Spirit of Truth/The Bible on Trial

What do corn husks, nut shells, avocado and banana peels, egg shells, chalf from wheat (et al) all have in common? All of these things are packaging material that protects what is inside from harm as it grows, until that plant has matured, and is ready for harvest, when that packaging is removed and what is now out in the open can be eaten. Yes, most of this packaging has alternative uses, yet none of those uses include direct nutrition to the body. You shuck the corn, crack the nut, peel the banana, and break the egg to get what is inside out. Then you discard that 'packaging' and use what is inside for it's intended purpose. All of these things come with instructions; 'Discard after use'! Jesus taught in parables, and many theologians and religious teachers (both in Jesus' time and today) believe that parables are just good spiritual stories that can help a person come closer to Jesus and to God, but have no significant meaning other than that. Contrary to this popular sentiment the parables of Jesus are identical to husks, nuts, peels, chalf, and shells in that they protect the truth that is contained therein, but to get to that truth you must first open the parable and dig out what is inside. This is why Jesus taught His disciples: "To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted; Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." (Matt. 13:11,13) The Parables of Jesus also come with the instruction 'Discard after use', because it is not the parable itself that IS truth, it is what is inside that brings the knowledge and understanding of truth; and "Few there are that find it". Open your heart/intellect to this truth and see what God has in store for you.

November 17, 2017 What do you do when you don't know what to do? Let's imagine that you have been asked to cook a turkey for the family Thanksgiving dinner, but you have never cooked a turkey in your life, and you don't know the first thing about how to do it so that the result doesn't end up giving everyone food poisoning, or killing someone. What do you do? Do you set off on your own, go to Google or the Foster Farm web site and just follow their directions, or do you ask someone that has experience in preparing a turkey to show you how to do it, so you can do it yourself? What many people believe about Christianity and salvation is that Jesus came to earth to "cook the turkey for you, so you don't have to do it yourself". Jesus told Pilate, "For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice." (John 18:37) If Jesus had come to earth to accomplish salvation for "everyone that believes" then what would have been the point of Him testifying to anything, and especially about the Truth? All he would have needed to do would have been to "die for the sins of the world", and that would have been that; certainly teaching people to accomplish what He said that He came to do (that is, testify to the truth themselves) would have been wholly unnecessary for their own salvation. Jesus came to earth to teach us the truth about salvation so that we could accomplish the same thing that He accomplished, that is, righteousness. Righteousness is accomplished by learning and living the words that Jesus brought to this earth from His Father. And when we learn to be obedient to those words just as was Jesus THEN we become righteous just as He is righteous, and THEN His sacrifice can apply to our lives, giving us the same eternal life that He has in Himself. Simple!

Join us today for an exciting study. Truth is the most important commidity in the Universe, and cannot be bought with gold or silver. Truth is freely given only to those that are humble in heart, and that have a mind that is capable of receiving it. This program is for the purpose of developing the mind set that allow a person to download the truth from God through the Holy Spirit.

Imagine that you have been accused of doing something vile that you didn't do. This in itself is hard to imagine. Now imagine that this act was suppose to have been done twenty, thirty or forty years ago, and there is now simply no way to refute the accusation. So what do you do? If the accusation were true, and today you were honest of heart, and "no lie was found" in your mouth, the response would be simple; you would admit to the fault, accomplish restitution (if that were still possible), appologize to the injured party, and get on with your life. But WHAT IF you didn't do it? What if this accusation was a tool of the enemy to discredit you, and/or the message you were speaking, such that the accusation itself would require a response? You would not be alone in facing this kind of dilema, because Jesus faced this same situation a number of times in His ministry while here on earth.  His enemies set verbal traps for Him at various times to try to discredit Him in order to make the people stop listening to Him. They asked Him questions such as, "By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?" (Matt. 21:23) He was accused of sedition by the Chief priests and the scribes while in front of Pilate, and yet against their accusations He said nothing (Matt. 27:12). He chose not to defend Himself against these accusations of His enemies because His mission was to teach the truth, and not to waste time on distractions. He simply had nothing to hide; He was blameless before God. We too can and must become blameless before God by learning and practicing the truth, such that we can not be distracted from our purpose in this world, which is to do exactly the same thing Jesus did in the face of the enemy which is to use the words of Jesus to teach others the Way, the Truth and the Life that leads to salvation.

It is amazing who you can meet at the local hardware store. In working a the local hardware store I have met personal friends that have stopped by to pick up nuts and bolts, or a neck for a shower nozzel, and I have, for the most part, met total strangers that need to find everything from batteries to trash cans, to services such has having a key made, or getting a gallon of paint color matched and mixed. You meet all types of people at the hardware store. Each one of them has a story that now includes me, as I walk up to them and greet them with a cheerful "How may I be of service to you today"? Everyone is looking for something, and many don't even know what it is that they need, except that they know that if they come to THIS store they will most likely find the answers. In many cases the answers include a surprise or two, that ends with them saying something like, "I didn't really think you would have what I was looking for, but here it is." Everyone that comes into my store is seeking the truth about what will solve their hardward problem, and hopefully, if I do my job, they will, even if I have to send them somewhere else to find it. All of us are seeking the truth in one form or another as we move through this life, be it from the hardware store or from life itself. If the answers to that you seek relate to eternal life those answers CAN be found, IF you know where to look. But to find THOSE answers you must look in places where you might not believe those answers lay. Knowing where to look can make all the difference in whether you finde eternal life or eternal death. If you seek those answers through the words and teaching of Jesus Christ the Son of God, as told to His own eyewitness disciples, then you WILL FIND THE TRUTH, and that truth will lead you to the eternal life you seek.

When you 'Know the Truth, the Truth will set you free". Free from what? Jesus often told His disciples to "Fear Not, for I am with you". So how can we not not live in fear? By KNOWING and LIVING the Truth. And how can we KNOW the truth? By listening ONLY to the words of God in the Old Testament, and the words of Jesus that He gave to his own eyewitness discples that were with Him while He was here on earth.

I just put my famous banana nut bread into the oven to bake. And yes, it is famous, at least to some people. When I admitted to my lovely and gracious wife what I had just done her eyes lit up and she smiled and made yummy noises (as opposed to my admitting other things, such as forgetting to get something for her at the store, and getting a decidedly different response). And no, I am not going to use this as a metaphor for repentance; that would be too obvious. I am going to use the idea of the recipe. My family and friends (who will be enjoying my banana bread with me a little later) consider me to be a good baker and chef. As such, I have a recipe file in which I keep several hundreds of personally tested recipes that I use as the basis for my food preparations. I KNOW these recipies work, and work perfectly every time I need them; just like my banana bread recipe. Every once in a while I change the recipe just a little to supply a little bit of difference to see if that difference could become the norm. Sometimes if works, and sometimes it is a disaster. But I NEVER go away from what I KNOW works, that will make the result a joyful experience for my family and friends. God has a recipe for salvation (and there is the spiritual metaphor), and that recipe works PERFECTLY everytime in bringing people that love the truth TO the TRUTH. Other chefs have tried to change that recipe by changing the words that Jesus spoke to fit their idea of what the recipe should be; and this ALWAYS ends in disaster for the person that changes the recipe and for those that eat it. Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God; the one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son. 2John 9.

Psa 51:10  Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Mat 24:48  But if that evil servant should say in his heart, ‘My lord is delaying his coming,’ These are two examples of the use of the word HEART in Scripture. Yesterday Rick equated the word 'heart' with the concept of 'intellect', and intellect is substantially different from intelligence. If you substitute 'intellect' for the word 'heart' in the above verses you begin to get the idea about how important the intellect is to how we must view salvation. It takes little intellect to believe 'salvation by grace though faith', because this concept require little cognitive thought to process; all it requires is a strong sense of faith that allows you to believe a lie as if it is the truth.  The 'heart' of the matter is that if we are to become righteous as is Jesus ("Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect") then we must combine knowledge with understanding which creates wisdom. THIS is the intellect! ONLY the wise will understand! Many will purify themselves, and make themselves white, and be refined; but the wicked will do wickedly; and none of the wicked will understand; but those who are wise will understand. Dan. 12:10.

On Thrursday the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Chicago Cubs by a score of 11 to 1. This score included 3 home runs by Enrique Hernandez that netted 7 RBI's, and tied the NL record for the largest number of home runs in a single game of the NLCS. To say that the team was ecstatic would be an understatement. But how would the Dodgers have felt if the Commissioner of Baseball had come to them before the NLCS even began and told them that they had won the 7 game series without playing a single game due to an obscure rule that said that under certain conditions the Commissioner could 'declare' a winner by fiat, simply making a statement of faith that the Dodgers would (in his opinion) have won anyway, so why play the game. Do you think the Dodgers or the sponsors would have been 'ecstatic' if this happened? I personally think that the team would have filed a protest with the league to let them play and EARN the right to go to the World Series on their own. Most everyone that is involved in sports wants to win because they proved that they were better than the 'other guy'. Why then are people that declare themselves to be Christian happy to accept 'salvation by grace through faith' that essentially does the same thing; taking the joy of overcoming out of the act of winning! Yet this is EXACTLY what the Apostle Paul says happened when Jesus 'died on the cross to save us from and in our sins'. Jesus does not reward someone for overcoming simply because they think (have been told) that He has overcome for them, so they do not have to overcome for themselves. When you read the words of Jesus that He gave to His own eyewitness disciples you find that we must 'overcome as He overcame'. In order to 'be like Jesus' we must BE like Jesus, that is, righteous and holy because we overcame as did he.

Mat 16:26  "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? The tragedy of the fires on the West Coast are awful, but especially those in the Sonoma and Santa Rosa areas of Northern California. The New York Times today has an online head line that reads "In California, Fires So Fast Hesitation Proved Lethal". "One man delayed his escape from the towering flames in hopes of saving his new truck, but couldn't find the keys. An elderly couple slept as danger erupted, not waking until it was too late to flee down their one-lane road. Another couple, who barely missed their chance to drive away, huddled in a pool, surrounded by fire and choking smoke: he survived, but she did not". (Quoted from the story.) A truck, sleep, and a house, were so important to these people that they died because of these 'things'.  There is an example of 'leaving too late' in the parable/prophecy of Jesus in Matthew 25:1-13, where Jesus describes a group of people that did not bring extra oil with them so they could find the way to the marriage feast because it was pitch dark. They had to go to find some more oil because their lamps were going out, and thus were late to the feast and the door was shut. They were so encumbered with their 'property' (what they believed) that they did not learn the truth in time to "save their souls". They actually found the 'light', when they got to the door the KNEW why it was shut against them. Don't let the love of these 'things' keep you from the Kingdom of God.