God’s Voice Was Loud and Clear!
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2, 4:17)
Scripture records two people who uttered those words: John the Baptist in Matthew 3 and Jesus in Matthew 4. But I heard someone else say it 21 years ago, and it changed my life forever.
I was deep in despair. The consequences of some very bad choices had brought me to a new low in my life. Suicide seemed like the only way out for me. So, there I leaned against the rail on a wooden deck outside my friend’s home along an old country road when I heard, “Repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
“What did I just hear?” I thought. “Was I having a nervous breakdown?” That voice was not in my mind. It came from the woods just thirty or forty yards away!
Again I heard it: “Repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
I was frightened because I knew I had not imagined that voice. I heard it! It was as audible and clear as if my friend next to me was speaking to me. What’s more frightening is she heard it, too!
That was on a Friday night. My friend told me after hearing that voice that she thought I was demon oppressed. I thought she was crazy. “Demon oppressed?” “What in the world did she mean by that?”
The next day, we drove by a church on our way to lunch and a church marquee read: “The Lord will deliver those who are demon oppressed.” I was startled.
I now realize that Friday night was the beginning of my journey to salvation, which we call “conviction”. But it was that Saturday, and the words on that marquee that really got my attention. “What else does the Lord have to do to get your attention?” my friend asked me.
I struggled with my decision for another day before I gave my life to the Lord. Interesting, isn’t it? Jesus gave his life on a Friday and rose three days later on Sunday. I wouldn’t give my life on a Friday, but struggled with it for three days before deciding on Sunday to trade in my old life in for a new one.
But where did that voice come from? I KNEW I heard it. It was not imagined. I later learned that two teen-aged boys went to their pastor at a small country church nearby and told him the Lord had instructed them to put a speaker in the back of a pickup truck and ride down that lone country road repeating, “Repent, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” They told the pastor, “There is someone out there preacher who needs to hear that voice!”
Perhaps more miraculous is the fact that the pastor believed those teen agers and instructed one of his adult members to drive them around while they sat in the back of truck proclaiming what both John the Baptist and Jesus said over 2,000 years ago. Those words are as true today as they were then!
Thank God that pastor believed what those two young boys told him they heard and thank God I listened. My life has never been – and never will be – the same again!
God’s Last Name Is Not Damn!
“He who would love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips from speaking deceit.” (1 Peter 3:10)
When I was a child, my dad hired a housekeeper who would pay me to cuss her out. Can you believe it? It just tickled her to death to hear a child “cuss like a sailor”.
I continued to cuss like a sailor all the way to adulthood. The truth is it became such a natural part of my lifestyle that I actually had to think about when not to use profanity.
But that all changed when I met Jesus. In fact, one of the most visible signs of the change in me was that I didn’t try to stop using profanity. It just supernaturally happened from one moment to the next.
God not only cleansed my tongue, he also cleansed my heart. Today, I can’t stand to hear anyone use profanity, including me. That’s right, I said me. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve been known to let a word slip out when I get angry and forget the one to whom I belong. I’m not perfect. But when I hear it, I get a check from my Spirit immediately.
That check from the Spirit is important to me because it’s a continuing reminder of God’s presence in my life. The Apostle Paul tells us at 1 Corinthians 3:16 that when we become Christians, God’s Spirit lives in us so that we can have guidance in all that we do. But he later warns us at Ephesians 4:30 that we should never “grieve” that Spirit by using offensive language. In other words, that caution light that goes off in me whenever I hear or use profanity is a supernatural experience. God is speaking to me and he isn’t pleased with what he just heard. I think that’s a signal that every Christian should sense when he or she is within earshot of profanity.
In spite of all my shortcomings, I can’t remember using the Lord’s name in vain since I came to know Jesus, but I do remember how God feels about it. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.” (Exodus 20:7)
When you think about it, that verse makes an awful lot of sense. If we are brought in this world to show God’s glory in our lives, then we have no right to associate him with the failures that show up.
Billy Graham tells a story about traveling on a plane next to a salesman. Mr. Graham asked him, “Are you paid anything for all the swearing you do?” “No,” was the startled reply. “I do it for nothing.”
“Nothing,” cried out Graham. “You work cheap! You throw aside your character as a gentleman, inflict pain on your friends, break the Lord’s commandments, and endanger your own soul–all for nothing!
God’s Mercy And Grace Are New Every Morning
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
There were times when the Apostle Paul must have looked at himself in the mirror and wondered what in the world had happened to him. He knew that salvation from the inside is much more difficult to understand than it is from the outside. When Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth that “old things have passed away” and “all things have become new,” he had come full circle in the realization that he was no longer the man he once knew himself to be. That’s why he once urged us to move beyond our past, “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead.” (Philippians 3:13)
Paul also understood that our spiritual walk is a journey, one that is fraught with disappointment and failure as much as it is with success and victory. The truth is it doesn’t matter how long we have been saved, we will always have those days when we come home and wish we could take back something we said or did.
There is a wonderful passage in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome that has always been a source of comfort to me, especially when I have had one of those days when I didn’t feel that I acted or very much resembled the Christian I claim to be. In fact, I believe Paul had one of those days when he sat down and wrote, “It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love to do God’s will so far as my new nature is concerned; but there is something else deep within me, in my lower nature, that is at war with my mind and wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. In my mind I want to be God’s willing servant, but instead I find myself still enslaved to sin. So you see how it is: my new life tells me to do right, but the old nature that is still inside me loves to sin.” (Romans 7:21-25, TLB)
The comfort I get from that passage is not just in what the Apostle Paul said; it’s also in the fact that he wrote it twenty-four years after he was saved. In other words, while we all mature as Christians, all of us will inevitably stumble along the way, saying and doing things that are not consistent with the new life we claim to have.
As Christians, we must remember that we will never measure up to God’s standards, at least not every day. That is exactly why Christ was given to us, as a propitiation for our sins. In other words, salvation is not just about forgiving sin in our lives. That’s only one side of the coin. It’s God’s mercy and grace that convinces us to get back up the next day and try to live it differently.
Huckabee, Palin and God’s Will For America
In the face of a clemency scandal, Mike Huckabee’s prospects in the 2012 presidential election are quickly fading. Sarah Palin appears to be a likely beneficiary. Indeed, some analysts suggest she is posed to become the new figurehead of the Religious Right even as Tea Partiers and the Religious Right are allying to push the Republican Party into embracing an ideological purity test.
Could Palin become the next James Dobson or Jerry Falwell? An October 16, 2005 worship service at her home church in Alaska, the Wasilla Assemblies of God, offers insight into this question.
During the worship service, Pentecostal pastor Thomas Muthee (the man who ran a woman out of her hometown because Muthee claimed she was supernaturally causing car crashes) christened Palin as America’s savior, with the approval of Palin’s congregation and Palin herself.
Muthee declared that God had called Palin as His instrument for transforming American society, bringing God and the 10 Commandments back into public schools, combating the forces of witchcraft, and abolishing the separation of church and state.
See the video for yourself. Is this the future that the Religious Right envisions for America?
