A resounding testimony for Christ will do a lot of things for you, including get you into trouble!

A resounding testimony of faith in Jesus Christ will get you into more trouble than you’ve ever been in, in your life.

You thought we were going to say how good life would be if you went “all in” for the Lord and told everyone about Him?

Let’s say it again…

A strong outspoken witness for the Lord Jesus Christ will box you into a corner and make you put up or shut up.

That’s why you ought to do it. That’s why you ought to erect a neon sign in your front yard declaring that “Jesus is Lord at 203 Garden Cove” or wherever you live. You ought to put a Bible on your desk and wear t-shirts that celebrate Jesus and put Him in your conversation.

Pray in restaurants before meals, speak to waitresses about their spiritual welfare, and witness to your colleagues at work.

So live and speak that when someone wants to attack the Lord Jesus Christ and can’t lay hands on Him, they start looking for you. (Acts 5:41 comes to mind.)

In declaring yourself for Jesus, you ought to remove your safety harness and throw yourself totally into God’s hands.

Quit being so cotton-picking careful.

What are you afraid of?

Tell people you’re a Christian and that it’s the best decision you ever made and that to know Jesus is the best thing on the planet.

Keep doing it and then watch what happens.  It might be painful, so be strong.

We have a couple of stories, one from a longtime friend and the second from God’s Word.

Diane tells this story about her family.

There was a time when their children were small and times were hard.  Diane had quit work to be a stay-at-home mom, and they were trying to make do on Philip’s salary from the department store.

As if life were not already complicated enough, Diane got sick and had to have a battery of tests and medical treatments. The condition was on-going and the costs were frightening.

As the one who paid the bills, Diane always made sure they sent the clinic a payment of some amount each month. However, it hardly put a dent in the total bill, which kept increasing.

During all this time, they never missed tithing their income to the Lord through their local church.

One day, they received a phone call from the clinic.  “We appreciate that you pay toward your bill each month, but we are going to have to ask for one-half of the total now. Until you do, you can’t charge anything more to this account.”

That was a blow. They began praying in earnest about what to do.

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Christians have no one to blame but themselves

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…. (from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  Act I, Scene 3.)

We did it and we are to blame.

Christians are forever complaining about the increasing secularization of America.  To listen to them in the year 2024 one would think the “old days”–say, seventy-five years back–were the golden time of perennial revival.

The only problem is I lived through those days of the ’50s and 60s.   I can tell you the preachers were constantly railing against the decline in religion, the weakening of the churches, the surrendering to the world.

There has never been a golden age of faith in this country or any other that I have heard of.  Men have always loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  The narrow way is always trod by the few while “broad is the way that leads to destruction.”

Don’t be overly impressed–or too discouraged–by statistics and percentages showing the swings of church attendance, the number of Christians in Congress, and such.

The greatest mistake of the past generations of Christians in this country was trying to Christianize the culture without evangelizing the people.  We put prayer in the schools, made the church the social life of the community, instituted blue laws so that no liquor could be sold on Sundays, and basically shut down secular life on the Lord’s Day.  We protected the morality of the cities and towns.  The citizens were no more Christian than previously, but we were making them behave like it.

It is indeed true that we managed to keep drugs out of our communities, kept a lot of bad movies from being aired in our small Bible-belt towns, and relegated bad sin to the back streets.  But we were forcing Christian behavior on a world of lost people.

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Okay, you are weak. So, what’s the problem?

“He helps us in our weakness….” (Romans 8:26)

I can still hear that fellow praying.  He said, “O Lord, I am so weak.  I am so pitiful, Lord.  How you can ever use a nothing like me is beyond me, Lord. I’m so ignorant, so fearful, such a sinner.”

I soon grew tired of his praying and all I was doing was listening.  I wondered how the Lord felt about it.

I think I know.

Our Heavenly Father takes it in stride.  He who created us knew from the beginning who we were. Nothing about us surprises Him.

He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust (Psalm 103:14).

It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps (Jeremiah 10:23).

The wonder is why you and I keep getting surprised by our weaknesses!

May I suggest you quit groveling in your self-pity, friend.  Okay, you have these weaknesses, these areas that throw you for a loop.  The Father knows this. He does not cast you away when it turns out you have a defect.  In fact, He took all this into His planning from the beginning.

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When God’s people do not live in His Word, many things happen. All of them bad.

“But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in that law doth he meditate day and night” (Psalm 1:2).

The Lord never intended for His Word to collect dust on a table in your back bedroom.

Brave men and women of the past paid for your right to own a Bible in your own language with their very lives.

What are you doing about that?

Christians who own numerous Bibles which they rarely open are thumbing their noses at the saints of old who paid the ultimate price.

This hard-won treasure lies buried under the dust and detritus of your life.

The Lord’s plan calls for His people to live and breathe His word, to read it and receive it inwardly and to think about it regularly and practice it. He intended it to become part of the very marrow of their bones.

Digest it. Assimilate it. Live it. And meditate upon it continually.

He even told people to “Eat this book.”

Several times in Scripture, God told His faithful prophet to consume the scroll containing His words.  (Check out Jeremiah 15:16; Ezekiel 2:3; 3:1-3; Revelation 10:9)

The idea was to get His Word inside them, to digest it as surely as one takes in meat and vegetables for nourishment and sustenance, and to grow thereby.

Job said, “I have esteemed the words of His mouth more than my necessary food” (Job 23:12).  Our Lord Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (that’s Matthew 4:4, where He was quoting Deuteronomy 8:3).

The image of taking in food and having it become part of your being is a perfect metaphor for God’s children assimilating His Word into our lives.

Man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  Moses said it, Jesus quoted it, and no one has improved on that statement since.

Sadly, too few Christians are living that truth today.

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The coach is toughest on his best players

“O you of little faith!  Why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31).

The teacher is hardest on the best pupils.

The Master Teacher is hardest on the Star Pupil.

The coach is in the face of the player with the greatest potential, on his back, never letting up.

Check out these words from the Lord Jesus.  Get behind me, Satan.  You are a stumbling block to me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s (Matthew 16:23).

He said those harsh, cutting words, not to the Pharisees, but to Simon Peter, His “star apostle.”

Simon Peter–the disciple with the most potential, the one Jesus renamed as “Rock.”  He called Peter a satan (adversary) soon after commending him for his confession that “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).  When Peter said that, the Lord said, Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

Called him blessed one moment and turns right around and calls him a devil. Wow.

What’s going on here?

Jesus had great hopes for Peter. And a great need for him.  To Peter alone, Jesus said, Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you like wheat.  But I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not.  And when you are converted, strengthen your brethren  (Luke 22:31-32).

With the star student, your hopes are great, your concern strong and constant, and your methods more severe than with anyone else in the room.

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How to tell when you’re growing in Christ. And when you’re not.

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  (2 Peter 3:18). 

Early coal miners carried canaries into the deep pits to alert them when they were in the presence of methane gas. Being more sensitive to these deadly fumes than humans, the bird would die long before the gas posed a problem for the miners. If the bird was dead, they ran for their lives.

We could all use a few canaries in our spiritual lives, to warn us when we were on dangerous ground as well as assure us when we were doing well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Colossians 3:1-17.  Those who will study it deeply, read it often and think about it regularly will learn a great deal about themselves and what it means to live for Christ. Before long, they will see patterns emerging in this text.

One evidence of many that Scripture is God-breathed and Spirit-powered is the multi-layers it possesses and the multi-dimensions in which it functions. A child will read this passage and find it fits his life perfectly, while his grandfather will see something entirely different but every bit as beneficial.

This passage deserves our attention today.  Please take a moment to read it.  Thank you.

Signs of growth

Here are four harbingers–four canaries, or measurements, signs, indicators–that alert the child of God who is growing in Christ that he actually is growing in the Lord. At the end we’ll turn it around and see how the opposite of these serve as warnings.

Four things begin to be prominent in your life as you grow in Christ.

And, we should look for all four to hold true at the same time.

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The disciplined life: So rare, so valuable

I’m confident you have heard the name Jimmy Doolittle.

Jimmy Doolittle flew those bi-planes in World War I for the United States, and then barn-stormed throughout the 1920’s, taking risks you would not believe. He led our country’s retaliatory bombing of Tokyo in early 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He played a major role in the Allied victory over the Axis, eventually becoming a General. His autobiography is titled I Could Never Be So Lucky Again.

Doolittle and his wife Joe (that’s how they spelled her name) had two sons, Jim and John, both of whom served in the Second World War.

The general wrote about his younger son:

John was in his plebe year at West Point and the upperclassmen were harassing him no end…. While the value of demeaning first-year cadets is debatable, I was sure “Peanut” could survive whatever they dreamed up. (p. 284)

Later, General Doolittle analyzes his own strengths and weaknesses and makes a fascinating observation:

(I) have finally come to realize what a good thing the plebe year at West Point is. The principle is that a man must learn to accept discipline before he can dish it out. I have never been properly disciplined. Would have gotten along better with my superiors if I had. (p. 339)

“I have never been properly disciplined.” What an admission. It takes a mature person to say that.

To put it another way, he had never learned to say no to himself. That is the essence of self-discipline.

He was not exaggerating. Doolittle was a man with a thousand strengths, but his few weaknesses kept creeping up and blindsiding him. Numerous times, even after he became a national hero, the officers in charge of his current assignment would ground him because of crazy stunts like buzzing airfields upside down and flying under bridges and endangering his passengers.

Prior to the Allied invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944), the actual place and time were the biggest secrets on the planet. Everyone was sworn to silence. Doolittle tells of a general who shot his mouth off in a bar, talking freely about the invasion, speculating on when and where, even though he personally had not been briefed.

General Eisenhower had no patience with such foolishness.

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Why our Lord requires that we “love one another”

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.  By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another  (John 13:34-35).

For good reason the Lord Jesus instructed His followers to take good care of one another.

No one else was going to do it.

Unless they loved one another, following Jesus was going to be a mighty lonely proposition.

The followers of our Lord were hounded, persecuted, ridiculed, harassed, and even martyred.  If they looked to the world to appreciate their efforts to bring the gospel of peace and love their way, they would be sadly disappointed.

The fellow believers were all they had. They were family.

The only family some had.

This is what I want you to do, said the Lord Jesus.  Love each other.

This is what proves your identity as my disciples, He said. My people love one another.

This is what discipleship looks like.

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Think God cannot use you? Think again.

“And Moses said, ‘Who me, Lord? I’ve not been to seminary. I didn’t even finish college. The other preachers won’t respect me. Pulpit committees won’t have anything to do with me. There’s a bounty on me back in Egypt. I stutter a lot, and tend to freeze up in front of groups. You’ve clearly dialed a wrong number, Lord.”

“And God said, ‘Shut up and listen.’” (My rather free version of Exodus 3-4.)

“The Lord can’t use a nothing nobody like me.”

Ever heard that? Ever said it?

Repent, sinner.  You underestimate God!

And, truth be known, you’re also overestimating your own importance in the equation.

The Lord delights in taking nobodies and doing great things with them.

I love the line in Romans 4 which goes, God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.

How’s that for doing something with very little.  Or with nothing.

Sometime in 1934, this fellow was working on the Graham dairy farm in Charlotte, NC. When I lived there a half century later, I heard him on the radio talking about the time he took Billy Graham to the Mordecai Ham crusade where he gave his heart to Christ.  He said, “Now, you think Billy Graham must have been an usual teenager for God to have done such great things with him in his long ministry. But you’d be wrong.  In fact, if I had lined up a hundred teenagers and told you one was going to be used of God to touch millions for Christ, you could not have picked him out. Billy Graham was a normal, typical teenager.”

As a 16-year-old working on the dairy farm, he said, Billy Graham was interested in one thing and one thing only. “He wanted to drive the farm truck.” And that’s how he got Billy to the crusade. “I told him, if you’ll go with me tonight, you can drive the truck tomorrow.”

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Why I’m angry at some preachers

You’ve heard them, I’m sure. Some well-intentioned but thoughtless man of God will stand before a gathering of the Lord’s people and in urging us to evangelize our communities will overstate the case.

“Jesus told us to become fishers of men! He did not tell us to be keepers of the aquarium!”

And, almost invariably, the statement will be met with a chorus of ‘amen’s.’

The only problem with that is it is not so.

In fact, it’s totally wrong.

Jesus did not send His disciples just to reach lost sheep–He certainly did that–but commanded that we are to “feed my sheep.” In John 20, He gave that command to Simon Peter three times.

In Acts 20:28, Paul tells the pastors of Ephesus that they are to “shepherd the church of God which he purchased with his own blood.”

And here’s another one, the one that set me off this morning.

In trying to motivate church members to get into the community with the gospel, the WIBT preacher* will say, “The Bible in no places commands the people of the world to come to church. It does, however, command us to go into all the world with the gospel.” (*Well-intentioned but thoughtless)

That’s so true, it’s almost totally true. But it’s missing something critical.

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