A Stone Heart

The prophet Ezekiel spoke of the unbelieving Hebrews saying that God would change their hearts of stone or unfeeling and carnal, selfish and uncaring and put in them new hearts of flesh, meaning tender, or single and one purpose and not wavering or divided. God will put a new spirit within us if we turn from sin and choose to live for Christ. He will make us a new person, throwing away the old. Let the sinner know he needs a change. “I am the captain of my ship” will sink you. Now you may say that doesn’t make sense. “I’ll do it my way” would be another way to say it. The self-confident, arrogant and selfish will perish. Our sins will sink us. So, what do we do?

Turn your ship around; ground it if necessary like Paul’s ship in Acts 27. Then you will live and not die. It is all about our hearts or soul and spirit.  Jeremiah tells us that, “The heart is deceitful above all things (all cure), who can know it” (Jeremiah 17:9). This is a great condemnation of the human heart in its natural state-incurable.  Ezekiel 11:19-20 states the cure, “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new heart within them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people and I will be their God.”  There is a lot said in this short passage. God is saying that man has a heart of stone. Now that is hard, right? Yes, it is impervious and not able to take in God. It is selfish, lustful, divided and beating to it’s own drummer, other than God. What does God require of us? He requires as Psalm 51 tells us a “pure heart” and He requires a “contrite and broken heart.” David understood this principle of life. Although he “was the man after God’s own heart,” he had sinned and knew that he needed God to “Search (him)me and know (his) my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24). Proverbs 27:19 tells us that a man’s heart reflects the man. So what do we do?

David and Aleph as Psalmists knew the way saying, “I seek you with all my heart”  (Psalm 119:10) and “I have chosen the way of truth; I have set my heart on your laws” (Psalm 119:30); “I have hidden your word in my heart”  (Psalm 119:11). Clearly we need to seek after God and His word for truth and life. Jesus Christ say, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me”  (John 14:6). There it is, Jesus is the only name under heaven by which men may be saved. We must confess our hard and sinful hearts- every one of us, and seek to trust in Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord of our lives. Only He can grant us forgiveness and lead us through His Holy Spirit in the “most excellent way.”

I have written a book based on Isaiah 30:21, a verse audibly spoken by God to me, “Whether you turn to the right or the left, you will hear a voice behind you saying, ‘this is the way, walk in it.”  What is the way? It is the way of Christ. In two volumes I tell what that means. It is not an easy walk, but one full of steep hills and twisting trails. But God will guide us toward the truth. Get a new heart and you will be able to follow Him with a “Cheerful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:19). Do you have a new heart?

I Choose

Do you wonder if you make choices that affect you, or are you a fatalist believing it just happens to you?  I am saddened if you are the latter as life just doesn’t happen to you. O yes, disasters and storms happen that you didn’t plan. God does allow tragedy in your life. He does not prevent all the trouble, even though He could. Why doesn’t He prevent and stop illness and trouble. What kind of God does that?  He is a good God, One who has bigger and longer-range view than you. He is a perfecting God not a pampering God one pastor said.  God wants to build us up, strengthen us for the journey so that we can persevere and be mature and complete lacking nothing as James 1:2-4 tells us. And yes, we do have choices- Choose to sin-choose to suffer. There are consequences to our choices.

So what do we do in this uncertain world? I say, choose the thing that is unchanging and immovable- God. God is the creator of the universe. He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, immutable and imminent. He is near to all who call upon His name and He is in control when we are not. He is God and we are not. We have the choice to live for Him or for ourselves. The difference is life or death- heaven or hell. We make choices by the 1000s, big and small. God gives us the innate intelligence to make many choices easily and many not so easily. And He holds the keys and the answers.  But He also gives us the choice as to whether we trust Him as Savior and Lord and live through and for Him. He is good and wants us to choose Him. If we do, He gives us His Holy Spirit to live and reign in our hearts. Through the Holy Spirit we have the wisdom to choose right. God reveals His will for us: through prayer; His word, the Bible; other godly people and circumstances. They don’t have to align, we just need to listen and look for where He is working and go there. God does all things for our good and His glory. So today, choose life.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving

Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done.

1 Chronicles 16:8 NIV

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 New International Version (NIV)

¹⁶ Rejoice always, ¹⁷ pray continually, ¹⁸ give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;    his love endures forever. Psalm 107:1

Struggle

Do you struggle against sin? I don’t know your response, but I know that mine is YES!  In Hebrews 12 the author tells us that since we have a great host or cloud of witnesses in heaven, “let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggles you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addressed you as sons: ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a son.’ Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons.”  (Hebrews 12:1b-7).

What an incredible passage. God is working in us to perfect us and give us endurance to resist sinful choices. Yes, we choose our way, even if someone sins against us, we still choose our response. By faith we make decisions to obey and follow God’s commandments. Paul also used this race metaphor in 1 Timothy 4:7 saying, “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” He admonishes the Galatians that as they run the race to listen to the truth and not the world or our sinful desires that act like yeast and puff us up. In Galatians 5 Paul tells us that Christ has set us free, so we must stand firm in faith and not be burdened by sin.

God has given us the strength through the indwelling Holy Spirit to stand and decide to obey. Don’t do anything in the dark that you would not do in the light. It will be found out. God will reveal our sin. Don’t hide it, but confess it to God and another godly person that they may encourage you as you walk in the way God designed. As my book of the same name quotes from Isaiah 30:21, “Whether you turn to the right or the left, you will hear a voice behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it.’”  In His still small voice through the Holy Spirit, God is guiding us. Read the word and know the truth.  C.S. Lewis tells us in The Problem of Pain, that God whispers in our good times (possibly sin) and yells in our pain.

Sin always takes us further and deeper than we planned. It works that way because Satan urges and convinces us of its benefits. But it will never work out well, unless we confess and change. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind as Paul says in Romans 12:2, so that you will become living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God and not conforming to this world, but knowing and doing God’s good and perfect will.

Convince and Complete

I recently wrote of the Counselor, the Holy Spirit who guides and leads believers in the way to go. The third person of the trinity also comforts us while He convicts us of sin. I heard Adrian Rogers speak on this John 16 passage about the Holy Spirit’s power. He stated that we need convincing of our sin. I think that is true because at least I am not always listening very well. Yes, I have been convicted of my sins and I am turning around and changing, but am I convinced?

God is not slow, but I think we often are slow to believe and understand how awful our sins are. God cannot have any sin in His presence. We must be changed and made new, without sin. This is a one-time point of salvation, but it is also a process of sanctification. This process is one of completion. It is not easy and requires trial and trying. James tells us that these trials make us mature and complete lacking nothing if we stay or persevere through them. We need to learn from them. Paul said as Jesus to the Philippians, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.” (Philippians 4:9). God is working on and in us, “being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6). Isn’t that a wonderful promise? God will complete what He has begun in each of us in His way and His timing. We need to be obedient and stay under His wing and ways until completion. This is not over until Jesus says it is over.

The Problem of Evil

Faith is hard at times. There is the disciple who said, “I believe, but help my unbelief.”  The prophet Isaiah spoke for God saying, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.  As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts…So is my word goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:8-11).

I have said that this country does not have a very good theology of suffering or hardship. Even Jesus said, “Why have you forsaken me?” Pain is hard and trials will accomplish their purpose, to make us mature and complete lacking nothing. God will answer, He is not slow and His arm is not too short as one Rabbi said in Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People. He initially thought that God did not have the power to intervene and change things. He does and His intent is to bring paradise back to a New Earth.

Ever since the beginning of man, we have been unfaithful and disobedient, bringing sin and sickness into the world. It was not created this way, but sin has brought decay and trouble. The Psalmist praises the God “who forgives all of our sins and heals all of our diseases, lifts our lives from the pit and satisfies the desires of our hearts that we might fly on wings of eagles.”  When I was suffering from tick borne illnesses that a medical school thought would be fatal to me, I prayed the words of the Psalm 103 written above and I was miraculously healed. Not all people are and God is not uncompassionate in not healing some.  David frequently cried out to God without seeing answers. But God hears and answers all prayers of faith unless we have unconfessed sin in our lives, and then He does not hear us.

Scripture is full of valleys and death, a natural part of life. It is God’s power that is working in our weaknesses as we trust and give thanks to Him in, and not for all things, for He is in all things.

He is compassionate and loving, full of mercy. His plans are to prosper and not harm us for a hope and a future, He tells us through Jeremiah. But we need to obey as there are consequences to sin and trials do occur. Our thoughts are not adequate to understand God’s ways. Yet He tells us His plans in Scripture. There have been over 300 Biblical prophecies that have come true as written in the most accurate book ever written. There are nearly 15,000 manuscripts of the Bible that are practically identical, written by 40 men inspired by the Holy Spirit over 1,500 years. They tell us that the creation of the nation of Israel was the last prophesy needed before Christ’s second coming or return to rule and reign and rid the world of evil.

Why does God wait until the end times to rid the world of evil, natural and moral? It’s the moral issues that are hard because man has free will and often choses cruelty, avarice and selfish power to try to control circumstances. God allows this and as a result many a hurt. He also allows us to combat or fight evil and to make morally good choices. Humans are not capable of solving the problem of evil because we will do things contrary to God’s intentions. God points us to good and gives us potential for it through the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and the filling of the Holy Spirit at salvation. This atonement brings us an imputed holiness through Christ that can overcome evil by making right choices in a sanctified or righteous life. Good is what glorifies Him and fulfills His will. That is, God wants us conformed to His nature. This is not a short-term view, but one that evaluates temporary suffering in light of eternal glory. God is looking to the greatest good.

God has announced a curse on mankind awaiting redemption from the bondage of sin. God did not create sin He merely provided the options of freedom that could result in sin.  But God allows sin and pain and suffering to bring us closer to Him. God grieves our sinfulness and is a victim of it. So He has provided the victory over sin through Jesus’s life, death and resurrection.

If this life were all there is then the problem of evil would be unresolvable. But Christianity’s doctrine of life hereafter teaches that there will be a great time of judgment- every sin will be recognized and the godly will be revealed. Punishment for evil will be justly administered, and the final dimension of eternal life will be granted to all who have responded to God’s loving offer.  Thus the complaint of the evil prospering and the righteous suffering will be satisfied.  God is making all things new in creating a new heaven and earth without sin when He returns very soon. Then we will be perfect.

One more problem. How could a loving God send anyone to hell? He does not; it is our choice to be left alone by God, therefore experiencing His absence forever- hell. Death is not final for either the believer or non-believer; it is simply choosing light with God or darkness and the absence of God forever.