Something Serious To Think About As You Self-Isolate
"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel."
Mark Chapter 1, verse 15.
"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;" Romans chapter 1 verse 18.
These may seem to be two very unlikely verses of Holy Scripture to pair up, but please be patient with me. There is something very important at the heart of what I have to say and my motive in doing so.
First of all, I wish to restate the four bed-rock points that form the pretext of this blog:
One and without doubt the most important of all is that God loves you.
Two is that you need to be saved. This is the direct implication of the fact that we are all loved by God.
Three is you can be saved. It would indeed paint a very miserable and poor picture of the God of the Bible that in spite of His loving us He is not able to save us after revealing to us the two points as stated above.
And four is a directive of how to be saved:
One, you must repent and confess your sins even if you do not feel as if you have in fact "sinned". After all, sin is a very nebulous idea and intangible to modern minds. Essentially everything that you have ever thought, said and done right up to that moment of your life from as far back as you can remember.
Two, you must pray and ask Jesus Christ to come into your heart and reign there as the Lord of your life and be your Personal Saviour.
Three, you have to tell someone what you have done so that it can be established. Maybe a member of your family or a trusted friend, but most importantly to look for a local church that believes these things and is able to befriend you and help you grow in your new life with Jesus. You will easily find such a place by searches like "Local Evangelical Church".
But there are as we all know a great many obstacles to this, and my personal angst is the reality that if you want to coax people who are nasty and objectionable out of the wood-work all you have to do is mention God. The objection raised is that religious people will use this very time of crisis as an excuse to further their agenda. The pure and simple answer to that claim is that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be further from the truth. Whatever answers you will get from these proponents of the new militant atheism, the reality of the situation is amazingly to be found in the pages of the Bible itself. You see the most blunt truth is that the militant atheist who shouts out at the call to repent "I WILL NOT believe!" is very sadly concealing the truth from himself that he is incapable of believing. And yet, equally amazing is the fact that deep down he knows that he is incapable of believing.
Here is the truth the militant atheist is concealing from himself:
1. He knows he must repent. The reason for this is that there is the permanent unease within himself that keeps nagging at him saying, "What if it is true after all? How do you absolutely know for sure that there is no God?"
2. He knows he cannot repent.
Just as sin is a very old-fashioned sounding word to the modern mind, so is faith. But the idea of faith has its own difficulties. For the sake of cutting to the chase here I will not reiterate each one of the many fancies and definitions people have. I will simply tell you what the Bible itself means by faith and let that be the conclusion of it.
Essentially the Bible presents faith as a gift from God, being as it were a satellite of God's own faithfulness. The reason we can trust God in the first place is because since Jesus rose from the dead he gave the gift of faith to us. But the salvation that faith brings doesn't come to us automatically; we have to receive it. One great teacher from the past said it like this, "Faith is the God given ability to receive from God."
In conclusion,
"but now God commands all men every where to repent" Acts Chapter 17, verse 30.
In the time of crisis, please use your time of self-isolation profitably and think very seriously of the things in this posting. My whole motivation in compiling this blog both generally and this this particular posting is that you might be saved. I pray for you as you read these things that this crisis will not defeat you and you will be kept healthy and alive and find new life in Jesus, who loved you and gave Himself for you.
God bless you.
Mark Chapter 1, verse 15.
"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;" Romans chapter 1 verse 18.
These may seem to be two very unlikely verses of Holy Scripture to pair up, but please be patient with me. There is something very important at the heart of what I have to say and my motive in doing so.
First of all, I wish to restate the four bed-rock points that form the pretext of this blog:
One and without doubt the most important of all is that God loves you.
Two is that you need to be saved. This is the direct implication of the fact that we are all loved by God.
Three is you can be saved. It would indeed paint a very miserable and poor picture of the God of the Bible that in spite of His loving us He is not able to save us after revealing to us the two points as stated above.
And four is a directive of how to be saved:
One, you must repent and confess your sins even if you do not feel as if you have in fact "sinned". After all, sin is a very nebulous idea and intangible to modern minds. Essentially everything that you have ever thought, said and done right up to that moment of your life from as far back as you can remember.
Two, you must pray and ask Jesus Christ to come into your heart and reign there as the Lord of your life and be your Personal Saviour.
Three, you have to tell someone what you have done so that it can be established. Maybe a member of your family or a trusted friend, but most importantly to look for a local church that believes these things and is able to befriend you and help you grow in your new life with Jesus. You will easily find such a place by searches like "Local Evangelical Church".
But there are as we all know a great many obstacles to this, and my personal angst is the reality that if you want to coax people who are nasty and objectionable out of the wood-work all you have to do is mention God. The objection raised is that religious people will use this very time of crisis as an excuse to further their agenda. The pure and simple answer to that claim is that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be further from the truth. Whatever answers you will get from these proponents of the new militant atheism, the reality of the situation is amazingly to be found in the pages of the Bible itself. You see the most blunt truth is that the militant atheist who shouts out at the call to repent "I WILL NOT believe!" is very sadly concealing the truth from himself that he is incapable of believing. And yet, equally amazing is the fact that deep down he knows that he is incapable of believing.
Here is the truth the militant atheist is concealing from himself:
1. He knows he must repent. The reason for this is that there is the permanent unease within himself that keeps nagging at him saying, "What if it is true after all? How do you absolutely know for sure that there is no God?"
2. He knows he cannot repent.
Just as sin is a very old-fashioned sounding word to the modern mind, so is faith. But the idea of faith has its own difficulties. For the sake of cutting to the chase here I will not reiterate each one of the many fancies and definitions people have. I will simply tell you what the Bible itself means by faith and let that be the conclusion of it.
Essentially the Bible presents faith as a gift from God, being as it were a satellite of God's own faithfulness. The reason we can trust God in the first place is because since Jesus rose from the dead he gave the gift of faith to us. But the salvation that faith brings doesn't come to us automatically; we have to receive it. One great teacher from the past said it like this, "Faith is the God given ability to receive from God."
In conclusion,
"but now God commands all men every where to repent" Acts Chapter 17, verse 30.
In the time of crisis, please use your time of self-isolation profitably and think very seriously of the things in this posting. My whole motivation in compiling this blog both generally and this this particular posting is that you might be saved. I pray for you as you read these things that this crisis will not defeat you and you will be kept healthy and alive and find new life in Jesus, who loved you and gave Himself for you.
God bless you.
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