VIDEO Getting to Know You

But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 3:18

 

Most people go on reality TV shows to find love or win money. But twin sisters Emily and Molly, who recently competed on The Amazing Race, had another reason for being on the show. Born in South Korea and separated at birth, the sisters were both adopted by families in the United States. Thanks to DNA testing, they found each other at the age of 36. One year later, they were traveling the world together on The Amazing Race. As Molly said in an interview, “It was a really nice way to get to know each other in a very unconventional setting. We would have never gotten this close had we not been able to spend time without phones or away from family, just one-on-one together.”[1]

We might know about God, just as the sisters eventually knew about each other, but we should seek to know Him on a far deeper level. As we run the Christian race, are we looking to get to know God more, or are we distracted by our phones and the busyness of life? Take some time today to step away from the distractions of everyday life and spend time getting to know your Heavenly Father more.

We are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it.
J. I. Packer

[1] Abigail Adams, “Identical Twin Sisters Who Met at Age 36 open Up About Fast-Paced Bonding on “The Amazing Race,'” People, September 28,2022.

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Breaking Up Camp and Moving On – 2 Peter 3:10-18 – Skip Heitzig

Rest Assured in God

You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You. Isaiah 26:3

Researchers in Fujian, China, wanted to help intensive care unit (ICU) patients sleep more soundly. They measured the effects of sleep aids on test subjects in a simulated ICU environment, complete with bright, hospital-grade lighting and audio recordings of machines beeping and nurses talking. Their research showed that tools like sleep masks and ear plugs improved their subjects’ rest. But they acknowledged that for truly sick patients in a real ICU, peaceful sleep would still be hard to come by.

When our world is troubled, how can we find rest? The Bible’s clear: there’s peace for those who trust in God, regardless of their circumstances. The prophet Isaiah wrote about a future time when the ancient Israelites would be restored after hardship. They would live securely in their city, because they knew that God made it safe (Isaiah 26:1). They would trust that He was actively working in the world around them to bring good—“He humbles those who dwell on high,” raising up the oppressed, and bringing justice (vv. 5–6). They would know that “the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal,” and they could trust Him forever (v. 4).

“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast,” wrote Isaiah, “because they trust in you” (v. 3). God can provide peace and rest for us today as well. We can rest in the assurance of His love and power, no matter what’s going on around us.

By:  Karen Pimpo

Reflect & Pray

What threatens to overwhelm you today? How can you remind yourself of God’s power and love?

Dear God, I trust You and choose to rest assured in Your love today.

For further study, read God Is Love.

Knowing the Heart of God

Our Father promises that when we truly want to know Him, we will 1 Corinthians 13:11-13

Most of us long to feel truly known by those we love. That makes sense because we were created in God’s image—He also desires to be intimately understood and loved by us. 

Just as you don’t want to be known for only the superficial details of who you appear to be, it’s not enough to simply know about the Lord. He wants us to learn how He thinks and feels, what’s important to Him, and what His purposes are. Of course, it’s impossible for us to completely know His mind. In Isaiah 55:9, He tells us, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” The depth and breadth of His mind is so great that we will never be able to fully grasp it in this lifetime. 

However, we can better understand God’s heart by seeking Him and learning from His Word. If we desire to walk in His ways, we must first genuinely know Him. Just as we come to know our friends better by sharing experiences together, we’ll also understand God better the longer we walk with Him. 

God wants you to seek Him with all your heart, and He promises that when you do, you will find Him (Jeremiah 29:13). So, the next time you’re feeling a need to be better understood, turn to the One who understands you perfectly. Even more importantly, ask Him to help you know Him better.

Crucified and Alive

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.” (Galatians 2:20)

This verse gives us two principles concerning the fleshly nature and our new life in Christ. First, we are admonished to consider ourselves “crucified with Christ.” The verb crucified (synestauromai) is in the perfect tense, indicating a past event with an ongoing action. In other words, we were crucified with Christ at the new birth and, as one theologian said, are “in the state of being crucified with Christ.” Thus, we are to consider our fleshly nature as in a position of being put to death. Romans 6:6 says, “Our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.”

But the miracle of new birth and ongoing sanctification involve much more than the death of our sinful nature. Paul noted previously in Romans 6:5, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” Indeed, believers are new creations in Christ Jesus. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). In regard to this new creation, Paul admonishes us to “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24).

These gospel mysteries and empowering truths should be at the core of our theological convictions. Our spiritual state is our identification with Christ in the redemptive truths of His crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. JPT

“Condemned”

John 3:18

“HE that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”—John 3:18.

Someone has said that “whatever has happened to other wages, there has been a reduction in the wages of sin.” Of course, he meant that judgment and hell and the wrath of God are not being preached as once they were. Millions regard hell as a superstition, the judgment as a myth. Thousands of church members do not believe in eternal punishment, or doubt it, to say the least. Such an attitude is not a sign of intelligence but of stupidity. When God has spoken on a subject as plainly as He has on this, then the man who shuts his eyes and stops his ears to it is a fool.

God has said that the unbeliever is condemned. He shows that he is condemned—as John 3:19 declares—because he loves darkness rather than light. If you dislike plain preaching, it is likely because you are living in darkness and you don’t like the gospel searchlight. When the straight, undiluted gospel is being preached, and some fellow winces and squirms and twists and goes out to criticize, nine times out of ten he is living in condemnation and dreads the light. On the other hand, a righteous man seeks the light and wants to know the truth, and desires that God should search him and know his heart and try him and know his thoughts.

What is this condemnation? It is God’s sentence upon sin: the second death, eternal separation from God in hell. God is love, but He is also a consuming fire, and it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Who is condemned? He who does not believe. I care not what street he lives on, what car he drives or the size of his salary. He may belong to “Who’s Who” and “What’s What,” but God has only one yardstick, and he who does not believe on Christ with a living, saving faith—whether rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief—is condemned already. He may be an upstanding and outstanding citizen, active in church-work and belonging to all the idealistic clubs in town and have a high moral character and a spotless reputation, but if he believes not of the saving of the soul he is in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity, and the wrath of God abides upon him.

When is he condemned?Already: not tomorrow, not at death or the judgment; not maybe, possibly, but he is condemned now and is merely waiting to begin serving his sentence.

Why is he condemned? It is stated twice in our text. He that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God. Not because he robbed a bank or killed somebody but because he has not believed! When we think of condemned people we think of gangsters and kidnappers, but any man who does not believe is condemned. How shall we escape condemnation? By believing, of course, and receiving the Lord Jesus as Savior. He who hears and believes shall not come into condemnation (John 5:24); there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1). Believe Him and rest upon His finished work, and as surely as once you were condemned, so surely will you be saved.

“With God all things are possible.”

Psalm 78:13-32

Upon this occasion we shall read a part of the outline of Israel’s history contained in

Psalm 78:13-32.

Psalm 78:13

This recapitulation begins at the Red Sea even as our spiritual liberty begins at the drowning of all our sins in Jesus blood.

Psalm 78:14

Thanks be to God for providential guidance. We are not wanderers who have lost their way amid a trackless waste, but we follow where the unerring wisdom of Jehovah leads.

Psalm 78:15-16

Here were abounding and extraordinary supplies; apt symbols of the streams of grace which flow to us from the great deeps of electing love and covenant faithfulness.

Psalm 78:17

What a change from grace to sin! It is enough to make us weep to see how good God is, and how base a return man makes. It would seem as if the more the Lord blessed man the less man blessed his God.

Psalm 78:18

To desire God to aid us in gratifying unholy appetites, is to tempt the Lord; but his holiness will not yield to our solicitations, for God cannot be tempted.

Psalm 78:20

To question the Lord’s power is to speak against him. Unbelief is essentially a slandering of the Omnipotent and gracious God.

Psalm 78:21, 22

Nothing so angers God as unbelief. O for grace to be kept from it.

Psalm 78:23, 24

This made unbelief so much the worse. Mercies received aggravate the criminality of distrust. It is so much the worse to doubt when we have received already such great favours from our gracious Father.

Psalm 78:25-28

God gives plenteously when he gives.

Psalm 78:30, 31

No. Gratification does not kill the passion. Man can be satiated with evil, but he is not nauseated with it. He changes the form of the sin, but sins on. Note here that God’s bounties in this case were not pledges of love, but rather tokens of anger.

Psalm 78:13

God often smites the mighty when he has pity on the poor and weak.

Psalm 78:32

As mercy did not soften, so chastisement did not humble them. Lord, what is man!

God of eternal love,

How fickle are our ways!

And yet how oft did Israel prove

Thy constancy of grace!

Now they believe his word,

While rocks with rivers flow;

Now with their lusts provoke the Lord,

And he reduced them low.

Yet when they mourn’d their faults,

He hearken’d to their groans;

Brought his own covenant to his thoughts,

And call’d them still his sons.

Salvation: A Right Relation Between God and Man

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. Ephesians 2:13

The cause of all our human miseries is a radical moral dislocation, an upset in our relation to God and to each other.

For whatever else the Fall of man may have been, it was most certainly a sharp change in man’s relation to his Creator. He adopted toward God an altered attitude, and by so doing destroyed the proper Creator-creature relation in which, unknown to him, his true happiness lay.

Essentially salvation is the restoration of a right relation between man and his Creator, a bringing back to normal of the Creator-creature relation.

A satisfactory spiritual life will begin with a complete change in relation between God and the sinner; not a judicial change merely, but a conscious and experienced change affecting the sinner’s whole nature.

The atonement in Jesus’ blood makes such a change judicially possible and the working of the Holy Spirit makes it emotionally satisfying. The story of the prodigal son perfectly illustrates this later phase. He had brought a world of trouble upon himself by forsaking the position which he had properly held as son of his father. At bottom his restoration was nothing more than a reestablishing of the father-son relation which had existed from his birth and had been altered temporarily by his act of sinful rebellion. This story overlooks the legal aspects of redemption, but it makes beautifully clear the experiential aspects of salvation.

VIDEO Know Him More

One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple. Psalm 27:4

 

It often happens over a holiday meal or at a birthday party. Family members begin reminiscing, and before you know it, children are hearing stories about their parents and grandparents that they’ve never heard before. Or adult children begin sharing some of the exploits from their childhood, and their parents learn what the kids “got away with” while they weren’t looking.

It seems as though no matter how well we know someone, even our own family members, there’s always more to learn about them. The same is true for our relationship with our Heavenly Father. Some of us have been learning about God since before we can remember. But there’s always more for us to learn about Him. Like David, we should desire to know our Father more, to become closer to Him. Begin studying a specific attribute of God or spend time slowly reading through the Gospels—seek to know Him better each day.

The longer you know Christ, and the nearer you come to him, still the more do you see of his glory. John Flavel

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Sure Steps for Uncertain Times – Psalm 27 – Skip Heitzig

To Do or Not to Do

I do not do the good I want to do, . . . I keep on doing [evil]. Romans 7:19

When I was a kid, a decommissioned World War II tank was put on display in a park near my home. Multiple signs warned of the danger of climbing on the vehicle, but a couple of my friends immediately scrambled up. Some of us were a bit reluctant, but eventually we did the same. One boy refused, pointing to the posted signs. Another jumped down quickly as an adult approached. The temptation to have fun outweighed our desire to follow rules.

There’s a heart of childish rebellion lurking within all of us. We don’t like being told what to do or not to do. Yet we read in James that when we know what is right and don’t do it—it is sin (4:17). In Romans, the apostle Paul wrote: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it” (7:19–20).

As believers in Jesus, we may puzzle over our struggle with sin. But too often we depend solely on our own strength to do what’s right. One day, when this life is over, we’ll be truly dead to sinful impulses. Until then, however, we can rely on the power of the One whose death and resurrection won the victory over sin.

By:  Cindy Hess Kasper

Reflect & Pray

What sins are the biggest struggle for you? How can you rely more on God’s power to overcome their stronghold?

Loving God, please help me to choose to do what’s right. My heart’s desire is to reflect Your perfect character and holy ways.

For further study, read Taking Sin Seriously.

The Desires of Your Heart

When we learn to delight in the Lord, we are forever changed and discover unspeakable joy Psalm 37:4-7

What is your greatest desire? We often read today’s passage and assume that it means God will give us whatever we want. It’s not uncommon for someone to talk about a prayer request and then add, “God promised to give me the desires of my heart.” But in context, that scripture reveals the Lord’s principle for purifying our desires and issues a call for devotion to Him. To delight in the Lord means to take pleasure in discovering more about Him and in following Him. As we do, the Holy Spirit aligns our heart’s desires with His, which positions us to experience His blessings. 

When we commit our way to God, we allow our thoughts, goals, and lifestyle to be shaped by His will and the things He loves. In other words, we acknowledge His right to determine whether our longing fits His plan. If we rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him, we can rely on Him to work out circumstances, even when the desire He’s given us seems impossible. When He is our first love, our heart becomes focused on making His glory known with our life. 

God wants to give us our heart’s desires in His time, when we’re aligned with His will. As we learn to enjoy Him for who He is, our self-focused wants are replaced by His perfect will and purpose for us