Be Holy

1 John 4:16 God is love.

I have seen the above taught over and over and while the statement is true, not only is there a good deal more to the passage, there is a great deal more to God than just love. God hates sin (Proverbs 6:16-19) and that is an area that the, quote, unquote, Christian of today refuses to study. In 2 Timothy 2:15 we are taught that we are to put forth the effort to learn the Word of God for ourselves, we are to study to show ourselves approved. The modern day Christian, a.k.a. New Testament Christian, is being sold a bill of goods with no delivery due.

The Bible Jesus taught from was and is the Old Testament and yet there are heretical teachers that teach people that all they need learn is the New Testament. I've said many times, the New testament is the best commentary ever written on the Bible but if you only read the commentary it is like reading a comic book version of Gone With the Wind instead of the Book. They are both correct but you can never get the details straight from either one of them. A failing grade on a book report is not fatal, a failure at Christianity is!

Consider for a moment the fate of Jesus. Jesus had His beard snatched out by the handful, was blind-folded and beaten by soldiers with their fists, was crowned with a crown made of thorns that I'm taught were over an inch long and it was driven into the skull, he was given thirty-nine lashes with a Cat-o-Nine tails and then nailed to the cross with square nails. Jesus is the Son of God and yet the Father sent Him, knowing all these and more would be done to His Son. God the Father did not hate His own Son but there are seven things He does hate. If God will send His Son into this torture, to give you and I salvation, do you really believe He will wink at your unrepentant sin?

I understand that people are hesitant to name any teachings heretical and God does not expect us to do that, He has done it for us and all we need do is to learn the scriptures. The big issue of the day is Homosexuality and the truth is that as long as they refuse to repent in this life, they will go to Hell for it. But that is such a convenient distraction! Satan must be tickled to no end with himself. Liars will also burn in Hell! Lying and sexual relations outside of marriage are the people's wine of today and
Christians no longer are outraged by that behavior, God is though.

In 1 Thessalonians 4:7 we learn that we have not been called out of the world to commit sin but that we have been called to live a holy life. Can a man or a woman do such a thing? Yes, but not by ourselves, we need the indwelling of the Holy Spirit for such a life. Holy, in one respect means to be set apart to God. In another scripture we learn we are to live holy because God is holy and while we might fail we are expected to get up and let God remove the dust of our failure and to begin anew.

My prayer is that every person that will read this message, given to me by God, will repent and renew their effort to follow God. But whatever you do, read the Old Testament.

The Basics

Heb 5:11 Concerning him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing.  
Heb 5:12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.
Heb 5:13 For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant.
Heb 5:14 But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.


My blog is titled Basic Christianity because I believe that it is impossible to go forward with any degree of success without being grounded in the basics. As a military man I spent two months being trained to engage an enemy and to remain alive through the conflict. And then, like an Infantryman I was sent to AIT, Advanced Individual Training, to learn my specialty. Even though my life expectancy was 3 minutes and thirty seconds in combat, the Army expected me to expect to survive. They had grounded me in the basics and for the next six years I was repeatedly run back through those principals by repeated Field Maneuvers at scheduled and at unknown times, in the middle of the night and, just, whenever. During the thirty months I spent flying in a helicopter in Vietnam, those basics saved my life and the lives of the men under me many times.


A Christian, a follower of Christ, is likewise trained and has chosen to live in this manor. Living, now, with the final stage of MS and once more looking death, square in the face, I go to Sunday services, both, to teach and to be taught. And then, as I live out the week, save Wednesday night, I encounter lost men and Christ Followers in need of teaching.


When I was two years in the faith and forty-seven years of age, God called me to teach. I had heard the sermons and had read the passages of stricter judgment for teachers and I did not want to seek that job at all. But, as it should be, God had His way! I began to teach the Primaries Class at Church and there could be no better class for a forty-seven year old Baby Christian! I learned more than my students probably did. I'm certainly not saying that God did not work through me because in my second year of teaching my entire class was saved before June. But the point is that God taught me to teach the basics of Christianity. The very principals by which every man and woman is saved.


Today, my class is titled "The Grumpy Old Men and I'm still teaching the "Basics” of the Christian faith. Just as I could not survive in hand to hand combat without basic skills, neither can I be an effective teacher without the basics of my faith.


Today there are many false teachers and almost everyone seems to fear naming them as such. But there are a multitude of false teachers in this world today and some of them are dangerous like Jim Jones and David Koresh and others just lust after the money like Benny Hinn. The problem is that, by and large, these men are never important enough to become nationally known so we never hear of them. But they plague the Baby Christians and they will destroy their faith where it is possible. Joni Erickson Tada was almost one of those that were lead astray by these false teachers. Joni is a quadriplegic and was told that the only reason she could not be healed was because her faith was not strong enough.


It is a very popular teaching today that every person can be healed of any disease if they just believe. The problem with that teaching lies directly within the Basics of Christianity. If this teaching is true there should never be a Christian that dies and yet all of the disciples of Christ are dead including Paul who was stoned and left for dead, beaten with rods, received 39 lashes three times, ship wrecked and bitten by a viper. Paul is, by far, the best example of the errancy of this teaching. God healed Paul, right up until it was time for Paul to go to Heaven, then he died.


Others, like Joni and myself, God has chosen to glorify Himself by working through us in spite of our weakness. Does that mean there is no Healing Ministry that is genuine? Certainly not! There are two women in my church that engage in that very ministry. They are both poor, by the world's standard, and yet they do not go on tour or get on the radio and television demanding that people send them a million dollars. They just quietly perform their ministry and seek only to glorify God.


When we remember to stick to the basics we can be successful at anything God wants us to do because we learn to put ourselves out of the way and to allow God to work through us.

Whoops!

Heb 9:27 And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,
Heb 9:28 so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.

The quote above is from the Translation of the Bible that I have come to love to read. The NASB is as close as one can get to a word for word translation in the English language, I'm taught. Word for word translations, rather than idea for idea translations, pull no punches, they just give the facts, as close as possible to what God has left for our study and inspiration.

This week a Student Doctor 0f Neurology had the task of informing me that they were pulling away from any attempts to heal my, previously Remitting, Recurring Multiple Scleroses and were moving into the Maintenance Mode to keep me comfortable as I die. It was a great opportunity to witness and that is just what I did. I smiled, she looked distressed, and I told her I was on my way to Heaven and that only this shell would die and that I would just be transformed. That made the rest of the hour long encounter go so smoothly and she looked so relieved.

As a soldier in Vietnam I was not a Christian and I came face to face with death. I had to learn that for those thirty months I was a dead man walking and that just as we said many time every day, “It don't matter!” You cannot find your best friend blown into so many pieces that you cannot count nor recover all of them without deciding to either make them pay or to become completely useless. And if they could do that to Hienen, I knew they could do that to me. That was another reason to make them pay and being in control, to some extent of other men's lives I could not morn for more than a couple of hours, somebody else might get killed by my negligence.

When I decided I was dead and it didn't matter it set me up for a difficult culture shock when I arrived home alive. It took me the better part of eight years to wake up and stop fighting things when I was awake. Forty some years later the ghosts has, mostly, been put to rest at night with a miracle drug. But I digress.

Every man must die the first death where we shed this earthly body and transform into eternity. My last real hero, Ed Freeman, mostly known to folks like me as sir, passed this year and that broke my heart but I know where He is and that is a comfort beyond any imagination. “Snake,” so called because he could fly a helicopter lower than Snake Manure went to Heaven and so am I when this shell gets to tired to push on further.

It is a sweet hope that we Christians hold for a truth. Hope, the normal or lost man's term becomes reality for the saved man when the Holy Spirit indwells us at salvation. Every Christian knows that they were born to die the first death so that they might enter into the Kingdom. I will post this in several places on the net in the hope that one dying might read it and ask Jesus to forgive their sins and give to them eternal life, just as He did for me.

It's a simple thing, if you believe that Jesus died for your sins all you need do is to call out to Him for forgiveness and He will save you from Hell and the bottomless pit. (Rom. 10:9, 10)

Integrity, Love and Grace

I have often seen the question on the Internet and have, from time to time, been asked the question, "Why does God allow evil?” Folks dislike the answer and few are the Christ Followers that will answer and maybe that even know the answer. The answer is much like the Exhaust Manifold of an Internal Combustion Engine. The final output must come from several sources and yet there is but one answer. The final answer is that we, Christians, will learn the depth and length of grace. For reference you'll need to read First Corinthians 1, all of it. Paul dealt with this issue which burns down in the purification process to Integrity in the handling of "Grace.”

God sent His one Son into the world to pay the debt He did not owe in order that God might be able to extend His grace to us and right there is the stopping point for the average Christian. And yet that is not the aspect of grace that God wants us to plug the entrance to our Learning Processes at. Remember the Manifold? An R985, radial aircraft engine, has nine cylinders and one exhaust manifold, all the cylinders put their used gas into that one piece of equipment to get it out of the way.

In, exactly the opposite manor God extends His grace to each of us but it does not just dump out and fade away at that point. Now we, the Christ Follower, are in need of a "manifold” to exhaust into. Remember that brother that stumbled in the faith, last year, and we removed him from fellowship? WRONG! This is evil, but this is no more evil than the ten girls we dated and slept, in the back seat with, before we were married. That man or woman was and still is an exhaust port for God's infilling of His grace in our lives. God never meant for us to secret His grace away to keep it until we burst.

Well what about that rapist/murderer? God even loves Him! That's why so many of us are found in prison on Sunday morning and evening, to extend grace to them. God doesn't, so much, "allow” evil as, instead He forgives us of devising it. And if God has given, not just extended, grace to us, "How can we ever do less to our fellow man and claim to be students of Christ?”

Now, be careful here, this lesson is not about our right to bear arms but neither is it a litany against protecting our mothers, wives, children or home. We can love a man and still kill him to protect ourselves and our loved ones, I know, that was my profession for eight years when I was a young man. A better example is Harvey Wright. I hired on with a Japanese company and I negotiated a good starting wage to kick in on my 13 week on continuous employment and being a new Christ Follower I did not avoid the question when he asked how much I made, nor did I feel inclined to lie to him.

Harvey had been there long before I showed up for him to train me and I was making a good bit more than he was. Now Harvey was a Baptist Sunday School Teacher but every time I turned around I found Harvey's knife in my back. I had heard Pro. 25:21, 22 preached from the pulpit by Bro. Richard Clark, so I did not retaliate because I also knew that vengeance belongs to the LORD. Instead I began to pray, every day, for Harvey's spirit to be healed. I will not give the details but when God poured those coals onto Harvey's head both our spirits were changed. There were great tears in my eyes as I attempted to comfort and to lift Harvey up, only to be rejected.

You need to be careful praying for someone, your love for their spirit and eternal welfare will magnify itself beyond all belief. So I pray that all will understand what I am teaching in the morning and that none of you have chosen to make deposits in the Grudge Bank. I do my very best to keep my account there empty.

God bless!

XP Notice

While it will not kill your computer it is worthy to note that the support for Windoze XP from MS has, officially, been pulled. In a Tech Paper from ZD Net I learned that, while MS had promised to support XP until the summer of 2014 but they lied! What this means to you is that the system will no longer receive security updates and thereby become more and more vulnerable to new viruses, trojans and worms.

For those of you that are smart enough to avoid the dangers built into vista and 7 but would like to continue running your XP and still be safe, there is, indeed, a manner to accomplish this. You can download a free Live CD image called Ubuntu 10.04 from ubuntu.com and use the Burn Image to CD function of your cd burning software to produce a Live CD.

Then you can install Ubuntu and you have two methods to choose from. You can automatically duel boot the systems or you can use the entire disk for Ubuntu and then install XP inside Ubuntu. If you have the XP CD the second method is to be preferred.

If you select my preference you will have the ability to permentantly keep your XP free of viral problems. You’ll need to install the VirtualBox, available free from the repository with just a point and click or you can browse to virtualbox.org and download the latest version, also free, and have USB support. (I’m betting that you already know which one I’m running.)
Now you can, intuitively create a Virtual Hard Disk and install windows. Activate it and never touch the Internet with windows again. After you have installed the Windoze and start it running you will be immensely dissatisfied so look at the top of the window frame holding Xp and click on devises. Now click on Install Guest Additions… After they are installed you will discover that you now have seamless mouse integration and if you will look for the Window expand button at the top right, if you have not yet chosen to go to the Windows left config, and on clicking it your window will not only maximize, sowill your Windoze screen.

Now install your Windoze apps and live happily, ever after.

Are You Following God?

Do you follow Jesus? That's not a trick question and it is a question whose answer holds your eternal destiny in it's context! (John 14:15)

In the afore mentioned verse Jesus was very clear in His statement. There are others that allude to our responsibility to God also, both in the Old Testament and the New. Paul was so clear in his teaching on the point that folks have become so uncomfortable with Romans 12:1 that they have made a joke about it to draw away some of it's sting.

People have so exaggerated Biblical slavery to the point that I have been rebuked and threatened with posting privileges being removed if I did not retract my post and apologize for offending some unstudied New Testament Christians. I've read the Bible for the past twenty years to learn all that I can about God before I go home to be with Him. I've sat under several good teacher and preaches and they have, all of them, agreed with my understanding that we (Saved Men) are purchased away from our lives of sin and the price paid for our purchase is the death of Jesus, the Christ, on the cross.

So when Jesus says, “If you love me...” He's not making a footnote for the average Joe to ignore. No, and Paul is on the same page as Jesus when he tells us it is our duty to live as Holy a life as we possibly can, with the aim that we will be worthy of being a living sacrifice to God. My great grandmother was an Irish immigrant and thousands of them, at a time, would sell themselves into slavery to get to America. This was happening long after the conclusion of the American Civil War and many of them were Share Croppers with the aim of purchasing there freedom, they were Bond Slaves just as the follower of Jesus are.

If you are following Jesus the task is very simple and yet there are very few in the Worship Service on any given Sunday that have and are submitting their will to the will of God. When we are submitted to the will of God we use the Word of God, the Bible, as our governing agent in every decision we make.

I am often asked how to determine the will of God for one thing or another and I must admit that it perplexes me that folks are serious when they ask this question and they, often, are disturbed with me when I explain to them that God's will for every circumstance is covered in the scriptures. The problem arises when people ask specific questions, such as but certainly not limited to, “What does God say against going fishing on Sunday Morning?”

Well, God did not have it recorded as Commandment number eleven that “Thou shall not go fishing until after Worship service.” This is actually a poor example of this situation because it is covered in Hebrews 10:25 where we are exhorted to not forget to assemble ourselves together to exhort one another. You see, it says not a single word about fishing or not but the principal is very clearly stated.

A a teacher of the Bible with a very advanced case of RRMS I have learned to rely on God to speak through me and the Holy Spirit has led me to prepare more carefully thet I might be ready with an answer as quickly as possible and I have three volumes I rely very heavily on besides my NASB giant print Bible. The first, the Naves Topical Bible I purchased in my second year as a Christian. It is very useful to study any topic in the Bible and it is alphabetically arranged for a simple search.

My next purchase was about five years later and being an Amateur Christian Apologist, I have found it essential. This volume is the Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman Giesler ad finally my newest essential tool for the weak minded is a paperback titled Where To Find It In The Bible. With the first and the last volumes, about thirty-eight dollars on the net, there is not a question to e asked that you cannot give an answer to in less than a minute. If you only purchase one, I urge you to make it the Naves and if you have a computer go to e-sword.net and download the free basic program ad them the Naves from the Dictionary section.

Christians and Guns?

Luke 22:35-38 (King James Version)

 35And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing.
 36Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
 37For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end.
 38And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.

I know that I am forever teaching that there is a sever lack of attention to what is being taught in the Body of Christ today but I cannot cease until I pass over because it is such an important topic.

In my, almost, daily encounters with people, claiming the Name of the Christ for their, very, own, I find such discourse with what the scriptures, the inspired Word of God has to say. While it is certainly not a new concept there is a disturbing concept that is growing in the US by leaps and bounds and that would be the refusal to bear arms against this nation's and other people's enemies.

It seems to me that not only do these “New Testament” Christians, not read the Bible (The Old Testament) that Jesus, not only inspired to be written but, read and used exclusively but they cannot be reading the best life application commentary ever written, the New Testament! In verse 36 of the above passage from Luke Jesus warned His followers, that will be us, to arm themselves for the oncoming events.

Now, there are two ways for a Christian to arm himself and he should be properly prepared in both. The first, and by far, the most important is to place the Word of God in the secret place of your heart. That is best accomplished by daily reading the Word of God. It's really a painless thing and does not require you to become a teacher. It takes fifteen to thirty minutes a day for a year to read the entire Bible... all of it!

The second, although it is a good idea, does not require that you run right out and purchase a semi-automatic rifle. It does however require that a man be prepared to die defending his mother, his wife and his children. Defense, like Christianity, requires commitment.