Salvation is the free gift of God, but we are so reluctant to turn to Him and accept it. We are separated from God by a yawning chasm when we remain in sin, refusing to turn to Him, refusing to yield. But when we turn, ever so slightly, when we yield, ever so slightly, He is right there in an instant, spanning the gap, ready to accept us as we accept Him. what a great and wonderful God we have!
I urge you to read the conversion story of Eliza below. God stands at the door. When we knock, He opens its. We just have to knock.
God’s sheep hear His voice. God knows His own. They sit in the whole spectrum of churches on any given Sunday morning or Saturday night, and some of them do not visit churches very often at all.
The article, A Classic Pentecostal Encounters Charismatic Catholics, takes me back to the early days of my Christian walk. I was raised Catholic, but I found little attraction to church as a child. We went to church religiously, a practice I later came to appreciate about my parents, but there seemed to be nothing in it for me. I even felt uncomfortable in church.
I went through some very rebellious teen years, wandering lost through the haze and fog induced by alcohol and drugs, drifting to the edge of the precipice, before I woke to the emptiness that I had inexplicably been embracing. That was not my conversion, but just the beginning of walking in a new direction.
Fast forward just a short while to college where I entered like a kid in a candy store with a new found passion for knowledge and truth. I thought I had left religion behind. Actually I did (and have never returned). What I did not realize is that I would discover the life that religion seemed to enshroud like an empty tomb. Continue reading “Catholics, Pentecostals and the Body of Christ”→
“An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign[i]; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah.” (Matthew 16:4)
Jesus spoke of the sign of Jonah twice. The ironic thing is that everywhere Jesus went, he performed signs and wonders. What were those people looking for?!!
The “problem” for the religious leaders was that Jesus challenged their religious dogmas, and He did it on purpose! Continue reading “The Sign of Jonah”→
“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny[i] himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:24-26)
There is no statement anywhere in the whole of the Bible any more fundamental or important than these words Jesus spoke immediately after He spoke of His own future suffering. All of the Law and Prophets speak of Jesus. (John 5:31) Jesus was approaching the nadir of the purpose for which He, God stripped of His glory, became man. As the disciples rebuked Jesus about talking about future suffering, Jesus spoke these words.
As Jesus looked forward to His own suffering, He looked back to His disciples and said, “If you would follow Me, you must be all in.” Jesus was ready to set the example, and he pointedly instructed His disciples what it would mean to follow Him. They must have taken His words figuratively, as they had no idea Jesus would hang in a literal cross not long thereafter. Continue reading “The Profit of a Man”→
Bible skeptics often talk as if there is a dearth of evidence that any of the events in the Bible took place. Skeptics consider the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, as fictional, a fanciful product of the imagination trumped up many, many years after the actual events took place, and full of places and characters that never actually existed. The Ebla Tablets found in Northern Syria tell a different story.
