Thistletown Baptist Church

Entries from September 2009

Sermon: September 13, 2009

September 30, 2009 · Comments Off

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Thistletown Baptist Church

September 13, 2009

Always Praying

Eph. 6:10-20 (ESV)

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. [11] Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. [12] For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. [13] Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. [14] Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, [15] and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. [16] In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; [17] and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, [18] praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, [19] and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, [20] for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.

I Introduction

1. Today marks the beginning of our annual Week of Prayer. Its purpose is to kick into the new season by committing it to the Lord in prayer and asking Him to enable us to d what we as a church are called to do.

2. This is the Word of God.

a. It is true.

b. It is our authority. It is God speaking to us. It is God communicating to us everything we need in order to live a godly life. It is possible to misinterpret it and say it says things that it does not say. From those who find in this Book that God always wants oyu rich and healthy to those who say they know when the Lord is going to return, people have always put their own understanding into the Scriptures rather than take out from them what God has already said. It is hard work, when seeking to understand the various parts of the Bible, to make sure we only say what the Bible says. But for the true follower of Jesus Christ it is always worth the work.

c. This morning we are going to look at Ephesians 6:18&19 and see some things there about prayer. There are commands given the church about prayer. There are those, who when they hear the word “command”, get their backs up, resist, don’t want to listen anymore. They just do not like to be told what to do. But God does give us commands and it is good for us to pay attention to them. (more…)

Categories: Sermons

God of Justice

September 30, 2009 · 1 Comment

Micah 3:1-4 (ESV)

And I said: Hear, you heads of Jacob

and rulers of the house of Israel!

Is it not for you to know justice?—

[2] you who hate the good and love the evil,

who tear the skin from off my people

and their flesh from off their bones,

[3] who eat the flesh of my people,

and flay their skin from off them,

and break their bones in pieces

and chop them up like meat in a pot,

like flesh in a cauldron.

[4] Then they will cry to the Lord,

but he will not answer them;

he will hide his face from them at that time,

because they have made their deeds evil.

God is a just God. He is the God of justice. That word usually brings up scenes of punishment and retribution. When we hear of justice we think of God hurting people. This may be in part because we know that we have been so evil that the only just thing is for us to get hurt by Him.

But justice does not only have reference to punishment. It is about fairness. Justice speaks to the need for provision of fairness to the under-privileged. God, through the prophet Micah, takes issue with His people because they do not practise justice in relation to the poor and dispossessed. If they were just, then the under-privileged would have more of the necessities of life provided by those able to assist.

Injustice is turning a blind eye to the needy of society and it is not wrong to plead for justice for them. The punishment that God determines to levy on those who have been willingly ignorant of the needs of the less fortunate is to turn a deaf ear to them (verse 4). If they will not hear the cries of the bottom rung of the society then God will not hear them.

We in evangelicalism are so prone to equate a right standing with God as measured by Bible reading and church involvement that we do not often regard compassion as a mark of true Christianity. But it is. There are those on the opposite end of the spectrum who say the whole Gospel is the giving of aid to the needy. That is palpable nonsense. But compassion is a true mark of the faithful; and it is a true reflection of the heart of God. God has placed us here to worship and part of that worship is being the heart of Jesus to those who cannot help themselves.

And surely, doing justice cannot simply mean throw money at the needy from a distance. Money needs to be thrown. But people need to be interacted with, understood, listened to and responded to. It demands prayer and patience and time and having one’s shibboleths challenged. It means sacrifice and involvement and perhaps even living with and on less for the sake of helping others. It demands much. That is why the people of Micah’s day weren’t doing it. Anyone can help from a distance in a manner that does not make demands. The idolatry that God has seen in them prevents them from focussing on others more than themselves.

To neglect the poor, especially the poor of the household of faith, is an insult to our and their Maker. It is not a small deal. It is a very big deal. It is so big that God says He will not hear the cries of those who do not show love to the under trodden of society.

My prayer life cannot be what it should be if I do not use my energy to help those who suffer in various ways. My prayer life cannot fail when I do. Why do your prayers sometimes feel like they are bouncing off the ceiling? At least consider that it may be because you have not heard the pleas of those who without your help will be completely without resource. Help them – for Jesus sake, help them.

Categories: Devotions

Idolatry and Social Injustice

September 28, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Micah 1

2 Hear, you peoples, all of you;

pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it,

and let the Lord GOD be a witness against you,

the Lord from his holy temple.

3For behold, the LORD is coming out of his place,

and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.

4And the mountains will melt under him,

and the valleys will split open,

like wax before the fire,

like waters poured down a steep place.

5All this is for the transgression of Jacob

and for the sins of the house of Israel.

What is the transgression of Jacob?

Is it not Samaria?

And what is the high place of Judah?

Is it not Jerusalem?

6Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country,

a place for planting vineyards,

and I will pour down her stones into the valley

and uncover her foundations.

7All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces,

all her wages shall be burned with fire,

and all her idols I will lay waste,

for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them,

and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return.

As we read into Micah’s prophecy we will see that God’s anger at His people was more than justified. The next chapter relates the sins of injustice and greed on a large scale.

But we need to remember that the horrible social injustice of which they were guilty stemmed from an even greater sin. The sin against which Micah prophesied was idolatry (1:5-7). If the essence of sin is pride, it’s demonstration is idolatry. We show our pride by worshipping other than God. The god of choice is oneself.

Adam and Eve ate the fruit because Satan told them they would be as God. The people of the north and south kingdoms of Israel and Judah committed idolatry because of their surroundings. They adopted the gods of the Gentiles with whom they lived. Conformity led to idolatry. Conformity itself is idolatry. They had already forsaken God for other things before they ever bowed down to an idol.

We desire to be like the world more than we desire to do as God says and be different for His glory. We set ourselves up on the throne and obey the sovereign ruler – us. This is why Micah said they deserved the justice that was coming. The people should be ashamed of themselves. We should find sin shameful. But we do not.

The church needs to be on guard against being so conformed to the world that we call evil good and good evil, just as the world does. There is a battle going on for our souls (I Peter 1:11) and we lose it whenever we let our guard down, find the philosophies of the godless appealing and grow ignorant of the Word of God.

The social injustices that are referred to in chapter 2 come from hearts that find themselves more important than God. The horrible abuse of people can always be traced back to a view of God that is far too low and a view of oneself that is far too high.

Categories: Devotions · Uncategorized

Don’t Make Me Come Down There

September 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Micah 1

1The word of the LORD that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.

2 Hear, you peoples, all of you;

pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it,

and let the Lord GOD be a witness against you,

the Lord from his holy temple.

3For behold, the LORD is coming out of his place,

and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.

4And the mountains will melt under him,

and the valleys will split open,

like wax before the fire,

like waters poured down a steep place.

5All this is for the transgression of Jacob

and for the sins of the house of Israel.

What is the transgression of Jacob?

Is it not Samaria?

And what is the high place of Judah?

Is it not Jerusalem?

6Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country,

a place for planting vineyards,

and I will pour down her stones into the valley

and uncover her foundations.

7All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces,

all her wages shall be burned with fire,

and all her idols I will lay waste,

for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them,

and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return.

The children have been acting up and mom hollers out from the living room for them to behave. There is a brief calm and then it starts up again. Mom yells again and the same scenario is again acted out. Finally mom gets up and approaches the source of the trouble, but she is careful not to approach too closely. “If I have to come in there you are not going to like what happens.” There it is. Mom threatens not to just yell from her place, but to actually come into the room and deal with the whole matter hands on. That is serious threat. To have mom actually come into the room and deal with things would have a more powerful effect than if she simply continued to shout out instructions from the safety of the living room.

The prophet Micah wrote to both northern and southern kingdoms of Israel regarding the coming captivities of the two Jewish nations. As he begins to deliver the message from God that we know as the Book of Micah, he gives this warning – “the Lord is coming out of his place and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.”

The people have sinned. They have become intransigent in their sins and God has been telling them, from a safe distance that they had better start behaving. The people calm down a little but it is not long before they are right back at their sinfulness again. So God says “Do you want me to come in there?” That is a threat that ought to make everyone examine their lives very closely.

The thought of having to stand before God unprotected by priests and temple ritual should have made them tremble where they stood. But it does not. They fear poverty, and oppression from stronger nations. They fear captivity and political weakness. They fear what any godless person can fear. But they do not fear God and they are not filled with dread at the prospect of having God come down and deal with them directly. (See 6:9 and 7:17). So God came down and God judged them and all the things that they did fear happened to them because they would not fear God.

Much of the church of North America today has no fear of God. They have a view of God that longs for Him to come out of His place because they do not realize that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. They believe that fear of God is an Old Testament concept and that God is such a friend that He will never punish or deal harshly (see 2:6; 3:11).

This was precisely the attitude of people in Micah’s time.

Too many have the perception that the “decision” they made, makes them the friends of God in such a way that God will never show anger no matter how they behave. They never consider that they may not be the friends of God at all and that even if they are, the never consider that God loves the glory of His Name more than He loves them. Does God threaten to come out of His place to judge the nations and to judge His people today? Perhaps He already has.

Categories: Devotions · Uncategorized

Imprecations

September 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Psalm 58

1Do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?

Do you judge the children of man uprightly?

2No, in your hearts you devise wrongs;

your hands deal out violence on earth.

3The wicked are estranged from the womb;

they go astray from birth, speaking lies.

4 They have venom like the venom of a serpent,

like the deaf adder that stops its ear,

5so that it does not hear the voice of charmers

or of the cunning enchanter.

6O God, break the teeth in their mouths;

tear out the fangs of the young lions, O LORD!

7Let them vanish like water that runs away;

when he aims his arrows, let them be blunted.

8Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime,

like the stillborn child who never sees the sun.

9Sooner than your pots can feel the heat of thorns,

whether green or ablaze, may he sweep them away!

10 The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance;

he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.

11Mankind will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;

surely there is a God who judges on earth.”

Another imprecatory Psalm. Every time we come across one people start tiptoeing around it like it has an infectious disease of some sort and needs to be put in quarantine so that no one gets infected. We often see two extreme explanations for the imprecatory Psalms.

1) – those who maintain that this does not say what it seems to say, or that God did not really say it. (This is what I was taught in one of the seminaries I attended). There is, in this, a hidden understanding that we know what God is really like and we know that He would never say or inspire someone to say what this seems to be saying.

2) The gleeful hateful interpretation that maintains that anything that transgresses the will of God is deserving of our hatred and we would be justified in bombing into oblivion any who ever disagree with our understanding of the Scriptures.

The first approach amounts to a denial of the inspiration of Scripture. It is the idolatrous assumption that the God who loves us would never have such an attitude. It presumes to know what is really God-like and pronounces that this cannot be, for it is below God to say such a thing. It therefore should never have been allowed in the canon. It cannot properly be understood, they say, if there is anything in the explanation that says that God hates sinners.

The second approach finds delight in such texts and hopes to convince the world that God is on a rampage. There is an implicit self righteousness about the view. They believe that the wicked deserve the wrath that is invoked in the Psalm but they also believe that the reason they will not be on the receiving end of that wrath is because they are intrinsically better. They are in God’s good books because they are holier, more perceptive, less sinful, less depraved. These are the ones at the Gay Pride Parade with the placards that proudly state that God hates gays and so should everyone else. Across the street from them are those who believe that God never wrote such a Psalm in the first place and God loves all people equally, no matter what their crimes.

They are both guilty of the same offence – God is like me. It is not even “I am like God”, for that would make God, God, and that is not their problem. Their problem is that they are their own gods and when the Scriptures interfere with that assessment then they have to explain those Scriptures in a manner that allows them to keep their godhood.

These are people who know that when the Bible says things we like it is because God is seeing our point of view and therefore He must be right for if this is not right then that means that we are wrong and we know that cannot be the case.

Both these interpretations are great tragedies.

How then should we understand such texts that give us a difficult or “looks like us” understanding of the Almighty?

1) Christians don’t take vengeance on their enemies – that is God’s work and the most we dare do is ask Him to be just. 2) God is a just God and what these Psalms ask for is not more than what the wicked deserve. But it is also what we deserve and if not for the grace of God it is what should be prayed about us. Absent of the grace of God we would be doing the things that have the Psalmist so concerned.  3) God inspired the Psalmist to say such things to teach us about His justice.  4) It is not wrong to want injustice to end and it is not wrong to pray for the wicked to receive their just reward.  5) Such texts teach us that it is always wrong to take justice into our own hands and not to leave it up to God. David calls for God to do something while never actually doing to his enemies what he asked God to do. 6) God did not always do what David asked for and this means that we are to see a God of great mercy even though He has every right to destroy us all. 7) The way we can take action to end the horrors that the wicked do, is to triumph over evil with good. Give the Gospel.

Categories: Uncategorized

Just one of those days

September 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Sorry about the absence of a devotional today. The day started in 4th gear and never slowed down. Back at it tomorrow, I trust.

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Run Away and Be at Peace

September 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Psalm 55:6 (ESV)

And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!

I would fly away and be at rest;

Psalm 55 begins with a plea for God to show mercy in listening to David’s cry for help. Once again, David is surrounded by enemies. This Psalm does not tell us what the crisis is but it is not unusual for David to be in pickles of some sort, sometimes of his own making, sometimes by the conniving of others. We know that he has been betrayed by a friend (verse 12-14) which makes the pain so much worse. I expect my enemies to plot against me. When it comes from those I have trusted then the damage is multiplied greatly. Verse 16 is the refuge for David. He can go to God even when his friends have betrayed him. The Psalm ends on a great note of hope. David urges all who read to find their refuge in God. This cannot but mean that God has heard David’s cry for help and has answered and supplied relief.

It is verse 6 that we draw our attention to. David expresses a desire to fly away from the problem and be at rest. How real the Psalms are! Who can deny that they are the expressions of the heart of a real man in real life situations? How understanding God is to inspire the heart aches and inner turmoils of men so that they wrote such things that we so easily identify with. Who has not felt like they wanted to fly away from their crisis and go to a place where the crisis did not exist and they could be at peace? Who of us is not even in such a condition today?

If we can taste the reality of life in such expressions of anguish and anxiety; if we can feel the author’s pressure and know that what he is going through is hard because we have been there; if we find hope in the fact that others, such as the writer of this Psalm have experienced the torture of life, then we should also be able to believe and experience the relief that he finds in God, if we are truly His disciples.

The same man who wished that he could fly away and be at rest is the one who encourages his readers to cast their burdens on the Lord and find the stability that God gives those who call upon Him. If we find his grief real, we should also find his worship and consolation in God real as well.

Rejoice that God allowed us into the inner turmoils of David’s trouble filled life. But do not stop there. Find in God the sweet relief that David found. The latter can be as real to you as the former.

How can this not draw us to Christ? The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus was made like us in every way (minus the sin) so that He might be a faithful and merciful High Priest in service to God (Hebrews 2:17). Jesus knew the temptation of wanting to fly away and be at peace. But He loved doing the will of His Father and He loved us more than the desire for safety. We may cry out to God for help when we are tempted to run and hide, because Jesus came and offered Himself as the only sufficient sacrifice for sin. All our comfort is because Jesus came and saved us through His life, death, and resurrection.

Categories: Uncategorized

Those People

September 21, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Jonah 3

1Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2″Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” 3So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth. 4Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5 And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.

6The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, 8but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. 9 Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” 10When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.

Jonah 4

1But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. 2And he prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. 3 Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

What can one say about Jonah? His honesty with God is commendable at one level but it is a very disturbing thing to hear his heart expressed the way he expresses it. He confesses that the reason he did not want to go to Nineveh to preach was because he knew that God had every intention of saving the people of Nineveh from their sins. Jonah knew that the Word of God shall not return void. He knew that God was not sending him on a fool’s errand. He knew that God is no respecter of persons. And he did not want people he hated to be favoured by God. Now that they have been, he is upset that God did save them and that he was the instrument used to accomplish it.

Why did God choose Jonah? Were there no prophets whose attitude would have been better than his? Most likely there were.

God does not surrender his people up to sinful hearts. He prunes us and shapes us into the image of Christ. Jonah needed much pruning and we can believe that he learned his lesson since he is probably the author of this Book. He would want others to learn the lesson that he learned, without the misadventures involved in being swallowed by a whale.

Jonah was better than many Christians in that he was honest with God regarding his rebellion against God’s purposes for his life. Would we dare admit that one of the reasons we do not evangelize more than we do is that we really do not care about the souls of lost people?

Are we numbered among those who say that God is unfair to condemn those who have never heard the Gospel while doing nothing to make sure they get to hear it? Do we think that those who march in support of abortion and gay rights and Hindu gods deserve to perish more than we do? And should God say “Arise go to [that group of people] and call out against them and call them to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ” would we say “I do not want to go to THOSE people”?

We may need to read the Book of Jonah with more than a vested interest in the fact that He saves Gentiles. The message is not just that God save Gentiles as well as Jews, although that message is certainly there. But there is also a message that God saves people we don’t think should be saved or can be saved. He saves people who commit vile sins. He saves people we do not want to be bothered with.

And we should remember that there may be people who think that we should not be bothered with as well. Let’s be very glad that God did not listen to them.

Categories: Uncategorized

Looking Around and Up

September 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Psalm 52

The Steadfast Love of God Endures

To the choirmaster. A Maskil of David, when Doeg, the Edomite, came and told Saul, “David has come to the house of Ahimelech.”

1Why do you boast of evil, O mighty man?

The steadfast love of God endures all the day.

2Your tongue plots destruction,

like a sharp razor, you worker of deceit.

3You love evil more than good,

and lying more than speaking what is right.

Selah

4You love all words that devour,

O deceitful tongue.

5But God will break you down forever;

he will snatch and tear you from your tent;

he will uproot you from the land of the living.

Selah

6The righteous shall see and fear,

and shall laugh at him, saying,

7″See the man who would not make

God his refuge,

but trusted in the abundance of his riches

and sought refuge in his own destruction!”

8But I am like a green olive tree

in the house of God.

I trust in the steadfast love of God

forever and ever.

9I will thank you forever,

because you have done it.

I will wait for your name, for it is good,

in the presence of the godly.

David writes this Psalm when he has been betrayed into the hands of Saul by one of his enemies. (I Samuel 22) Doeg, the man who had betrayed him told Saul where he had seen David. This led to Saul gaining ground on David, but worse, it led to the execution of Ahimelech the priest and eighty-five other priests as well.

Reading the Psalm through that history helps us in understanding what David wrote. Doeg ratted David out with his tongue and the Psalm deals with that in verses 1-4. David prays down imprecations upon Doeg but does not take matters into his own hands to bring revenge himself.

David comforts himself with the knowledge that even though things are not going very well in his life, he can still look forward to a reward from God for his faithfulness in the midst of great turmoil. This Psalm is a marvelous combination of distress over hardship existing at the same time with confidence in the God who promises great reward to the faithful.

What a lesson for us! Do not be afraid to mourn your hardships. But do not allow them to eat away at your faith. Consider the end of those who work against the commandments of God and take great relief in the fact that God will make you to be steadfast forever. The hope of the saint is a great sustainer in the day of hardship.

Cultivate a faith that can stand the test of persecution and opposition and set back. Look up and look forward when the days are very dark. Do not doubt the faithfulness of God to keep His promises to you. Never take matters into your own hands to fix things in a way that God Himself would not do if He were here in the flesh.

Of course, the greatest example of this is the Lord Jesus Himself. Betrayed, persecuted, abused, disbelieved, murdered, He submitted Himself to the will of the Father. He set his eyes on the joy set before Him, endured the cross, scorned its shame and triumphed over death for all His people. The greatest work ever accomplished on planet earth came when Jesus entrusted His life to the hands of His Father while enduring the horrors that He was called to endure in order to accomplish that victory.

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The Power of the Truth

September 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Jonah 3:1-5 (ESV)

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, [2] “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” [3] So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth. [4] Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” [5] And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.

Jonah did not want to go and preach in Nineveh. That is abundantly obvious throughout the whole account. The adventure with the fish has convinced Jonah that He had better do what God wants him to do. But his heart has not changed a great deal. He still does not want to preach in Nineveh. We know this from chapter 4.

The command to Jonah by God in chapter three is “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” . And Jonah did exactly that. And through the message that Jonah preached (and, we know, through the work of the Holy Spirit through that preaching) the city of Nineveh repented of its sin and God relented from the destruction that He had threatened.

It would have been much better for Jonah if he had preached willingly, with a burden for the people of Nineveh and a desire to see God glorified through their repentance. But even though his heart was not right, his preaching was.

This is marvelous truth. It is the Gospel that is the power of God (Rom. 1:17). It is through the foolishness of the message preached that people are saved (I Cor. 2:1-4). It is the Word of God that is quick and powerful and piercing (Hebrews 4:12). It is much better for us if all our motives are pure and pleasing to God. It is better for us if we preach from a love for God and heart for the lost. But even if we do not have those things it is the Word delivered that God uses to bring conviction of sin.

How the church needs to hear this today! We get caught up in methods and motives and attitudes as the crucial element in the delivery of the Gospel – and they are not.

This is not to say that motives etc. are not important. The reason we have the Book of Jonah is to show what God does with Jonah in order to bring his attitudes and motives into a God pleasing state. God is working to conform us to the image of Christ.

The point here, however, is that God does not need us to be the perfect image of Christ in order to be used by Him for the salvation of the lost. God can win the lost without us, but He has chosen to use the preaching of the Word through people to do it.

This Paul’s point in Philippians 1:15-18.

15 Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. 16The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. 17The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. 18What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.

What we MUST have is the real Gospel and deliver it, and the power of the Holy Spirit winging it to the hearts of those who hear us. We should strive to be more and more the people that God calls us to be. But even in the areas where there is much work required, God still uses the truth to accomplish His purpose of saving people from their sins. This is great stuff and a great encouragement for us to deliver biblical truth with whomever God gives us audience. Go preach the biblical Gospel with great confidence.

We must never diminish the importance of holiness as a powerful tool in the delivery of the Gospel. But it is the Gospel itself that is the power of God to bring people to Himself.

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