the most important and valuable choice already!   If no, then don't let today pass without asking the LORD to save your soul!  You will be eternally happy that you made that choice!

GOD BLESS!

Everybody wants or thinks they are going to go to Heaven when they die, but nobody wants to die.  Have you noticed that lately? We forget that we are all terminal.  You have to go through something to get to something. You have to go through death to get to Heaven, and you have to go through death to yourself (dying to self) to get to the victorious, abundant life. Heaven is a real place described in the Bible. The word “heaven” is found 276 times in the New Testament alone.
 
In the Bible in John 10:10 Jesus said: "I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.”  Jesus didn’t say, “I have come that you might have death,” but Jesus said, you might have life.   We won’t receive this life until we’re sick and tired of our old life. Not until we say, “Yes, to Jesus, because you died for me and I died with you. And I thank God, when you rose, because I will rise with you.”
 
People have different ideas about heaven. Many have no understanding of God at all, but still like to think of heaven as the "better place" where we all go when we die. If you asked people about their ideas about heaven their answers are often no more than vague hopes, similar to "maybe I’ll win the lottery some day."  Let’s face it most people don’t give heaven much thought until they attend a funeral or a loved one dies. It is popular to refer to heaven as the place where "the good people go." And of course, everyone they know and love is included in the category of "good people".
 
In the Bible those who were believers remind us that the funeral of Christians while filled with grief and the separation that comes with it also has bright hope.  For the Christian death is not the end.  We look forward beyond our own time on earth and realize that we have comfort in God and what is awaiting us.
 
Why is there so much interest in Heaven?  Well, the heavens are a creation of God along with the earth.  God made everything: the heavens and the earth.  The heavens belong to Him.  The Bible also refers to heaven as God’s dwelling place.  The Bible says that the heavens are His throne and the earth is His footstool.  Are you getting a picture of the greatness of God?  As awesome as the heavens are as they are described in the Bible, but God is not contained in them or even in the highest heavens.  He overfills the heavens and the earth!
 
But now that I said this about heaven the Bible also tells us that the heaven will disintegrate and disappear like smoke.  Then God will create a new heaven and a new earth that will exist eternally for His people.  But only if you have made a commitment to Christ while you are alive then you will spend eternity with Him in heaven.
 
Because of Jesus we understand even better than the Saints of the Bible what awaits us in Heaven.  Yes, death’s sting still hurts.  But we know that the death of the body is our induction into a full experience of eternal life.  The death of a loved one hurts but death is not life’s end, it is our entry into a full experience of that eternal life promised to us by the Lord Jesus Christ, Our Savior, Redeemer and soon coming Lord.
 
You want to get to heaven?  Then, while you are alive you must make your commitment to serve Him.  NOW is the time and please humble yourself before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Accept by faith what He did on that Cross for you.  Believe on Him and His Word and then Confess it to others.  That is sending your reservation ahead for your place at the King’s table and His Kingdom eternally.  Do it today!  That is how you make it to Heaven.  
 
The people who go to heaven are all alike in one way: they are all sinners who have placed their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:12; Acts 16:31; Romans 10:9). They have recognized their need for a Savior and humbly accepted God’s offer of forgiveness. They have repented of their old ways of living and set their course to follow Christ (Mark 8:34; John 15:14). They have not attempted to earn God’s forgiveness but have served him gladly from grateful hearts (Psalm 100:2). The kind of faith that saves a soul is one that transforms a life (James 2:26; 1 John 3:9-10) and rests fully on the grace of God.
 
Years ago, I heard someone say that Heaven is a place of “no mores”.   There will be no more tears, no more pain, and no more sorrow (Revelation 21:4). There will be no more separation, because death will be conquered (Revelation 20:6). The best thing about heaven is the presence of our Lord and Savior (1 John 3:2). We will be face to face with the Lamb of God who loved us and sacrificed Himself so that we can enjoy His presence in heaven for eternity.
 
Well, do you know for sure that you have eternal life and that you will go to heaven when you die? God wants you to be sure! The Bible says: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). Suppose you were standing before God right now and He asked you, “Why should I let you into heaven?” What would you say? You may not know what to reply. What you need to know is that God loves us and has provided a way that we can know for sure where we will spend eternity. The Bible states it this way: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). 
 
Accept His free gift today, so that you will know where you will be one blink after you die.