Inspired Words

To any reasonable person, the Bible can easily be shown to be inspired by God. It was written over a period of around 1,600 years, by around 40 authors from all walks of life, and yet there is a wonderful continuity of thought running throughout its pages. For example, consider the subject of “righteousness,” a word that is used 301 times in the NKJ translation. Jesus died on the cross because God demanded perfect justice to satisfy His perfect righteousness. Look at the amazing continuity of Scripture. Psalm 9:8 (written around 800 B.C.) warned that God “shall judge the world in righteousness.” Proverbs 11:4 warns again: “Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.” So, how can guilty sinners become righteous in the sight of a holy God? Hosea 10:12 tells us, “For it is time to seek the LORD, till He comes and rains righteousness on you.” It was the on the Day of Pentecost that righteousness rained down from heaven. Now God commands all men everywhere to repent. Why? “Because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness” (Acts 17:30,31). As the apostle Paul was about to die he said, “Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing” (2 Tim. 4:8). In the meanwhile, you and I wait for a new heavens and new earth “in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 2:13). So, what should we be doing as Christians while we wait? Daniel 12:3 tells us: “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever.”

Psalm 72: 2 He will judge Your people with righteousness, And Your poor with justice

Envy is grieving

“Envy is grieving at the good of another, than which no sin is more injurious both to God, our neighbor, and ourselves. But this was not all, she said to Jacob, give me children or else I die—A child would not content her; but because Leah has more than one, she must have more too…Observe a difference between Rachel’s asking for this mercy, and Hannah’s (1 Sam 1:10, etc). Rachel envied, Hannah wept: Rachel must have children, and she died of the second; Hannah prayed for this child, and she had four more: Rachel is importunate and peremptory, Hannah is submissive and devout, If thou wilt give me a child, I will give him to the Lord. Let Hannah be imitated, and not Rachel; and let our desires be always under the conduct and check of reason and religion.” John Wesley 

Genesis 30:8 Then Rachel said, “With great wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and indeed I have prevailed.” So she called his name Naphtali.

Future Punishment

When preachers in pulpits have no respect for God’s Law, they preach a gospel devoid of reference to and omit the reality of future punishment. Idolatry always follows when the Law is rejected. People imagine a god too kind to punish sin, so they lose the fear of God and therefore neglect to depart from sin. They don’t consider repentance to be a prerequisite to salvation and they are told they have peace with God because they simply “believe.” Consequently, the contemporary Church is filled with false converts (tares among the wheat, foolish virgins among the wise, bad fish among the good, and sheep among the goats), as well as false apostles, false teachers, and false prophets.

Jeremiah 6:13 “Because from the least of them even to the greatest of them,
Everyone is given to covetousness;
And from the prophet even to the priest,
Everyone deals falsely.

14 They have also healed the hurt of My people slightly,
Saying, ‘Peace, peace!’
When there is no peace.

Balance of the Law

We are called to do what Daniel did, to interpret the spiritual nature of God’s Law for a sin-loving world. God has numbered our days and weighed us in the balance of His Law. Salvation is only through repentance and trust in the Savior.

Daniel 5:26 This is the interpretation of each word. Mene: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it; 27 Tekel: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting...

Poor Souls

“In what an unhappy condition is that person who cannot derive comfort from the salvation of his own child! Yet there are many men and women in such a state. They care nothing for the souls of their own offspring. It would bring no joy to them if they saw all their children walking in the truth nor does it cause them any concern to see them otherwise. To see them sharp in business, or fair in countenance, is their main ambition; but to have them beloved of the Lord is no matter of desire. Poor souls, their own carnality overflows and saturates their family! To some it would even cause anger and wrath to see their children turning to the Lord; they so despise true religion that, if their sons and daughters were converted, they would rather hate them than love them the more. Such is the alienation which sin works in the human mind, that it will in some instances curdle human affection into enmity, at the sight of the grace of God.” Charles Spurgeon 

1 Kings 14:13 And all Israel shall mourn for him and bury him, for he is the only one of Jeroboam who shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something good toward the Lord God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam.

Professing Christian

“Let us awake to a sense of the perilous state of many professing Christians. ‘Without holiness no man shall see the Lord’; without sanctification there is no salvation (Hebrews12:14). Then what an enormous amount of so-called religion there is which is perfectly useless!” J. C. Ryle 

Hebrews 12:14
Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord

The Light of God's Law

Jesus said that when we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive power (see Acts 1:8). Why have we been given this power? To speak against sin and be witnesses to Jesus’ saving grace. We are to declare to the world the Law that God gave to Moses, which measures how all have sinned against God. Sin cannot be understood in truth until we realize that we are transgressors (see Rom. 7:7; 1 John 3:4). Any knowledge of sin, without the light of God’s Law, will be shallow. It is God’s Law that shows sin to be exceedingly sinful (see Rom. 7:13).

Micah 3:8
But truly I am full of power by the Spirit of the Lord,
And of justice and might,
To declare to Jacob his transgression
And to Israel his sin.

I don't believe in dentist

“On a recent trip to the dentist, while the dentist was working on my teeth he said to me, ‘I do not believe in God.’ Now this dentist knows what I do for a living and how important my faith is to me, yet for numerous reasons (one main one being his hands were in my mouth) I uncharacteristically remained silent, allowing him to explain: ‘How can God exist and still allow all the suffering and pain in the world?’ I remained quiet until he was finished (and of course put his drill away) and told him that ‘I do not believe in dentists.’ This confused him greatly so I clarified for him that if there are dentists in the world, how can so many people have broken, infected, and missing teeth? He answered me, ‘I cannot help anyone who does not come to me to have their teeth fixed.’ That reply is the same for faith. God cannot help people until they come to Him in repentance and faith,…and ask Him for help.” Tony Perkins 

Faithful Men

The three faithful men refused to compromise—even at the risk of their lives. As we can see from their words, “But if not....” their conviction did not come from a promise that God would deliver them. They were full of faith. They lived by faith, and they were prepared to die in faith. We, too, are called to be faithful in the face of death. Neither do we have a promise of deliverance from the hands of ungodly men. God allowed Stephen to be martyred, as well as eleven of the original apostles and millions of other martyrs down through the ages.

Daniel 3:17 If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. 18 But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up.

Lying only once

Committing even one sin, one time, is enough to send someone to hell (see James 2:10). But we know that every person has a multitude of sins. For starters, the person has failed to love God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He has dishonored his parents’ good name by being a liar. Besides that, you can’t trust anything he says because he is a self-admitted liar. However, I usually say, “There’s bad news. All liars will have their part in the lake of fire” (Rev. 21:8). While telling “white lies” may not seem serious to us, it shows a heart that is willing to deceive, and proves that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9). I explain that lying is very serious to God. The Bible says that “lying lips are an abomination to the LORD.”

Proverbs 12:22
Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,
But those who deal truthfully are His delight.

God owes us nothing but...

A young lady from Corona, California, was devastated by the tragic death of her boyfriend. The couple had just celebrated the birth of their first child. He had been to a nightclub, and was returning with friends at 2:00 a.m., when police believe he was speeding and lost control. He wrapped his car around a tree, killing himself and his three passengers.

His mother said that her son “loved to drink.” His distraught girlfriend lamented, “I don’t know why God would do this to me.”

My heart went out to her for her loss, but why was she blaming God for the death of her boyfriend? He was the one who was speeding, probably drunk, at 2:00 a.m. He killed himself. The incident had nothing to do with God, other than that He allowed it, in His sovereign will.

It seems obvious that many nowadays think God is nothing but a divine butler. He is there for our convenience—to come running when we snap our sinful fingers.

God gave us life. He lavished His goodness upon us, and to think that we can treat Him as some sort of lowly servant reveals a great ignorance of who He is. Such error can only end in disillusionment of life and bitterness of soul.

God owes us nothing but justice. He has no obligation at all to bless us with health, wealth, or long life. A civil judge is under no obligation to show mercy to a guilty criminal. If there was an obligation, then it wouldn’t be true mercy. Mercy is unmerited. He is, however, obligated to make sure that justice is done.

So it is with God. He is obligated by His very nature to manifest His divine and just wrath against all sin, and that will happen on what the Bible calls “the great and terrible day of the Lord” (the Day of Judgment). But He is also “rich in mercy,” and has offered us mercy in the cross...and we must receive it while we are on this side of eternity.

Proverbs 3:29 Who has woe?
Who has sorrow?
Who has contentions?
Who has complaints?
Who has wounds without cause?
Who has redness of eyes?
30 Those who linger long at the wine,
Those who go in search of mixed wine.

May Compassion Ruler our Hearts

“The more we become what we shall be, the more will compassion rule our hearts. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the pattern and mirror of perfect manhood, what said He concerning the sins and the woes of Jerusalem? He knew Jerusalem must perish; did He bury his pity beneath the fact of the divine decree, and steel His heart by the thought of the sovereignty or the justice that would be resplendent in the city’s destruction? No, not He, but with eyes gushing like founts, he cried, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings! and you would not.” If you would be like Jesus, you must be tender and very pitiful…I beseech you, let your hearts be moved with pity, do not endure to see the spiritual death of mankind. Be in agony as often as you contemplate the ruin of any soul of the seed of Adam.” Charles Spurgeon 

Luke 13:34 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under herwings, but you were not willing! 

No one can "kill" a Christian

Actually, no one can “kill” a Christian. It’s been well-said that death isn’t the termination of existence, but the entrance into an eternal and unchanging state. The Christian has been “sealed” with the life of God Himself. All a murderer does is promote those who trust in Christ from this pain-filled futile existence into eternal reality. Then, in the coming kingdom, we will enjoy forever an earth where “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox” (Isa. 65:25).

“You can kill us, but you cannot do us any real harm.” Justin Martyr (martyred A.D. 165)

Acts 7:59 And they stoned Stephen as he was calling on God and saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

Peace and Joy

“Understand that you must not look upon the possession of joy and peace as being the absolutely necessary consequence of your being saved. A man may be in the lifeboat, but that lifeboat may be so tossed about that he may still feel himself exceedingly ill, and think himself to be still in peril. It is not his sense of safety that makes him safe; he is safe because he is in the lifeboat, whether he is sensible of this or not. Understand then that joy and peace are not infallible or indispensable evidences of safety, and that they certainly are not unchanging evidences. The brightest Christians lose their joy, and some of those that stand well in the things of God, and concerning whom you would entertain no doubt, entertain a great many suspicions, however, about themselves. Joy and peace are the element of a Christian, but he is sometimes out of his element: joy and peace are his usual states, but there are times when, with fightings within and wars without, his joy departs, and his peace is broken. The leaves on the tree prove that the tree is alive, but the absence of leaves will not prove that the tree is dead.” Charles Spurgeon 

Romans 15:13 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Almighty God spoke it...

Make sure you don’t miss the magnitude of what God accomplished in creating the sun. Its surface temperature is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with the temperature at the core around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot. The sun’s diameter is about 870,000 miles (109 times greater than Earth), and it is 333,000 times heavier—and that is only one of over 100 billion stars that God made. It burns an incredible seven million tons of natural gas every second.

And Almighty God spoke it into existence.

Genesis 1:16 Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.He made the stars also.

They hate God's Law.

The disobedient and rebellious hate God’s Law. They think that their moral dilemma will be solved and they can sin with guilt-free abandonment if they expel the Ten Commandments and those who preach God’s Law. However, God wrote His Law in stone with His own finger, and He engraved its work on the tablets of their heart (see Rom. 2:15). They will still have to face Him and His Law on the Day of Wrath.

Nehemiah 9:26 “Nevertheless they were disobedient
And rebelled against You,
Cast Your law behind their backs
And killed Your prophets, who testified against them
To turn them to Yourself;
And they worked great provocations.

As bad or as good as it gets

For believers, life here on earth is as bad it gets; for those who refuse Jesus as their Savior, life here on earth is as good as it gets.

“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” C. S. Lewis 

Matthew 25:46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”