As I was studying to preach on James 3 regarding our talk I came upon this convicting video.
Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. (James 3:10)
As I was studying to preach on James 3 regarding our talk I came upon this convicting video.
Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. (James 3:10)
CBD has a tremendous bible story book on sale today for 50% off. I highly recommend this book for kids 3-8 years old. It tells all of the bible stories from a Christ-centered perspective, and my son absolutely loves it! I highly recommend buying it, even after the sale is over! Here is the link.
Psalm 100
1. Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands!
2. Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing.
3. Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.
4. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, And into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.
5. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, And His truth endures to all generations.
Today is the day we vote. But do you know where to vote? Click here to find out!
We are coming up to Luke 24 in our Sunday morning sermons and I am looking forward to teaching on what Jesus reveals to the disciples about the Scriptures. Here is a video that gives the explanation.
Another great video matched up with a great song, with some preaching included from John Piper. Enjoy!
(HT: Justin Taylor, Bob Kauflin)
It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie
upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there
is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have
done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with
grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the
grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Ten Reasons Why I Believe The Bible Is The Word Of God by R. A. Torrey
THIRD, on the ground of the unity of the book.
This is an old argument, but a very satisfactory one. The Bible consists of sixty-six books, written by more than thirty different men, extending in the period of its composition over more than fifteen hundred years; written in three different languages, in many different countries, and by men on every plane of social life, from the herdman and fisherman and cheap politician up to the king upon his throne; written under all sorts of circumstances; yet in all this wonderful conglomeration we find an absolute unity of thought.
A wonderful thing about it is that this unity does not lie on the surface. On the surface there is oftentimes apparent contradiction, and the unity only comes out after deep and protracted study.
More wonderful yet is the organic character of this unity, beginning in the first book and growing till you come to its culmination in the last book of the Bible. We have first the seed, then the plant, then the bud, then the blossom, then the ripened fruit.
Suppose a vast building were to be erected, the stones for which were brought from the quarries in Rutland, Vermont; Berea, Ohio; Kasota, Minnesota, and Middletown, Connecticut. Each stone was hewn into final shape in the quarry from which it was brought. These stones were of all varieties of shape and size, cubical, rectangular, cylindrical, etc., but when they were brought together every stone fitted into its place, and when put together there rose before you a temple absolutely perfect in every outline, with its domes, sidewalls, buttresses, arches, transepts-not a gap or a flaw anywhere. How would you account for it? You would say:
“Back of these individual workers in the quarries was the master-mind of the architect who planned it all, and gave to each individual worker his specifications for the work.”
So in this marvelous temple of God’s truth which we call the Bible, whose stones have been quarried at periods of time and in places so remote from one another, but where every smallest part fits each other part, we are forced to say that back of the human hands that wrought was the Master-mind that thought.
Day by day, dear Lord, of Thee three things I pray:
To see Thee more clearly
To love Thee more dearly
To follow Thee more nearly.
(Prayer of Richard of Chichester, 1197-1253)
“The measure of God’s love for us is shown by two things. One is the degree of his sacrifice in saving us from the penalty of our sin. The other is the degree of unworthiness that we had when he saved us.”
-John Piper
The book Ministries of Mercy by Tim Keller is the free audiobook download at christianaudio.com. I highly recommend this book! You can find it here.
Ten Reason Why I Believe The Bible Is The Word Of God by R. A. Torrey
Reason #2
SECOND, on the ground of its fulfilled prophecies.
There are two classes of prophecies in the Bible-first, the explicit, verbal prophecies, second, those of the types.
In the first we have the definite prophecies concerning the Jews, the heathen nations and the Messiah. Taking the prophecies, regarding the Messiah as an illustration, look at Isaiah 53, Mic. 5:2, Dan. 9:25-27. Many others might be mentioned, but these will serve as illustrations. In these prophecies, written hundreds of years before the Messiah came, we have the most explicit statements as to the manner and place of His birth, the manner of His reception by men, how His life would end, His resurrection and His victory succeeding His death. When made, these prophecies were exceedingly improbable, and seemingly impossible of fulfilment; but they were fulfilled to the very minutest detail of manner and place and time. How are we to account for it? Man could not have foreseen these improbable events-they lay hundreds of years ahead-but God could, and it is God who speaks through these men.
But the prophecies of the types are more remarkable still. Everything in the Old Testament-history, institutions, ceremonies-is prophetical. The high priesthood, the ordinary priesthood, the Levites, the prophets, priests and kings, are all prophecies. The tabernacle, the brazen altar, the laver, the golden candlestick, the table of shewbread, the veil, the altar of incense, the ark of the covenant, the very coverings of the tabernacle, are prophecies. In all these things, as we study them minutely and soberly in the light of the history of Jesus Christ and the church, we see, wrapped up in the ancient institutions ordained of God to meet an immediate purpose, prophecies of the death, atonement, and resurrection of Christ, the day of Pentecost, and the entire history of the church. We see the profoundest Christian doctrines of the New Testament clearly foreshadowed in these institutions of the Old Testament. The only way in which you can appreciate this is to get into the Book itself and study all about the sacrifices and feasts, etc., till you see the truths of the New Testament shining out in the Old. If, in studying some elementary form of life, I find a rudimentary organ, useless now, but by the process of development to become of use in that animal’s descendant, I say, back of this rudimentary organ is God, who, in the earlier animal, is preparing for the life and necessities of the animal that is to come. So, going back to these preparations in the Bible for the truth that is to be clearly taught at a later day, there is only one scientific way to account for them, namely, He who knows and prepares for the end from the beginning is the author of that Book.
‘Christ is never fully valued, until sin is clearly seen. We must know the depth and malignity of our disease, in order to appreciate the great Physician.’
-J.C. Ryle
A question I am asking myself: Do I seek to see my own sinfulness and admit it for what it is, or do I seek to overlook my sin or perhaps justify it in my own life. The answer to this question will have much to say about how I view my Savior Jesus Christ!
Ten Reasons Why I Believe The Bible Is The Word Of God by R. A. Torrey
Reason #1:
FIRST, on the ground of the testimony of Jesus Christ.
Many people accept the authority of Christ who do not accept that of the Bible as a whole. We all must accept His authority. He is accredited to us by five Divine testimonies: by the testimony of the Divine life He lived; by the testimony of the Divine words He spoke; by the testimony of the Divine works He wrought; by the Divine attestation of the resurrection from the dead; and by the testimony of His Divine influence upon the history of mankind. But if we accept the authority of Christ we must accept the authority of the Bible as a whole. He testifies definitely and specifically to the Divine authorship of the whole Bible.
We find His testimony as to the Old Testament in Mark 7:13. Here He calls the law of Moses the “Word of God.” That, of course, covers only the first five books of the Old Testament, but in Luke 24:27 we read, “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself,” and in the forty-fourth verse He said, “All things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses and in the prophets and the Psalms.” The Jews, divided the Old Testament into three parts-the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms-and Christ takes up each of these parts and sets the stamp of His authority upon it. In John 10:35 Christ says, “The Scripture cannot be broken,” thereby teaching the absolute accuracy and inviolability of the Old Testament. More specifically still, it possible, in Matthew 5:18, Jesus says, “One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.” A jot is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet-less than half the size of any other letter, and a tittle is the merest point of a consonant-less than the cross we put on a “t,”-and Christ here declares that the Scripture is absolutely true, down to the smallest letter or point of a letter. So if we accept the authority of Christ we must accept the Divine authority of the entire Old Testament.
Now, as to the New Testament. We find Christ’s endorsement of it in John 14:26, “The Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” Here we see that not only was the teaching of the Apostles to be fully inspired, but also their recollection of what Christ Himself taught. We are sometimes asked how we know that the Apostles correctly reported what Jesus said-”may they not have forgotten?” True, they might forget, but Christ Himself tells us that in the Gospels we have, not the Apostles’ recollection of what He said, but the Holy Ghost’s recollection, and the Spirit of God never forgets. In John 16:13, 14, Christ said that the Holy Ghost should guide the Apostles into “all the truth,” therefore in the New Testament teaching we have the whole sphere of God’s truth. The teaching of the Apostles is more complete than that of Jesus Himself, for He says in John 16:12, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all the truth.” While His own teaching had been partial, because of their weakness, the teaching of the Apostles, under the promised Spirit, was to take in the whole sphere of God’s truth.
So if we accept the authority of Christ we must accept that of the whole Bible, but we must, as already seen, accept Christ’s authority.
“The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, ‘So that’s how God did it.’ My goal is to understand a little corner of God’s plan.”
I love New York City, and I love people that go into that city with a heart to represent God. I think that this woman is doing a wonderful thing for these kids in this school. She is showing them what the love of God looks like toward us sinners, the love all of us as believers have, regardless of our performance. Check it out if you have 5 minutes.
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. (Romans 8:18)
consider suffering; consider the present time……….this life on earth, in these 70 or 80 years….
THEN consider the time to come….eternal life….consider glory; consider how great it will be, that the struggles and trials and difficulties that often seem overwhelming to us today………in light of eternity……..they are not even worthy of mention, not even worth comparing……….consider the great disproportion, that sufferings will fade into insignificance……
Consider how amazing eternity must be, where glory is revealed not only to us but in us! It will reach to us, be bestowed upon us, so that we will become not just spectators but actual partakers!
Christianaudio.com is giving free downloads of A.W. Tozer’s classic book, “The Pursuit of God” this month. Click here to get your copy.
Think you know a lot about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Take this quiz to find out how much you really know! Have fun!
