Love songs are everywhere. The feeling of love is wonderful. Millions are looking for love. Messages about who to love, what to love, and how to love abound. As Christians, we want to look at God’s perfect love for us and realize that is the example to follow! This talk focuses on God’s loving character and His supreme demonstration of love: The sending of His Son to die on the cross for us. Emulating this kind of love will cause us to be amazed. Just like McCartney felt about his special love…Yeah, I know it doesn’t seem to fit. Just listen!
Archives for the month of: April, 2013
In this continuation of the Galatians 6 exposition on planting and harvesting, we’ll
take a look at what ‘good’ is in the context and to whom we should be doing it!
The wrap-up reminds us that we are HIS workmanship and the ‘good’ that we’re to
be involved in was prearranged by God from the beginning!
Spring is comin’ on slow, but we have crocuses poking through, and maybe you have some tulips or other flowers coming up. Matching right up with the season at hand, I want to take a look at the law of sowing and reaping found in Galatians 6:6-10. If there’s a Biblical law that is all-encompassing, relevant for today and utterly unavoidable, it’s the law of sowing and reaping. What kind of planting are you doing in your life, and in what kind of soil do you plant the seeds of your efforts?
Ever feel like you’re not saved? There’s a cold breeze blowing through the landscape of you and God and you wonder, ‘am I still really a Christian’? In this communion devotional wrapping up the ‘in Him’ list of Ephesians 1, be encouraged, because you’ll discover that one of the blessings of being in Christ is that we are sealed by the Holy Spirit. We’re sealed for a day in which we will be fully redeemed by God, and no one nor anything can compromise our salvation!In Him…Security
The theology of Biblical marriage is clearly set forth in Genesis 2: 18-25, and reiterated in the comparison of marriage and the church found in Eph. 5:22-33. We believe that homosexual “marriage” is not a Biblical concept, and is not in keeping with the definition of marriage that God sets forth in His Word
The ‘revelatory’ and ‘sign’ gifts were possessed by the Apostles (Rom.15: 18, 19) and other first-century prophets who were the foundation upon which the Church was built. (Eph. 2:20) ‘Revelatory’ gifts, as the name implies, were given to reveal all of God’s teaching for the church through the Holy Spirit (communicated by the Apostles and some prophets, and subsequently penned into Holy-Spirit-inspired Scripture!) in Christ’s absence. (John 14:26; John 16: 12, 13) Further, I Cor. 13: 8, 9 teaches that the prophecy and knowledge available to the church prior to our meeting the Lord will cease. When will the gifts themselves cease? Since the Apostles of Christ and some prophets and Paul “as one born out of due time” possessed these gifts, one concludes that the passing away of these gifts attended the passing away of these men in the first century of the church.
Considering ‘tongues’, Paul clearly states the purpose for this ‘sign’ gift in
I Cor. 14: 21, 22. After referencing an Old Testament example of how ‘tongues’, or known foreign languages, would be used to speak to Israel about her unrepentant rejection of God’s instruction and instructors (chief of whom was Jesus), he states that tongues are for a sign to unbelievers. And in the Isaiah 28: 11 context, the unbelievers are Jewish unbelievers; the current generation had just crucified Jesus Christ. The gift of tongues then, spoke to unbelieving Jews warning of the consequences of their rejection of Christ, and that now God was in this church-age (initiated at Pentecost) using Christians to instruct God’s people-and by extension-the world. (that was to be Israel’s God-given role, Ex. 19: 6) The consequence of Israel’s rejection of her Foremost Prophet was predicted in Luke 19: 41-44. This consequence was embodied in the terrible Jewish War (66-73 AD), in which Rome decimated Jerusalem and killed upward of 1M Jews.
One concludes then, that with the announcement of judgment brought by these men of strange tongues, and signaled by the temporary gift of tongues, that the gift ceased sometime in those years of God’s judgment
West Paris Baptist Church 