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Tag Archives: the world today


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What God Requires

Micah 6:8
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

What must we do to work the works of God?  We need to implement justice, morality, and rightness, today in our own lives.  God is clear in his Word.  What we do in our lives, and how we do it, matters to us, and to God.  He has requirements of us. We need to do certain things in order to prosper spiritually and physically in our lives. We are told repeatedly throughout scripture that judgment from the Lord is coming.  That God will judge the just and the unjust according to their works. He will judge the nations and peoples of the world.  He will judge his own people.

Immorality and corruption are increasing in the environment where we live.  We need to be looking to God for the ability to refuse temptations.  Western governments and nations are rejecting God and his commandments today.   Lying and deceit are everyday occurrences with those we deal with in business and everyday activities.  We see this in the news about our financial organizations defrauding and deceiving their banking customers.

What are we to do?  It’s not going to be ok for us to participate and do business the same way as the world around us.  God has given us his commandments.  They are laid out extensively in his Word.  The ten commandments being the scaffold of what he requires of people.  His Word is what we must follow.  God has not left us defenseless as his people.  We do not have the old nature that powerless against sin.  We have choices as God’s people to do what is right.  How do we do this?

Through  the Holy Spirit. We need to be asking God for his Holy Spirit to be given to us in a measure that is responsive to what is happening today in our world and what is happening where we are living.  This is individual, and also corporate, for us as God’s people.  We are in a struggle and we need to overcome through God.  Western Christians are  experiencing opposition from their government leaders, education institutions, judicial legislation, and popular culture.  What to do?

Stand with God, and do his will.  Keep his commandments. Ask him to help you to do this.  He will.  Guard your heart, your mind, and do what is right.  Avoid and rebuke temptations in the power of Jesus Christ.  You will be richly rewarded in this life and in the eternal life that you will enter.  ‘Well done thou good and faithful servant’.

 


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Character Deficiencies Within and Without the Church

We are seeing something today in the church and in our society at large that I have not previously witnessed to this extent in my lifetime. Deficiency in the character of people. Personality disorders are increasing in the general population. One of the main personality disorders arising in our time is narcissism. This occurrence is having a very adverse effect in our world and in the church. People with functional narcissism often seek positions of power and influence. They are found in greater numbers among CEO s, politicians, ministers of religion, and in other positions of decision making and authority. Scripture says that in the last days people will be given over to a reprobate mind because they will not accept the truth but prefer to believe a lie. I think that we are into those days now.
Narcissism is filtering down to the average person in our day from upper echelons. People are engrossing themselves in the culture and the often perverted teachings coming from places of higher authority in our lives. People do this seemingly unquestioning, even in the church. Christians are accepting of any book, any new thought, any teaching, as long as it has the ‘christian’ label.

People having narcissism personality disorder are looking for power, control, and ‘food’ to feed their need. This requires that they put on a false personality before others. What you see is not them. You see the false person. This person does not have normal human emotions. They mimic emotions that they have seen on other people’s faces for particular circumstances in their own lives. This narcissistic condition emerges in their very young years. Emotionally they remain very young and self-centered throughout their lives. They make extremely poor marriage partners because whoever marries them marries an emotional child. They can make the ‘hard’ decisions because they do not feel guilt or remorse for their actions. They cannot love as a normal person can. The main emotions that are real for them is anger and rage.
When we think of this type of person being a pastor, a government leader in a position of trust, a company manager or owner making decisions that affect hundreds maybe thousands of lives, we get a picture of the devastation that this personality disordered person makes on society. Church leaders with this condition are no exception. Many other church leaders are following them because these people may be successful by worldly standards.  Pastors who are their followers then lead their own flocks into error and possible destruction.
We are currently living in extremely precarious times as Christians. We are going to have to exercise judgment and discernment within and without the church. We have the authority to do so according to scripture. We must judge the spirits. We must look at the fruit. We must analyze the lives of our leaders to see if they are being true. To not do this is foolhardy in our day and time.


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The Bible, is it correct information?

I read some regular news mostly from CBC here in Canada. I also read some alternate media sites on the Internet. What I have found for myself is that there appears to be error in both camps of news. On the Internet there are opportunistic web sites, propaganda sites, gossip sites, false teaching sites, exaggerated and hyped up sites, and so on. We have ongoing nuclear disaster problems in our world that are not mentioned in regular news broadcasts. We have important news that happens in the world and in our governments that is not covered by regular news outlets, we have news that is reported incorrectly, and so on. Where can someone get reliable trusted information in our day?
In my mind the Bible is the only correct information that we can rely on and depend on in our day. There is so much confusion, disinformation, false teaching, biased propaganda, deception, and outright lies in our day. The average person is changing into thieves, liars, and brutes. Scripture says this about the Cretans during the time of Paul the apostle. There comes a time in society when things are turned upside down and inside out. I think this is what is happening today. We in the world are being shaken. Everything we’ve known and believed in the past is being dismantled and questioned. Someone recently said that you read what the left news is saying, then you read what the right news is saying, and choose something to believe that is in the middle somewhere. I don’t think this is where a person finds truth either. This position is just more moderate thinking about untruths. Is everything we hear and read a lie? No. But how does one know what the real truth is? We don’t know. This is the reality in our day and time.
The Bible is also being questioned and dismantled in our day. This assault is coming from Biblical teachers,and preachers. The Bible’s truthfulness is being questioned today. We are being told that we can believe some of the Bible, or maybe even most of the Bible, but some parts of scripture are unreliable. Scholars say that there were wrong translations made in the past and so what the Bible says today can be questioned or set aside. I believe it is the Bible that will keep the believer on the correct path and will teach the believer what truth is. We absolutely need the Holy Spirit in our day, but we absolutely need to trust what the Bible says as well. Jesus says in the Bible that he is the TRUTH. Where else could we find this information other than the Bible?


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Fear and Grace

The Bible repeatedly exhorts God’s people about fear. We are not to fear. The scripture encourages believers to ‘Be strong, be courageous’, that God has ‘not given us a spirit of fear but of power, and love, and a sound mind’. We are facing fearful times in our day. Church leaders are fearful. They are conforming to the requirements and compromise the world is asking for in order to avoid persecution. They want to be friends and a blessing to the ungodly of our day. This is the result of the teaching about grace that has permeated every church in the USA and Canada. We are to turn our eyes away from sin and love everyone (especially the world) in order to show God’s unconditional grace. To get people saved. This is false teaching. This is not taught in the Bible. This teaching has not been balanced with other teachings in scripture about grace. Grace to obey God. Grace for gifts. Grace to conform to the will of Christ in our choice of lifestyle, in our mind, and in our heart. Grace to endure hardship. Grace to remain faithful to God despite the circumstances. Grace for our transformation into the image of Christ. Grace to die to ourselves, to our old nature. Etc. etc.

As believers we must overcome fear. Fear is the opposite of faith. Currently, fear is being used to manipulate believers and church systems by the world. Churches are falling one by one to these demands. A prominent church teacher is telling believers here in North America that they can side with the antichrist (to the point of taking his mark of ownership) and still be saved at the end. This is presumptuous and absurd. Once we are the devil’s he will not let us go, and we do not have the power to deliver ourselves. We will have turned our back on Christ and the power of the cross. The Bible teaches that at that point there will be no more sacrifice for our sin.


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Two Covenants meaning Hagar and Sarah

Galatians 4:21 begins a teaching about the two sons of Abraham. The story in the OT of the two sons named Ishmael and Isaac tells of how Ishmael and his mother Hagar were sent away by Abraham. In Galatians the apostle Paul says that we can look figuratively at the mothers of Abraham’s sons as representing two covenants, one of the natural, and one of the promise through the power of the Spirit. Paul clearly teaches that the present Jerusalem is of Hagar. She will not share in the inheritance of God. Paul declares that there is a Jerusalem that is above and that she is the mother of those who are in Christ.
Today we have many teachers and preachers who make errors in dividing the word of truth. They teach one part of the Bible as full and complete truth, but when other parts of the Bible are read their teaching is contradicted by other Scriptures. This means there is error in what they are teaching.
The present church system that we know of in North America does not have checks and balances. There is alot of control implemented in the majority of churches. We can be certain that this type of control of people and of what we are being taught is not of God. We seem to have a mishmash of teachings related to both Hagar and Sarah. On the one hand we have freedom in Christ, on the other hand we are subjects and children to these church systems. The Hagars of our day.


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Christian youth interacting in today’s world

The Scripture says ‘be ye in the world but not of it’. We look around our communities as Christians and things seem at least somewhat ‘normal’. We see families out together, people going about their business, people smiling and laughing, and children tagging along with their caregiver. This means that the world is alright doesn’t it? Things can’t be that bad. Then we hear that some of the middle school youth at our church are struggling with feelings of homosexuality. Feelings that they don’t want and that they hate. What has happened?
There is a spirit of homosexuality in our land right now in the West. This spirit is increasing in its scope and in its power in the lives of youth. Especially those who involve themselves in today’s media of gaming and other influential technology such as the easy access to pornography websites through the Internet.
Government laws have gotten behind the enforcement and acceptance of homosexuality and political correctness in society has demanded alignment in the thinking and actions of everyday people. Differences of thought are stomped out quickly by authorities as discriminatory, bigoted and subject to possible fines and imprisonment.

Youth are active in media. They like gaming. They like technology that entertains them. They like being exposed to ‘new and exciting things’. They want to try everything to see what it is about. They are very susceptible to peer pressure and want to be the same as their friends. They want to be thought of as progressive in their thinking and in how they live their lives. Through these mechanisms and influences the youth are coming under the control of the homosexual spirit that is currently in the world.

If the youth want to break free of this control they are going to have to be taught to be very careful of what they are engaging in. Many of the current games they play may have to be set aside for other choices. Some of the music they listen to and some of the television programs and movies they watch may have to be avoided. If the youth continue to engage with media indiscriminately then there is a strong possibility that they will lose control of themselves and become captives and slaves of the spirit of homosexuality and of other unwanted and hated powers of ungodliness.