The Glorious Pathway to a Beautiful Ending – Purity 735
Purity 735 05/19/2022 Purity 735 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a boardwalk pathway running along the waters of
the Hudson River comes to us from a friend who visited the Saugerties
Lighthouse back on April 28th.
Even though I can’t see the lighthouse in this photo, I trust that my
friend was telling their friends on social media the truth and that if we
followed in their footsteps we would find the lighthouse at the end of this
path and that we would undoubtedly see it and enjoy its beauty as we walked toward
it.
Well, it’s Thursday, and by now it shouldn’t surprise any of my
friends that I am sharing another photo of a pathway today because Thursdays nights
have been the day on which I have taught and encouraged others to follow the
path of Christian Discipleship to experience their freedom in Christ and to
overcome besetting sins and negative emotions that prevent Christians from
experiencing the peace and joy that is to be expected when we walk in the Spirit.
Although I first “believed” and made Jesus my Lord and Savior
back in 2010, and I set about coming to know what His word said and what being
a Christian meant in earnest in the years leading up to it, I didn’t really “put
my money where my mouth was”, I didn’t really repent until 2015, when Pastor
Bob Costello started a Christian Recovery program at my local church, and I
decided to trust the Lord to free me from the bondage of addiction that I had
put myself in since being a young adult. We are talking about 20 hard core
years of willful enjoyment of alcohol and drugs here. And not only did I think I was unable to
stop, I frankly didn’t want to stop.
Although I had been a Christian for a few years, I hadn’t given
up my besetting sin even though I was sincerely trying to seek the Lord. I not only attended church twice a week, I
also served in the church as an audio visual tech. I went to Bible study once a
week. I already had gotten my Associates
degree in Biblical Studies and was working on completing my Bachelor’s degree in
Bible College!
But even though I had given myself to all of these pursuits and
had tried to repent of my addictions on my own with little success, in 2015 – I
publicly let everyone know that I was going into recovery and trusting the Lord
to help me overcome the vices I thought I would never give up.
The Lord is faithful and if you humble yourself and surrender to
His will for your life, He will lift you up and give you the strength to walk
away from the darkness of your past.
So after successfully completing the program, I began teaching on
Thursday Nights at the recovery ministry and eventually transitioned to
teaching Christian Discipleship in 2021.
And tonight I will continue in my endeavors to encourage Christians to apply
their faith to their lives by facilitating the Freedom in Christ Discipleship Course
on Zoom for Freedom in Christ Ministries.
I share these messages of encouragement on the blog and podcast
and volunteer my time to share the message of Freedom in Christ because I have “been
there” and “done that”. I have walked the path of Christian Discipleship
through some very dark valleys in my life’s journey and I know that faith in Jesus
Christ and living according to the life principles set forth in the word of God
is the pathway that is rich in meaning and purpose, is paved with the fruit of
the Spirit, and just happens to lead to everlasting life.
I know that the word is God is true because I have experienced
the Lord’s presence and guidance in my life and simply have no choice but to
give Him honor and praise and encourage others to come to know the Lord and to
experience their freedom in Christ for
themselves.
Somewhere along the path, early in my walk, I fell in love with the
Barlow Girl’s song “Beautiful Ending”. I
am sharing a link to a YouTube video of it, on the blog (https://youtu.be/XO0lBwYCehc) because
my stating the lyrics probably won’t do it justice. But the song says:
“Oh, tragedy
Has taken so many
Love lost cause they all
Forgot who You were
And it scares me to think
That I would choose
My life over You
Oh, my selfish heart
Divides me from You
It tears us apart
So tell me
What is our ending?
Will it be beautiful
So beautiful?
Oh, why do I
Let myself let go
Of Hands that painted the stars
And hold tears that fall?
And the pride of my heart
Makes me forget
It's not me but You
Who makes the heart beat
I'm lost without You
And dying from me
So tell me
What is our ending?
Will it be beautiful
So beautiful?
Will my life
Find me by Your side?
Your love is beautiful
So beautiful
At the end of it all
I wanna be in Your arms”
And repeat! Bridge,
Chorus, Chorus.
That song was a
huge inspiration for me in those early days of my faith because it pointed to
my ultimate salvation, of when I would see God face to face. But it also
stretched my heart to love the Lord, for the gift of His forgiveness and the
power He had poured into me with the Holy Spirit. It not only gave me hope for that final
destination, it gave me hope for overcoming the many problems in my life by
walking with Him. Is that not in the song? Must have been the Holy Spirit encouraging
me!
And so I sang
that song. I lived that song. And I saw the beautiful ending of my struggles
come into sight the more I followed the Lord. And even in the darkest days, it
drove me to believe that I would find a beautiful ending, not only in heaven,
but here on earth.
And can I tell
you? I found it. But guess what this is
a pathway. Our journey is not over. I keep walking and talking with God because
I know that there is another “beautiful ending” somewhere down this road and
many more before I see the Lord face to face.
So let me
encourage you. God has a beautiful plan for your life. There may be great
suffering in our journey but the beauty of our path begins with the reception
of the gift of our forgiveness and a new and eternal life.
If we forsake
the gift, if we accept Jesus and then just go back to the normalcy of our dark
pre-Christ existence, if we fail to answer His call on our life, we will lose
sight of the beautiful thing He has done for us and we will not walk into the
beautiful things that He wants us to see before we see Him face to face, before
we are in His arms.
So turn from
the world and start, or keep on, walking and talking with God. Surrender to His
will and guidance. He has beautiful things for you to see. So start walking in
His direction, because even though I know you can’t see it yet, I swear that your beautiful endings are down
this pathway and I promise that you will eventually see them in the distance, reach
them and then move on to the next beautiful ending that the Lord has for you,
before you get to that ultimate beautiful ending which is really just another beginning
as we will live, rule, and reign with God for ever and ever. Amen.
______________________________________________________________
Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book
for Men”.
This morning’s meditation verse is:
Proverbs 2:5
(NLT2)
5
Then
you will understand what it means to fear the LORD,
and you will gain knowledge of God.
Today’s Bible verse reminds us that when we understand what it means to
fear the Lord, we will gain knowledge of Him.
Pretty simple huh, the Word means what it says. Uh Oh, Are we supposed
to fear the Lord?
Hey, let’s keep it real life and death are scary matters. And the Word of God is filled with the Lord’s
warnings to be right with Him or be subject to His wrath.
Yeah, Hell isn’t Satan’s kingdom. It’s his prison and God is the one
who sends him, and everyone else who rejects Jesus as Lord and Savior, there.
So yes having a healthy fear of the all powerful and holy God of all
creation is wisdom. However, because God
graciously offers us forgiveness and adoption into His kingdom through faith in
His Son, Jesus Christ, we don’t have to be afraid of God.
God loves us and wants us to come to Him. His warnings of His judgement
and wrath are done out of love. He wants us to know the consequences of
rebellion and denying Him.
In the world they have “scared straight” programs, where trouble youth
are brought into prisons to see the harsh reality of where their criminal
behaviors will ultimately lead them. The intention isn’t just to terrify the
children with the possibilities of confinement, violence, and degradation that
are part of life in prison. The intention is to cause them to see the error of
their ways and to avoid the consequences.
The fear of the Lord is supposed to draw us to surrender to Him and to
follow His wisdom and ways.
So the fear of the wrath of God is one aspect of gaining knowledge of
God.
But another aspect of this “fear of the Lord” should include the simple
but awesome fact that God is Creator.
Think of it. As big as this universe is, as old as it is, God was before
it all. He imagined and created it all.
I sometimes get tripped up just thinking about the vast multitudes of
people on the earth and consider the fact that God knows everyone of them and
the intentions of their hearts.
The fear in this sense is “respect”. How great and might is He! So we are to have a healthy fear of God, His
ways are higher than our ways but He calls us to be with Him and to know Him
and it is an offer we should accept.
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 John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life”.
As always, I share this information for educational purposes
and encourage all to purchase John Pipers’ books for your own private
study and to support his work. This resource is available on many
websites for less than $5.00.
Inspiring Sacrifice
for Lesser Causes
In fact, in wartime
sinners often rise to remarkable levels of sacrifice for causes that cannot compare
with Christ. The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from
hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a
kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is. No war
on earth was ever fought for a greater cause or a greater king.
But
oh, what bold risks and daring sacrifices these lesser causes have inspired! On
February 19, 1944, the battle for Iwo Jima began. It was a barren,
eight-mile-square island six hundred miles south of Tokyo, guarded by 22,000
Japanese prepared to fight to the death (which they did). They were protecting
two air strips that America needed in the strategic effort to contain Japanese
aggression after Pearl Harbor and preserve the liberty that America cherished.
It was a high cause, and the courageous sacrifice was stunning.
The
hard statistics show the sacrifice made by Colonel Johnson’s 2nd Battalion:
1,400 boys [many still teenagers] landed on D-Day; 288 replacements were
provided as the battle went on, a total of 1,688. Of these, 1,511 had been
killed or wounded. Only 177 walked off the island. And of the final 177, 91 had
been wounded at least once and returned to battle.
It had taken twenty-two crowded
transports to bring the 5th Division to the island. The survivors fit
comfortably onto eight departing ships.
The American boys had killed about
21,000 Japanese, but suffered more than 26,000 casualties doing so. This would
be the only battle in the Pacific where the invaders suffered higher casualties
than the defenders.
The Marines fought in World War II for
forty-three months. Yet in one month on Iwo Jima, one third of their total
deaths occurred. They left behind the Pacific’s largest cemeteries: nearly
6,800 graves in all; mounds with their crosses and stars. Thousands of families
would not have the solace of a body to bid farewell: just the abstract
information that the Marine had “died in the performance of his duty” and was
buried in a plot, aligned in a row with numbers on his grave. Mike lay in Plot 3,
Row 5, Grave 694; Harlon in Plot 4, Row 6, Grave 912; Franklin in Plot 8, Row
7, Grave 2189.
When I think of Mike, Harlon, and
Franklin there, I think of the message someone had chiseled outside the
cemetery:
When
you go home
Tell
them for us and say
For
your tomorrow
We
gave our today
O Lord, Don’t Let Me Waste My Life!
I am deeply moved by the
courage and carnage on Iwo Jima. As I read the pages of this history,
everything in me cries out, “O Lord, don’t let me waste my life!” Let me come
to the end—whether soon or late—and be able to say to a family, a church, a
city, and the unreached peoples of the earth, “For your tomorrow, I gave my
today. Not just for your tomorrow on earth, but for the countless tomorrows of
your ever-increasing gladness in God.” The closer I looked at the individual
soldiers in this World War II history, the more I felt a passion that my life
would count, and that I would be able to die well.
As rainy morning wore into afternoon and the
fighting bogged down, the Marines continued to take casualties. Often it was
the corpsmen [medics] themselves who died as they tried to preserve life.
William Hoopes of Chattanooga was crouching beside a medic named Kelly, who put
his head above a protective ridge and placed binoculars to his eyes—just for an
instant—to spot a sniper who was peppering his area. In that instant the sniper
shot him through the Adam’s apple. Hoopes, a pharmacist’s mate himself,
struggled frantically to save his friend. “I took my forceps and reached into
his neck to grasp the artery and pinch it off,” Hoopes recalled. “His blood was
spurting. He had no speech but his eyes were on me. He knew I was trying to
save his life. I tried everything in the world. I couldn’t do it. I tried. The
blood was so slippery. I couldn’t get the artery. I was trying so hard. And all
the while he just looked at me. He looked directly into my face. The last thing
he did as the blood spurts became less and less was to pat me on the arm as if
to say, ‘That’s all right.’ Then he died.”
In
this heart-breaking moment I want to be Hoopes and I want to be Kelly. I want to
be able to say to suffering and perishing people, “I tried everything in the
world.… I was trying so hard.” And I want to be able to say to those around me
when I die, “It’s all right. To live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
When the Trifling Fog Clears
At these moments, when the
trifling fog of life clears and I see what I am really on earth to do, I groan
over the petty pursuits that waste so many lives—and so much of mine. Just
think of the magnitude of sports—a whole section of the daily newspaper. But
there is no section on God. Think of the endless resources for making your home
and garden more comfortable and impressive. Think of how many tens of thousands
of dollars you can spend to buy more car than you need. Think of the time and
energy and conversation that go into entertainment and leisure and what we call
“fun stuff.” And add to that now the computer that artificially recreates the
very games that are already so distant from reality; it is like a multi-layered
dreamworld of insignificance expanding into nothingness.[1]
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tomorrow------------------------
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Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship