One day you make an unexpected friend of a previous enemy. It’s happened to everyone of us.
When will we learn? When will we stop pre-judging? When will we give room for the hope of God in others? When will we forgive past deeds so that life can come?
From where comes your next unexpected friend? Life never comes to us as we expect it to be painted. Yet, when will we learn what we already know?
Be wise in Christ toward evil, but do not close the door to hope.
During an exquisite time of visitation from God this morning, I fell upon something that gave me the child’s belly laugh for a while. Though I tried to sober up and stop chuckling, it kept coming back. Much like a living cartoon from the Far Side.
Today’s times are not what they were in the day of Abraham. Such visitations from God inspired those beautiful men to lay an altar of stones in a place here or there. They were a testimony to HIS love and faithfulness. And people well respected them as long as they understood the reason for the pile.
But after this beautiful visitation from our God, shall I gather a few stones and make a small altar to his love? He came upon me in a truck parking lot. Yeah, let me just do that.
There is no place for understanding what is holy in today’s world. A man will come along and see a small pile of rocks on his pristine blacktop. “What kind of a fool would do a thing like this!”
Busying himself with some kind of tool, the small pile of rocks would quickly be moved back where it came from. No understanding. No sense of holy. No one does these things today. And the irony of two different days is a joke before the Holy Throne of He who inspires souls to give endless thanks for His love.
This picture of futility stirred me to pure laughter. Go ahead, someone tell me modern man is closer to God than he ever was before.
Consider the Lord Jesus.
From the beginning the Living God spoke Living words.
This is the Lord Jesus, the Christ of God.
He IS.
Consider His testimony among us. Faithful,
He IS.
His crucifixion is not what He was.
He IS.
The machine of our sin had no hold on Him. From the Living God,
He IS.
Of the Living God,
He IS!
God is permanently first. Those who earnestly seek his lovely face in Christ will be living an entirely different life.
Their life is born from heaven. It is a life granted by the Living God out of his mercy in Christ Jesus and for His own purposes.
It is a life lived by the rules of heaven. It is a human heart that aches for home. For them, the voice of the Spirit of God overrides society’s supremacy.
Outwardly, they are like any other human. Inwardly, the violence of the war within them evades description. The end of their war will come the moment they can tear off their flesh and ascend to the home they desire so deeply.
They cannot define peace like the world defines peace, they cannot have tranquility here. Tranquil, to them, is the promise of God.
21. When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. 22. Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. 23. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. 24. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. (Genesis 5)
We are forced to ask this question, “Who does our actions and thoughts say we are?” The answer is already in the hand of God the Father.
How many even ask the question, comparing themselves to the expectations of Christ?
I wrote this this morning for Facebook. It didn’t seem right not to share it here.
Facebook shares memories of time past. So this morning I’m going to use that.
Assuming that I will still be here in a couple of years, perhaps five, I’m going to write what I see this morning.
The coming day of judgment:
It is an open and desolate place for those without Christ. It is a place of compulsory gathering. It is an utterly darkened and foreboding place; as if in comparison to our experience here, it is like the darkest of nights with the thickest a fog about us. A place unfamiliar, a place of no resources to defend ourselves, a place of living threat, and a place of endless fear.
All the while, the sounds of thundering, hungry, and intense ministers of God wait to do his will. The total silence of the place allows the ear to hear every movement of those holy servants of God.
If ever man has feared, he will be in extreme agony there while he awaits his own personal and eternal words of judgment to be spoken against him. And in that place, there are billions of souls who wait.
Millions and millions are the servants of the Lord. Let your mind paint as vicious a creature as you can. They will purify the house of God, eternity will not make room for God’s enemies. God is Life, in him there is no room for impurities or death.
With the speed of light and the strength of freed lightning they will snatch away and devour as God pronounces each judgment. Without regard for each judged soul, they will immediately put him in his proper place.
Naked and helpless, there is no place there to hide.
Now I speak of these things on a day called “today”, and here I have opportunity to reflect. This is the day of salvation. In this abundant place, I am allowed to consider all these things and respond with an appropriate fear of God.
“Today” is the day to make peace with the Living God through Christ Jesus, His Holy, Honorable, and faithful Witness. “Today” brings the opportunity for forgiveness of your sins and cleansing through a repentant heart. No one who stands in the field of judgment is there by mistake.
I have not had a vision from God about this. I got this from reading the book of Joel, as anyone else who can read can read for themselves. As a person reads the book of Joel his imagination set on fire.
But the day of the Lord will be vastly more than the man’s imagination can paint. It is absolutely sure to come. And it will be absolutely stark and personal.
Today is the day of salvation!
May the man I will be, when this post is brought up in Facebook as a memory, be in vastly better prepared to receive the things of Christ.
Needless to say, I’m going to go to prayer now.
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” (copied from biblehub.com)
Photo of lithograph from wikipedia
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