Sharing God’s Grace - Purity 814
Purity 814 08/19/2022 Purity 814 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo a what appears to be two setting suns comes
to us from my niece, Megan, as she recently shared this photo on social media from
what I believe to be a sunset over
somewhere near Ocean City Maryland as my brother Mike and his family has made summer
visits to the “White Marlin Capital of the World” a family tradition.
Well as the sunsets on another work week and the third
week of August it is my prayer that my friends and family use the weekend, forecasted
to be a hot one in my neck of the woods, to make some summer memories that will
endure well after the Summer of ’22 is a distant memory.
Growing up my immediate family enjoyed family
vacations is Cape Cod and in Lake George New York and those short trips had a
real impact on my memories of my childhood. While I also remember summer time
fun at home those trips stand out because we went somewhere “different” and
some of those places we revisited because we were fond of them and they became
somewhat familiar.
I myself took my family on trips to Cape Cod and
Lake George when my kids were younger to try to share the experience that I had
enjoyed as a kid. Now my brother Mike
has discovered and fallen in love with Ocean City and has made that a tradition
that his kids will fondly remember and possibly take their kids to one
day.
One of the things we do in our lives is to try to
share the good things with our loved ones. In life we discover things that we
enjoyed and felt were worthwhile and out of our love we try to share them with
our family, our friends, and sometimes anyone who will listen.
While I could give lots recommendations on places to
travel to because of the places I have gone, the good thing that I wish to
share with my family, my friends, and anybody who will listen is the life of
peace and joy that is found through faith in Jesus Christ and the daily
decision to walk and talk with God as we live our lives.
Last night was the last Zoom meeting of The Grace
Course that I have been facilitating and although I had planned on using the
session to review the Steps to Experiencing God’s Grace the meeting turned into
a discussion about how to share what we have learned about experiencing our
Freedom in Christ and the wonders of God’s grace with others.
Sometimes I wonder if participants in these groups
or classes are “getting it”. Are they understanding and experiencing their
freedom in Christ. Are they drawing close to God and applying the truth of God’s
word, that the lessons are based on, to their lives?
Through the years of recovery and discipleship
ministry, I have seen breakthroughs and victory. I have seen people just walk
away almost immediately. I have seen people go through the Freedom in Christ
course and seems to agree with the material but then refuse to go through the
Steps to Freedom in Christ. I have seen others go through the Steps and seem to
have a significant moment of repentance with God only to disappear from my
radar, making me wonder if they were just going through the motions or even
worse, if the enemy hadn’t reclaimed the ground he had momentarily lost.
But then you have moments like last night where the
participants openly testify to the significant difference the Freedom in Christ
course and the Grace Course has made in their lives and how they are now
motivated to share what they have come to know with others. Rather than packing up their books because
schools out for the summer, these men are asking God “What’s next?” and “How
can I make other people understand God’s grace?”
One of our participants has begun a gospel tract ministry
to try to reach those who don’t love of God.
Another one has become with an interfaith group of various Christian
denominations that seek to establish unity around the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This man also has a heart for youth and will be teaching a group of 8th
and 9th graders and last discussed what he can do to possibly make
an impact in these adolescents lives to lead them toward God and away from the
traps of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Another participant has recently moved back to his
childhood neighborhood and sees how things have gotten worse in his community
and he feels he may have a call on his life to encourage the youth in his
neighborhood to turn away from the streets and to follow the Lord’s will for
their lives.
One of the purposes of Christian Discipleship is to replicate,
to teach and encourage others to teach and encourage others, and to boldly go
where ever the Lord leads you. And last night,
I really got the sense that God has blessed my efforts to encourage these men
to follow Christ. They have a heart to set the captives free and to open the
eyes of the blind.
But discipleship is also about community and we have
that as well. We encourage one another
in our faith and we will be meeting again in two weeks as they have agreed to
join me as I have decided to walk through Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and
to podcast it, to encourage others to pick up their crosses and to surrender to
God’s will for their lives.
I actually am on vacation next week but I don’t have
any plans to travel. Instead I will be working on taking Bonhoeffer’s book and
crafting it into a presentation that will attempt to share the experience that
I had when I first read it. Like a
favorite summer vacation spot, I look forward to showing the good things I
found in Bonhoeffers book, the encouragement to be an authentic Christian, to
live in and for Christ.
So enjoy the summer while you can this weekend but
as you marvel at the splendor of the summer sights and sounds, remember that
your heavenly Father made it all for us to enjoy and that His creation calls us
to ponder the Creator and the meaning and purpose that He has for us.
He wants us to know Him. That’s why He sent Christ,
to save that which was lost and to lead us to know the Father and the wonders
of His love.
So keep walking and talking with God because when
you know Him and His grace, it will cause you to want the share the peace and joy
you have in Him with your family, your friends, and anyone who will listen.
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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:
Hebrews 3:14 (NLT2)
14 For if we are faithful to
the end, trusting God just as firmly as when we first believed, we will share
in all that belongs to Christ.
Today’s verse encourages us to endure in our faith and to keep the
wonder of our salvation that we had when we first believed, stating that when
we do that we will share in all that Christ has for us.
Faith is not something we get once and then can put on a shelf for
the day we die. Here the writer of
Hebrews encourages us to not forget the joy of when we first believed and
encourages us to persevere in our faith with the assurance that we will share
in all that belongs to Christ.
The fruit of the spirit grows in our lives when we walk in the
Spirit. Christ said in John 15 to Abide in Him and we would produce much
fruit. The fruit can be good works of
course but we should also understand that the fruit can be the good work done
in us, in the cultivation of kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness. patience,
love, peace, joy, and self-control in our life.
Our relationship with God will last for eternity so we should be encouraged
to be faithful to the end, because although this life may be finite, there
really is no end in sight as the Lord will welcome us into heaven if we should
die or He will rapture us into His kingdom when He prepares for His second
coming.
Christ has eternal life. It is ours through faith in Him. The
fruit of the Spirit describe Jesus’ character. They are ours when we follow Him. So be faithful to the end and these things
that belong to Christ will be shared with you.
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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 Clash of World Views
Christians
face a dilemma. If we accept at face value the Bible’s affirmation of the
reality of evil spirits, we create an unbridgeable gulf between our world view
and the prevailing Western world view. How can we accept the overthrown
premises of a prescientific world view by believing in the real existence of
demons and evil spirits?
The crux of the issue
for all interpreters is the degree to which we should allow our Western
scientific world view to determine our conclusions. Modern hermeneutical theory
has convincingly demonstrated that none of us are objective interpreters. We
all approach the texts with individual pre-understandings (especially our culture
and theological tradition) that influence the results of our analysis of
Scripture. This bias should not make us despair of finding the truth and its
relevance for our situation. Rather, it should force us to undertake a careful
examination of our own presuppositions and assumptions while at the same time
attempting to interpret the meaning of Scripture in its own language, cultural,
religious and social setting. We then engage in what Anthony Thiselton speaks
of as “an ongoing dialogue with the text in which the text itself progressively
corrects and reshapes the interpreter’s own questions and assumptions.” All
three parts of this hermeneutical process are essential in finding the meaning
and relevance of Scripture in our own day.
As was demonstrated
in part one of this book, there is no question that people living in the first
century believed in evil spirits, including all of the New Testament writers,
particularly Paul. At this point the modern scientific world view stands in
direct contradiction to the first-century world view and also the biblical
world view. In his recent book on Jesus, Marcus Borg is certainly aware of this
interpretational difficulty. He notes:
Within
the framework of the modern world view, we are inclined to see “[demon] possession”
as a primitive prescientific diagnosis of a condition which must have another
explanation. Most likely, we would see it as a psychopathological condition
which includes among its symptoms the delusion of believing one’s self to be
possessed. Social conditions also seem to be a factor.… But whatever the modern
explanation might be, and however much psychological or social factors might be
involved, it must be stressed that Jesus and his contemporaries (along with
people in most cultures) thought that people could be possessed or inhabited by
a spirit or spirits from another plane. Their world view took for granted the
actual existence of such spirits.
Although
Borg does not give us help in overcoming the clash between the two cultures, he
frames the nature of the issue quite clearly. For us the question now becomes
whether the New Testament view of evil spirits should reshape and correct the
prevailing Western world view on this particular point.
In the first volume
of a projected trilogy on the powers, Auburn Seminary professor Walter Wink
reveals the controlling influence of his cultural presuppositions in thinking
about the biblical references to the powers. He candidly remarks:
We
moderns cannot bring ourselves by any feat of will or imagination to believe in
the real existence of these mythological entities that traditionally have been
lumped under the general category “principalities and powers.” … It is as
impossible for most of us to believe in the real existence of demonic or
angelic powers as it is to believe in dragons, or elves, or a flat world.
He
then proceeds to demythologize the language of power in the New Testament,
ending up with an interpretation of the powers as the abstract “inner essence”
of social systems, political structures and institutions (see the next
chapter). Wink’s views have already had a significant influence on evangelical
thought with regard to the powers.[1]
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tomorrow------------------------
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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), 176–177.