A Word With You

It was before Christmas, and I went shopping for toys for my kids. Now you might not think there's anything unusual about that – unless you happen to know that all my kids are grown up now. But that doesn't mean they can't have one little spark of childhood left in them, right? For example, I always buy my daughter a doll for Christmas. And we've got one son who for a long time was a big fan of a certain Sesame Street character, and he had a collection of everything Ernie. Well, there came a time when this Ernie toy was one of the hottest Christmas items on the market. I discovered the toy in September in a store before it became an officially hot item. I could have bought it, but I said, "Naw, Christmas is a long way off. I can always get it later." Wrong! When "later" came, no more Ernies to be found.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "When 'Later' Never Comes."

When it's a toy you miss because you waited – no big deal. When it's God you miss, when it's eternity in heaven you miss, that's huge.

Our word for today from the Word of God, 2 Corinthians 6:2. God says, "In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you." God says here there is a time of His favor; there is a day of His salvation. And that's when you need to grab Him. Then He clearly spells out the time we need to respond to Him. God's Word says, "I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation."

When God talks about salvation, He's talking about rescuing us from the death sentence that we're all headed for because of our sin, which is basically the self-rule of our own life. A life that was created to be run by our Creator. This "salvation" came at a very high price for God. See, someone had to die as your substitute to pay for your sin in order for you to be rescued.

The only one who was qualified to pay that awful price was God's one and only Son. That is Jesus Christ. So, believe me, it really matters to God what you do with His Son, because of what His Son gave up for you. The only response that can change a person's eternal address from hell to heaven is putting your total trust in Jesus as your only hope of belonging to God and of being with God forever.

But so many of us are like I was the day I held that purchase I wanted in my hand. We decide to put it off – make it ours later. I chose to get it later, and later was too late. It was no longer available to me. That's the awful risk you take when you put off Jesus one more day.

Maybe you've been around the message of Jesus a lot. Maybe most folks think you belong to Him. But deep in your heart, you know there's never been a time when you've really committed yourself to Him. It could be you've said, "I will give myself to Jesus when I'm ready."

You need to hear the words of Jesus recorded in John 6:44. "No one can come to me unless the Father...draws him." You don't come to Jesus when you're ready. You come when God's ready. It's God who makes you ready to trust Jesus. If you feel that tug in your heart right now, this is the only time you can be sure God is readying you to come. There are no guarantees of one more opportunity. That's why the Bible says, "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near" (Isaiah 55:6). He may not always be findable. He may not ever be this close again.

If you've never had that "Jesus, I'm yours" moment, would you do that now and get this settled? Eternity is nothing to wait on, procrastinate on. This could be your "Jesus day." Tell Him, "Jesus, I'm yours. What you did on the cross is my only hope of rescue."

Go to our website. There's a pathway there that I've tried to lay out as simply as I could so that you could be sure you belong to Him before you hit the pillow tonight. That website is ANewStory.com.

Saying "later" to God's Son is eternally dangerous, because God says the day of salvation is now. It's almost yours now. But later – later may be forever too late.

It's almost become a gag line; it expresses the attitude of an employee who just wants to meet the bare minimums of their job. You ask them a question, ask them to do some small task; kind of shrugs his shoulders, puts his hands in the air and says, "Not my job!" Well, that can be a lazy response or maybe a wise one in some cases. For example, if you ask me to repair your car, I probably should say, "It's not my job." Or if you ask the local mechanic to take care of your toothache, it would be good if he said, "It's not my job." Or if you ask your dentist to program your computer, it would probably be good for him to say, "It's not my job." See, you really shouldn't be working out of what really isn't your job and you don't know how to do it anyway.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Trying to Do God's Job."

Our word for today from the Word of God is Psalm 84:11, "For the Lord God is a sun and a shield. The Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does He withhold from them whose walk is blameless." Wow, that's a great promise, isn't it? No good thing... Any good thing; anything that's really good for you, He will never withhold if your walk is blameless. And, of course, He's the one who defines what's good for us, because He knows best.

What's interesting about this verse is that it tells you three responsibilities that are not your job. "It's not my job!" Number one it's not your job to provide. It says here, "The Lord bestows favor." God gives you what you need. Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount, "Don't go chasing after food and clothing like the rest of the world does, because your Father knows what you have need of. You seek the kingdom of God and all the things will be taken care of."

You lose a lot of peace worrying about where the dollars are going to come from, the transportation, the resources. Three times in that passage Jesus told us, "Don't worry! Don't worry!" They're going to come from your Jehovah Jireh - the Lord who provides. He will take care of it. Although He expects us to work, ultimately the provision of your needs is not your job, but your God.

Secondly, protecting is not your job. It says, "The Lord is your shield." We waste a lot of effort defending our position, trying to look good, answering criticism from people, trying to protect our spot, fearing injury, fearing disappointment. What are you doing to just try to protect yourself? The Lord is your shield. It's not your job.

Then it's also not your job to promote. It says, "The Lord gives honor to people." Quit trying to get the spotlight for yourself; God exalts people. What are you doing trying to promote yourself? So, what is your job? Well, it says, "He does this for those whose walk is blameless." Your job is your walk. You're supposed to concentrate on cleaning up your walk with God, getting rid of those traits that displease Him and that bring criticism from others. Your job is to focus on spending time with your Lord - treating people as your Lord does, eliminating those stubborn sins that you tolerate rather than eliminate.

God's job is to provide your needs, to protect you from hurt, and to promote you to positions that He chooses. I wonder, have you been trying to do one of His jobs? Why don't you concentrate on your own? Concentrate on the purity of your walk, and God will keep His promise, "No good thing will He withhold from those whose walk is blameless."

My friend Bobby served as a Marine in Vietnam, and he told me something about his experience there that really got my attention. He said his assignment was doing electrical work on airplanes - which is not necessarily a front lines assignment. But there was a war going on all around them. So, when there was enemy activity, every soldier was trained to grab their weapon and be prepared to fight. Their bottom line assignment was summed up in four words, "every Marine - a rifle."

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "No Spectators In This Battle."

Nobody is just support troops. Everybody's needed on the front lines. That's the strategy for the most important battle of all time - the battle for the souls of lost men and women that rages in every generation.

God puts flesh-and-blood on that principle in a story in Numbers 32, beginning with vs. 1. It's our word for today from the Word of God. Here's the story. God has delivered the Jews from slavery in Egypt, led them through the wilderness, and now He's brought them to the banks of the Jordan River, the threshold of their Promised Land. Soon the battle for the land will begin. Even before entering, each of Israel's twelve tribes has been allotted a certain area of the land as their inheritance. That's on the west side of Jordan. On the east side of the Jordan, the Reubenites and Gadites "who had very large herds and flocks saw that the lands of Jazer and Gilead" - that's the lands right there where they are on the east side of the Jordan - "were suitable for livestock." Okay, so these guys who already have their land kind of.

They come to Moses with an idea - a dumb idea. They said the land they were on was "suitable for livestock, and your servants have livestock...let this land be given to your servants as our possession. Do not make us cross the Jordan." Moses' answer cuts like steel: "Shall your countrymen go to war while you sit here?" They said, "How about we just settle down here, skip the battle, and root for you guys out there on the front lines? How does that sound?" Moses basically says: "No way, man. Every Marine a rifle. No watchers here; only warriors." These folks got the message. They said, "We would like to build pens here for our livestock and cities for our women and children." In other words, we'd like to stay here in our comfort zone - "but we are ready to arm ourselves and go ahead...every man armed for battle, will cross over to fight before the Lord." Good choice.

Now, about that battle for a lost and dying world from God's perspective, no one can just watch this battle. Every child of God is supposed to be a warrior in it...including you. You can't just support others who are fighting for lives Jesus died to save. You've got to be fighting for some yourself. You can't delegate Christ's world-reaching Great Commission to a few spiritual daredevils called missionaries or full-time workers. This call is for all of us, wherever we live, whatever we do. You may say, "Well, I don't have the gift to tell others." If you belong to Jesus, you have the assignment! Remember, "we are Christ's ambassadors" (2 Corinthians 5:20).

The truth is you're somebody's best chance of ever going to heaven, because you're the one with Jesus in their heart who is closest to that person at work, in your family, your neighborhood. If you don't tell them, chances are they'll never hear what Jesus did for them.

And your silence will be, in essence, an eternal death sentence for them. You say, "Well, I can't possibly care about or support all the mission needs out there." That's right. But you know what you can do? You can say, "God, go ahead and place a piece of your broken heart for this world in my heart. Help me care about some need that You care about, and let me focus on that one." He'll do that, and you can begin to pray and give and help His soldiers who are fighting for those particular people.

No watchers in the battle for lost hearts, only warriors. Because everyone who belongs to Him, has a place on the front lines.

I remember the time that my son got in real late. And I remember because that really wasn't his usual style. And, of course, I was waiting calmly and patiently for him to get home and, you know, waiting to hear his explanation; except for the hand cuffs and the bright light that I greeted him with. Now, he had good reasons. There were car problems, and there were people who really did have to be dropped off before he was, and, oh yeah, they got lost. It all checked out, but I was still an unhappy father for one important thing that he missed. Can you guess what it is? Uh-huh, "You didn't call!" Every parent knows, and most teenagers learn that you're making a big mistake when you don't call home.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Neglecting to Call Home."

I'm going to read our word for today from the Word of God from 1 Chronicles 14. David is in his unstoppable years; everything he does works, and there are secrets here to being unstoppable. Verse 10 says, "David inquired of God, 'Shall I go and attack the Philistines?' And the Lord answered him, 'Go and I will hand them over to you.'" In verse 14, it says, "David inquired of God again." And in this case he happens to be asking Him about a strategy for defeating the Philistines. You see, David checked with the Lord apparently on everything...well, almost everything.

One day he did a great thing. He had the ark of the covenant moved from the suburbs so to speak, the outer country, to where it would be in the center of things. But it was only to be handled by the Levites. That's the law of God! And they didn't do it God's way and a man died while transporting that ark. Now we read in chapter 15 of 1 Chronicles, "You are the heads of the Levitical families. You and your fellow Levites are to consecrate yourselves and bring up the ark of the Lord to the place I have prepared for it. It was because you, the Levites, did not bring it up the first time that the Lord our God broke out in anger against us." Now listen to this. "We did not inquire of Him about how to do it in the prescribed way."

In other words, David is saying, "We messed up because we didn't call our Father; we didn't check to see how God wanted this done." Our tendency is to pray about something, and then check in, same time, same station maybe tomorrow. Or pray when we're losing the battle. Can we learn a lesson from David when he was in his unstoppable years? Pray first about which battles to fight. Not every battle is one God wants you to be involved in. Get His orders before you get involved.

Then ask the Lord about how to fight the battle. Pray until you start to feel His plan for that battle unfolding. The ark incident teaches us that you can do a good thing in a way God doesn't want it done. Good thing, wrong way, and it won't work.

Too often, this guy's got to confess to you, I will pray about something in the morning, and then I'll put myself on cruise control and just kind of go ahead and not check in again until I hit a crisis. I'm a victim of my own momentum. Our Father expects us to check with Him frequently, regularly, all through the day, before a call, before an email, before a text, before a signature, before we drive, before we park, before we make a decision about where we're going to go next. "What do You want me to do, Lord?" "How do You want me to do it?"

You can be unstoppable if you move through all your day's choices in consultation with your Heavenly Father. Like earthly kids, we tend to get in a mess, and then come into the Father's presence with our head hanging. And our Father says, "You didn't call."

I was learning to ride a bicycle, and my dad was my teacher. Across the street from our apartment was a schoolyard as big as a city block. Like most city schoolyards, it was all concrete, no grass. In the middle of that big expanse was the only obstacle for a bike-riding rookie - a big old metal flagpole. But how could anyone run into that when he had the whole schoolyard to learn in, right? It can be done. Yeah, there I was, wobbling along, trying to learn to keep my balance on two wheels with my dad just behind me. Suddenly I heard him saying, "Turn, boy." My hands were frozen to the handlebars. I was sure turning either way meant crashing on that hard concrete. Again, "Turn, son!" I was closing in on the flagpole. Now it was a desperate cry from the lips of a disbelieving father, "Turn or you're going to hit the pole!" Bonngggg! I hit the pole. I still have the chipped tooth to prove it.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Missing the Turn that Saves Your Life."

I made a painful mistake. I didn't make the turn that could have saved me. You know, there are lots of people like that. There's a turn that God is telling them to make; a turn that could save them from a life without meaning and an eternity without hope. But they just won't turn.

You may know a lot about a lot of things, but there's nothing more important in all the world than to understand the turn that will keep you from God's punishment and take you to God's heaven. It's described in many places in the Bible, including Acts 3:19, our word for today from the Word of God. It says, "Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord."

Here's why this is so life-or-death important. The sin that verse talks about will keep us from ever experiencing God's peace and God's love in this life and from ever entering His heaven when we die. A perfect God cannot have a relationship with an unforgiven sinner. But what we just read from God's Word talks about every sin you've ever committed being erased from God's book forever! Which means the only thing standing between you and God - between you and heaven - could be gone if you make the turn.

Obviously, the turn is a turn to God. And the way to Him is through His Son, who died to make that way. In God's own words, Jesus "bore our sins in His own body on the tree, so that we might die to sins" (1 Peter 2:24). The gift of eternal life is in the nail-scarred hands of Jesus, the One who purchased that life by giving up His own life for you. But here's the part that some people miss. When you turn to Jesus, you're turning your back on something else. You're turning your back on the junk that killed Him. You're making a decision that you're going to abandon the sins of the past that were the very sins He died to get rid of.

That's what the "repent" part of turning to God is all about - turning your back on your sins to turn to Jesus as your Savior. You won't be instantly perfect, but you're deciding to let Jesus change you. It's His power that will change you, but your decision that you will change.

Look, you can't face east and west at the same time. You've got to turn away from one to face the other. So it is with Jesus and the sin He died for. But then, why would you want to continue to defy God and poison your life with the sin that ultimately always kills? We're talking a new you here, from the inside out! A new you that begins the moment you say, "Jesus, I'm Yours!" God's come to you today to offer you complete forgiveness and life forever. Don't miss this opportunity.

In fact, that new you is what our website's all about. It's called ANewStory.com. Will you go check that out today?

Without Christ in your heart, you're heading for a collision with God and an eternity you don't want. But hey, listen, today there's still time to turn.

I think my son was about four the first time we played baseball together, and I taught him with a plastic Wiffle bat and Wiffle ball. I remember telling him rule number one of baseball even then, and really of other sports too. I said, "Now, son, keep your eye on the ball." Well, I've told him that lots of times over his growing up years, and it wasn't always about baseball. Whenever he's had trouble with his hitting, which has improved, it usually was because he wasn't watching where he should be.

Now, of course, he's a grown man with a family of his own. We recently went outside with a ball and bat. He threw and I attempted to hit the ball. You can probably guess what's coming. I wasn't connecting. So he gave me a little advice, "Hey, Dad, keep your eye on the ball!" The tables have turned.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Your Eyes - Where Sin Begins."

Our word for today from the Word of God comes from Matthew 6:22-23. Jesus is talking about the importance of our eyes in following Him and what we should be keeping our eyes on and off of. It's a lesson in how not to strike out spiritually. Listen to His words: "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness."

Now, Jesus here is not talking about your need for an optometrist or getting stronger glasses. He's talking about the fact that your eyes are the point of entry for everything you think about, and what you think about is what turns out to be the beginning point of the actions you commit. So your eyes gather input that is sent to your brain and stored there, and then as the Bible says, "As a man thinks in his heart so is he." But it all begins at eye level.

Do you remember what Jesus had just said in the previous chapter, Matthew 5:28? He said, "I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." There are the eyes again. The place you have to stop sexual sin is at eye level. It's like baseball. If your eye is on the right thing, you'll be okay. If your eye is looking at the wrong thing, you're going to fail. No Christians have ever had to live with the bombardment of sexual images that we get daily. Nobody's ever had the media we have, and we get so much we're almost numb to it.

See, a fundamental discipline of a Jesus follower has to be training your eyes. It's a firm resolve that you just won't look at what is suggested. When a billboard appears with a provocative picture, you just commit yourself to instantly look the other way; you don't even consider what you'll do. When a magazine ad, or a TV channel, an Internet website; maybe you're jumping around and you're looking at all kinds of channels or websites and suddenly there's this sexually attractive image in front of you. You could linger. But no, you can't afford to do that. You move on quickly.

Training your eyes is as practical as simply not allowing your eyes to wander beyond the face of the opposite sex or just turning away. There's a powerful temptation isn't there to linger, to fanaticize, to kind of work it over in your mind, to let your eyes sin? You say, "Well, I didn't do anything." And yet the Bible says that if it's gotten to your eyes, then through them you are full of darkness. That's what Jesus taught us.

Every time you linger on a sexually tempting image, you send ammunition to your enemy - ammunition you can be guaranteed he will use to defeat you spiritually. So you've got to avoid spiritual strike outs, and that begins with training your eyes.

Our sons worked for many years on a Native American reservation. And it was one of the few places on that dark reservation. Dark because so few people had been reached for Christ and so few had any Christmas decorations up. But I was always impressed with that one village church where they had a lot of lights outlining all their church buildings, and there was a cross covered with lights on top of the church's steeple. It was pretty impressive. One Christmas I had a chance to visit there and I got to see the lights of the church and that cross. And, man, the cross really stands out against the darkness. And I met Rose. She's a Native woman who attends that church. Those lights are an important part of her story actually. She said, "I have struggled with alcohol for many years. And one night, during the Christmas season, I hit bottom. I was in the pit. I wandered outside and there it was – the cross all lit up in front of me. I came to where the cross was," she said, "and with the help of the pastor's wife, I finally found hope that night."

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Light in Your Dark Night."

As that Native woman discovered that night when it was especially dark for her, the shape of hope is the cross of Jesus. For her, and maybe for you right now.

In our word for today from the Word of God in Ephesians 2:12, the Bible describes in eight little words how so many people feel. It talks about being (here we go!) "without hope and without God in the world." "Without hope" describes the feeling that things are always going to be like they've always been, I'm never going to change, my life is never going to change, I'll always come up empty, I'll always come up lonely, I'm always going to come up confused, I'm always going to come up feeling worthless. The habits, the failures, the weaknesses that have always brought me down, they're always going to bring me down. Rose, the woman I met at that reservation church, said it was like being "in the pit."

And the Bible suggests that the ultimate reason we are "without hope" is because we are "without God." That doesn't mean you don't believe in God or even know a lot about God. It means you don't have the personal love relationship with God that you were made for. We're without God because we've chosen to turn our backs on Him and run our own lives instead of letting Him run them. So the One who has all the meaning, all the love, and all the answers we've looked for our whole life is on the other side of a wall, and that wall is called sin.

Thankfully, this "without hope" statement in the Bible is followed by that hopeful word "but." "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near." Wow! Now, how does that happen? "Through the blood of Christ" it says. So we find ourselves at the same place Rose found herself that night she found hope - at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ. Why is this shedding of His blood on the cross so important? Because, as the Bible says, "Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness" (Hebrews 9:22). Sin has a death penalty, and a death penalty can only be paid by someone dying. And Jesus did so you don't have to.

When you put your total trust in Jesus to be your personal Savior from your personal sin, you're forgiven of every sin. You're guaranteed heaven when you die. You receive His power to change what you've never been able to change. It doesn't have to be the way it's always been. Hope is born when you follow the light of God to the cross of Jesus.

And that's where He's leading you this very day. It's what our website's all about, and that's why I want to ask you to go there. Let this be your hope destination today - ANewStory.com.

Hope is in the shape of a cross. And hope is born for you when you come to that cross and you say these two words that change everything, "For me. It was for me."

I used to tell our kids, "You don't have to go to a party. Carry the party inside you wherever you go!" Our five-year-old grandson never heard that, but I think he got the idea. He could find a way to enjoy himself in just about any situation, with friends or alone, with his toys, or better yet as far as he was concerned, with just like the everyday stuff he found. I remember he and I were in my study, a few rooms away from the living room where his three-year-old brother and his Mommy were. Little brother decided to check out what big brother and I were doing, and big brother had an idea. His brother could be a messenger. So our five-year-old started writing little messages to his mother, which he then rolled up and dispatched his little brother to deliver. Mommy got the idea, and so she would write back an answer to every message. The shuttle went back and forth three times, I think. Big brother then wrote another message, but this time the messenger didn't show up. He had clocked out. So the message never got delivered.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Life-Saving Messengers."

Jesus has a message that He wants delivered to some people you know - some people you see all the time. The price of His message not getting through to them could be an awful eternity. He's counting on you to be the messenger.

He makes that clear in our word for today from the Word of God in 2 Corinthians 5:19-20, where the Bible says, "We are Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God." If you belong to Jesus Christ, you are His ambassador to the place where you live, the place where you work, the place you go to school, the place you "recreate," the place you shop.

When the President appoints an ambassador to a particular country, he's counting on his ambassador to deliver his messages, right? The things that he wants communicated. Whether you realize it or not, you've been assigned by the highest authority in the universe, by Jesus himself, to deliver His message to the folks around you. And that message is life-or-death information. But as our grandson found out with his little brother, when the messenger dies, the message dies. And in the case of Jesus' message about His death for our sins, people you know may die if you don't deliver it.

That's the awful picture of messenger failure in Ezekiel 33:7. It says, "I have made you a watchman...give them warning from Me...When I say to the wicked" - today that's anyone who has not had their sin forgiven by giving themselves to Jesus, and you know people like that - "When I say to the wicked you will surely die,' and you do not speak to warn him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood." Blood on our hands because of the silence of our lips. Don't let that happen to you. Don't let that happen to the people God's counting on you to tell about His Son. Whatever fear of what might happen if you told them about Jesus, could it possibly be as fearful as what will happen if you don't tell them?

Jack Phillips was the radioman for the Titanic. Two hours before the Titanic's fatal collision with an iceberg, Phillips got this radio message from another ship, describing the coordinates of the exact ice field that later doomed the Titanic. But instead of delivering that information to the captain, he stuck it on a spindle to deliver it later. That mistake cost him his life and the lives of 1,500 passengers that night. All because the life-or-death message he had was never delivered.

Don't make that mistake with the message Jesus has given to you to be delivered. Don't let your delay cost them heaven. His message is in your hands.

A friend of ours is an avid hunter. In fact, so much that he's been known to skip church occasionally during duck hunting season. He's well known in the church, so the pastor notices when he's not there. With a twinkle in his eye, our friend explained recently how he's prepared to handle pastoral questions like, "Where were you on Sunday?" He said he's actually named his duck blinds where he hides to hunt those birds. One he has named "The Word." The other is named "Prayer." So when the pastor asks where he was on Sunday, he simply answers, "I was in 'The Word,'" or, "I was in 'Prayer.'" That's messed up!

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Knowing the Words, Knowing the Lord."

Obviously, this is a hunter who understands the value of camouflage, as in the value of hiding behind some wonderful spiritual words. While his words are meant to be more whimsical than deceptive, they illustrate a deeper and more dangerous issue that is rampant among us church folks. We know how to use all the right Christian words and have just the right Christian look. We put it on every time we walk in the church door, but often it's camouflage that's covering up some issues in our life that aren't Christian at all.

Jesus put it this way in Mark 7:6, our word for today from the Word of God: "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." You can say all the good, God-honoring things and still underneath have a heart that is far from Him. A life that has, beneath all that spiritual camouflage, some attitudes or actions that have no place in a child of God, someone who's been rescued at the price of the blood of God's Son.

We forget that God doesn't look at the "outward appearance" but "at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). In other words, the only One who really matters is not fooled by our Christian words. Your whole relationship with Him, His blessing on your life, is all about the condition of your heart.

Could it be that you've been hiding some serious un-repented sin under the camouflage of those beautiful spiritual words? You can be talking about prayer and Bible study in the morning and swimming in the cesspool of Internet pornography at night. Your Christian words can mask all kinds of hidden bitterness, lust and deception, or a compartmentalized life that's all about Jesus in the God-compartment, but all about you at work, at school, or at home.

You can even try to put Christian words on things that are anything but Christian. You can call it conviction, God calls it stubbornness; you call it compassion, God calls it compromise; you call it love, God calls it immorality or adultery. Isn't it time you looked in the mirror and maybe saw the hypocrite behind the beautiful words? There's freedom, there's forgiveness and there's integrity waiting for you at the cross of Jesus Christ, where you need to bring all the sin that's been hiding behind all that spirituality.

One of the greatest dangers of being in a Christian environment is that you can know the words and never know the Lord. You can have a religion that's all about Jesus and never have Jesus. Jesus said there will be people like that on Judgment Day to whom He will say, "I never knew you."

Could it be you've got Christianity but you don't have Christ? You've mistaken agreeing with Jesus for being committed to Jesus, and that mistake will cost you heaven. But today Jesus brought us together so you can experience what it is to know Him for real. Make this the day you say, "Lord, all this time I've missed You. But I want You in my heart, not just in my head. I'm Yours."

Listen, our website is set up as a place where you can go and actually make sure you belong to Him. Would you go there? It's ANewStory.com.

It isn't the rhetoric of Jesus that matters; it's the reality of Jesus. So come to Him today as you really are. There's so much you've been missing. You can have it today.

Every once in a while the monotony of driving the Interstate is broken by some interesting signs. Sometimes I'll see one and my mind will get going, and it will process what I saw and I'll think about it for several minutes. I remember one in particular. There was a big, old truck speeding down the Interstate and it had in bold letters this sign: "Guaranteed Destruction of Confidential Files and Records." Well, that got me going! There was also a phone number. I didn't write it down; I didn't actually have any need for their services. But there was a number to call if you wanted all your confidential things destroyed. I thought about who might want a service such as that. I brainstormed some intriguing reasons and some intriguing people who might want to call that number. Guaranteed destruction! Actually, there's another sign that interests us even more.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Guaranteed Disclosure."

Our word for today from the Word of God comes from 1 Corinthians 4, and I'll begin reading at verse 4. Paul says, "My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness, and He will expose the motives of men's hearts. At that time, each will receive his praise from God."

This phrase that brings to light the hidden things and exposing the motive of men's hearts in the original Greek has the thought of turning something inside out; opening all the closets, showing what no one else has seen before. In other words, God is going to expose every secret. Now, there might be some who think they've destroyed all the evidence. The fellow driving that truck, he had that sign that said, "Will destroy your confidential files and records."

Did you know that no matter who destroys them on earth, God still has His copy? He knows every detail of every one of your financial dealings, every financial transaction, and every business transaction. He knows the letters you have written that you want no one else to see. He knows your motives, your websites. He's recorded every idle word, every angry word, and every dirty word. We think we got away with it because no one else knew. If God knows, you're caught, and He does. And so will everyone else one day.

That's why the Apostle John says, "Walk in the light as He is in the light." It's so freeing to be able to live saying, "I've got nothing to hide." Live without sinful secrets. You don't have to worry then if the closets come open. There's nothing there to hide. Live lives that are relaxed and confident, because you've got no fear of discovery; you don't have to keep looking over your shoulder. When you're living within the limits, you don't have to keep looking in the rearview mirror to see if the law enforcement is coming over the hill.

Again, some of the most liberating words in the world; look in the mirror, "Nothing to hide." Isn't that awesome?

God's sign says: "Guaranteed Disclosure of Confidential Files and Records." So, live the kind of life that isn't afraid of everybody knowing, because they will.