The Path to Resolve Unfinished Business - Purity 825
Purity 825 09/01/2022 Purity 825 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo a water pathway between seemingly
ending walls of rock comes to us from one of my family members who captured
this scene during a visit to “The Grand Canyon of the Adirondacks” in Ausable
Chasm NY. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able
to make the trip and so many of my family share photos from this trip that I am
not sure which one shared this scene so I saved and shared it as “Ausable Chasm
Pathway” – August 22, 2022 – Some Seguin or Clark”. Even though I wasn’t able to go because of
work I can get a small sense of what it must have been like at the bottom of
that chasm from photos like this one.
Well it’s Thursday again and even though I won’t be
leading any discipleship groups on Zoom this evening, I share today’s photo as
an encouragement to all who may feel that they are at the bottom of a chasm of
problems or surrounded by problems on the right and the left to keep walking
and talking with God on the pathway of Christian Discipleship. When we decide to live out our faith by
following the Lord with the way we live some how we can not only make it out of
that chasm of personal and spiritual conflicts, we can have peace and joy while
we walk through it because of the Lord’s presence with us.
Today is also the first day of a new month so let’s
choose to make a brand new start of it and take our first steps into September
with the confidence that knows that God will be with us today and every day
this month as we will transition from Summer to Fall and all the new
experiences and responsibilities that come with the changing of the season.
I don’t know about you but right now it sort of
feels like I am at the bottom of a chasm because of the uncertainty of my wife’s
current employment situation and because “back to school” season starts next
week as I will be leading a new group into the Freedom in Christ Discipleship
Course this Tuesday and will be leading some former graduates of the course
through a course of my own making as we will examine Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Cost
of Discipleship” on Thursdays.
Also the Lord has put it on my heart to try to resolve
some unfinished business of my past regarding my former home and I am admittedly
a little nervous about it because it will involve lawyers and confrontation.
But recently, I felt very convicted about this issue as I wish to walk into my
future unhindered by the things of the past and even though I have taken care
of so many things to put my past in the past. The issue of my old house has
been something I have left on the back burner of my life and had resolved to
ignore it and just hope that it would take care of itself in time.
But the Lord apparently had different ideas. The other
morning I was driving at work when suddenly I had thoughts of my own mortality
and the simple fact that I am 50 I can’t really assume that I will be around
forever. I started to think of my wife and kids and what would happen if I
would suddenly die.
My life insurance would be a blessing I guess but
then I thought about my old house and how my ex has refused to sell it, as we
agreed in our divorce and how she is “squatting” there and according to my son,
has recently rented out a room someone to help her with the costs of living. And I thought about how, if I should die
suddenly, my wife or my kids would have to deal with my ex and probably fight
her in court or surrender the value of the home that was legally mine.
And that’s when my spirit, or The Spirit, hit
me. I had to take care of this. I like to think of myself as a nice guy and I don’t
like confrontation and I don’t want to necessarily cause my ex any trouble, but
I got the sense that “right was right” – she should honor our divorce agreement
– and that as a Christian, I was supposed to be responsible and take care of
the things I have been entrusted to and do the things I have agreed to do . My
ex and I both agreed to sell the house and by leaving things alone I was not only shirking my responsibilities but was
possibly endangering the inheritance that my family would receive.
So, here we go into September and into the future
ahead. There is uncertainty. There is
the excitement of new opportunities for ministry and encouraging more
Christians to experience their freedom in Christ, And there is the unpleasant business of settling
unfinished business of the past, when part of me would just as much like to
ignore things but even though I have some, okay anxiousness, about what will
happen, I somehow have an enduring peace because I know that the Lord will be
with me through it all and that I am doing the right thing.
The Lord wants us to trust Him in uncertain times.
He wants to walk with us into the excitement of new seasons. And the Lord wants
us to resolve the issues of our pasts that we would rather just ignore, because
He wants us to experience the abundant life of freedom that we can know when we
resolve our problems and take all the obstacles out of our way that keep us
from the joy of walking in peace with our heavenly Father knowing that we have resolved
or forsaken all the trappings and turmoil from our old life to experience the
new life we have in Him.
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Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible
Promise Book for Men”.
This morning’s meditation verse is:
Colossians 1:22 (NLT2)
22 Yet now he has reconciled
you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result,
he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you
stand before him without a single fault.
Today’s verse reminds us that through Christ’s death and our faith
in Him, we have been reconciled to God, brought into His presence and are now
holy, and blameless without a single fault as we stand before Him.
The joy our faith comes from Jesus! He paid the cost for our new
lives with the Father s and when we put our faith in Him we are not only declared
“Not Guilty” because our debt has been paid, but we are also blameless, without
a single fault, in the presence of the Lord.
We don’t have to feel guilty anymore. We have been reconciled to
God. We have peace with Him.
We are also holy. We are “set
apart” as His children and for His purposes.
And as I wrote about above, the Lord will cause us to resolve the
things in our lives that make us doubt these facts of who we are.
The Holy Spirit convicts us to live a holy life, to walk away from
the ways of darkness that we used to live in and to resolve the things in our
past that would condemn or accuse us of “not really being a Christian”.
The way of righteousness and truth may not sit well with the world
and may cause people to hate us but when we follow the Lord with the way we
live our lives we can have the assurance that we are living according to God’s
will because we will have peace in HIs presence and we will be able to honestly
confess that we have done our best to resolve our past problems, make peace
with others, and do what is right.
So don’t doubt who you are in Christ. The word of God is true. If we feel less than “holy”, we have to accept the forgiveness that we have received, live a righteous life now, and resolve those things in our past that have been left undone.
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As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.
Today we continue sharing from Clinton E. Arnold’s
“Powers of Darkness”
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Clinton Arnold’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.
The Recent Work of Frank Peretti
In
his recent best-seller This Present
Darkness, Frank Peretti unveils the strategy and networking of those
hostile opponents who come from the realm of spirits, demons and powers. He
depicts these forces of darkness mobilizing to gain control of a typical small
town in America. They try to accomplish this takeover through a variety of
means, but primarily through a plot to draw people away from Christ via an
organized expression of the New Age movement.
Peretti moves the
drama back and forth between the human and the spiritual plane. He discloses
the demonic activity behind human struggles and difficulties. His conceptual
framework is much the same as that of Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Demons exert a direct influence on individuals. For
instance, after portraying the evil activities of one of his human characters,
Peretti gives his readers further spiritual insight into this person: “a deep
and seductive voice spoke thoughts to her mind.” This character later turns out
to be a university professor who is disseminating occultism through her
teaching. Through similar demonic influence on key people throughout the
university, the institution itself becomes perverted and is a major staging
ground for this new philosophy.
While C. S. Lewis gave
the Christian community a thought-provoking assessment of how an evil spirit
may exert influence over a person in day-to-day life, Peretti builds upon this
insight to help us imagine how the powers might work in concert to attain a
much larger diabolical goal. He describes the individual workings of demonic
powers, but he also shows their unified collective purpose. Assuming a
well-defined hierarchy with a chain of command, Peretti depicts various ranks
of powers carrying out their orders as part of a large-scale plan to usher in
an occultic philosophy first to one strategic city, and from that base of
operations, to the entire country.
As with any fictional
representation of the unseen world, a few parts of his work are hard to swallow
and perhaps do not seem to match biblical emphases. For instance, why is there
so much said about the countermanding work of God’s angels and so little about
the work of the Holy Spirit? Overall, however, Peretti gives us an account that
is not only captivating but also imaginatively represents how the powers of
darkness might actually work.
Those who appreciate
Peretti’s novels will need to remember that the powers of darkness work through
a multitude of ways to draw believers into sin and hinder the mission of the
church. Satan may very well find his best line of attack against a church
through something other than an organized conspiracy like the New Age movement.
In fact, is it not more often the case that sexual impropriety, ethical
misconduct, deeply entrenched feuds between church members and matters such as
these do more to dim the light of the church’s testimony in its community than
the inroads of occultism or Satanism? This is certainly not to minimize the
danger of aberrant (or satanic) teaching, but it does emphasize Satan’s use of
a wide variety of schemes (methodeia
Eph 6:11).
The general impact
that Peretti’s book has had on the life of the church has been quite positive
in two respects: First, the book has effectively challenged people to factor
the existence of the hostile demonic realm into their world view; and second,
the comment I hear almost invariably from people who had read the book is, “It
has prompted me to pray.” The soaring sales of his book and its sequel, Piercing the Darkness, indicate that much
of evangelicalism was ready for this challenge.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
to be encouraged.
My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship
[1]
Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness:
Principalities & Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove,
IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 1992), 205–207.
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