Faith or Going Your Own Way?

 

Monday, February 29, 2016

 Paul wrote the following words to his spiritually adopted son, Timothy: “But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.  For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious, gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power.  Avoid such men as these” (2 Timothy3:1-5).

 Hey Gang:  Scripture tells us that in the last days man will believe Satan’s lie ”that God knows when you eat from the forbidden fruit your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil” (Genisus:5).  When I listen to the rhetoric of our political leaders I see how effective Satan has been in my lifetime in spreading this vomit.

 There is a tremendous divide in our nation and world where two roads split- one the believers path and the other Satan’s bangles and beads road. These grow farther apart by the hour.  A tremendous chasm is growing wider and deeper as more and more people say, ‘No Lord, I do not want any part of you’.  The sheep are becoming more defined from the goats, the wheat from the tares and the saved from the unsaved.

 Should we be surprised with the rapid increase in lawlessness in these last days?  I think not if you are into the Word of God, Jesus warned us that, what is happening is precisely what is going to happen just prior to His coming for His children:  “…just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man’.  He also said, “as happened in the days of Lot” and we know what happened to Sodom.  (Luke 17:26/ 28)

 I think about Noah a lot these days.   I have done some wood working in my 82 years.  I love to make wood toys just to see the little ones eyes light up when I give them to them.  I have a table saw, a jig saw, sander, drills and all the other electronic gadgets that are needed to get the job done.  But, when I read the dimensions of the ark and realize Noah did not go down to Home Depot or Lowes and buy the precut wood, I am amazed.  He started by cutting a tree down and taken his hammers and chisels and shaped every piece and every piece had to be perfect.   

 How sad he must have been, for the closer he came to the completion of the ark, the closer he knew, God’s judgment would fall on that sinful generation.   I believe with every peg that Noah drove into a board he prayed, Father forgive them, they do not know what they are doing. 

 As I listened to the morning news my heart was heavy because I believe God is crying out to this once great and proud nation to “understand what we are doing?”  We were the recipients of a thunder-snow  blizzard last night that took down some of the electric lines and left us in the dark.  I had never heard the term thunder-snow blizzard before.  But I learned what it meant when it was blowing so hard I could not see a hundred feet and with it came the music of thunder.

 We are certainly into a time of new records in just about everything, Last summer we had record fires in the west, record floods in the south, record tornadoes in the mid-New records in the west.  It was a good time to reside in Michigan.  Other new records as well: We just passed a new record high in our national debt: we now owe the world more than nineteen trillion dollars and the number increases by the second.

 These are but a smidgeon of the catastrophic things that are happening in the good old USA.   Let me ask you a question this morning?  If God’s patience runs out, and I surely believe there are enough signs that it is, do you think, if He sent a major catastrophic event into our country that the average Joe on the street would get the correlation between the event and God’s wrath? 

 Do you think many Pastors in our land would recognize God’s hand in the catastrophe and suddenly begin to preach repentance from their pulpits?  Are you up to speed in your relationship with Abba Father? If, and when, a catastrophe would hit our nation, are you are prepared?

 God said: “I AM”.  Is He YOUR  I AM. Research His Names that describe His I AM qualities.

 Blessings, Gramps