How Much Do Black Lives Matter? Or Blue lives? Or All life?

We keep saying Black Lives Matter. Or we say Blue lives matter. Then we say All lives Matter.

We are missing the point. The real real question is how much do they matter?

Do black lives matter as much to all white people as other people's lives? Do cops lives matter as much to a black inner city kid as they do to a white woman driving through East St. Louis? Does the life of a baby in the womb matter as much to the college kid who got pregnant 6 weeks ago at a party while she was drunk as much as to a husband and wife who have struggled to get pregnant for 8 years?

You see the question is really "What do I care about?"

For us Christians the answer is simple.

John 3:16
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."

There was no racial distinction nor is there an economic requirement. Jesus died for the world. Jesus died for the sinners.

If you claim Christ as your savior you must claim Him as your Lord.

This must be our mission:

Philippians 2:1-8
So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

We must look at other people's lives as MORE important than our own.

Then things will change.

Forgiveness is not an option for the Christian.

Colossians 3:12-13
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

The command here is we are to forgive as the Lord has forgiven you. And how is that? How did Jesus forgive us? Let us see what God’s Word says.

Romans 5:8
But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

While we still sinners Christ died for us. He didn’t wait for us to stop being sinners. He died for us, which is how He procured our salvation and the way God forgives us. We are called to do the same thing. We are to die to self. This means that even when the sins of others hurt us, we must love them so much that our hurt does not matter. We die to our own feelings and we forgive. Period. Christians, we must stop making excuses for holding on to our anger and bitterness. While we are yet sinners Christ died for us.

Hard, isn’t it? Well it’s pretty much impossible except for the fact that we, as believers, have the power of God through the indwelling Spirit of God living in us.

So what must we do in these terrible days? We must put on holy and beloved compassion for all God’s people. We must be kind, humble, meek, and patient even with those who seek to harm us. We must bear with each other our sinful infirmities. We must forgive.

The greatest of tests of our faith is found in this command. If we are unable to forgive then we must repent. Our own personal salvation is at stake.  I leave you with a stern warning from the very mouth of Christ, Himself. Take it serious people.

Matthew 6:14-15
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. 

How To Overcome the Mess America Is In

We can continue to complain and be disgusted by the world and the things going on. We can post on Social media about Hillary and demand jail time. We can argue over the BLM movement. Or...we could be faithful as Christians and do what God calls us to do in the power of the Holy Spirit.

John 1:5

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Isaiah 58:9-12

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the LORD will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.

Church we must follow the call of Jesus as He stated in Matthew 5:13-16

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."

The light WILL overcome the darkness. But it is our duty to shine it.

How To Share Jesus With the World

The popular message today that the church too often gives on how to witness to the unsaved is to say, Jesus loves you.” And He does. That is clearly stated in the Bible. God, the Father loves us so much that, as we read in John 3:16, He sent His only Son as the way to have eternal life in Him. But the teaching of the Bible does not teach us to share only that message. In His letter to the Colossians Paul gives us the method of sharing Christ with the world. Hear God’s Word as the Spirit inspired Paul to write.

Colossians 1:28
We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ.  

Let us take a quick look at the instruction from Paul on how to proclaim Him.  Its quite simple and we see two commands. We can see that this is not just a message for the church, though we need admonishment and teaching as well, it is an instruction to admonish and teach “every” man.

What does Paul mean when he says we are to admonish? The Greek word for admonish is noutheteō.  The meaning of that word is to caution or reprove gently and the two common English equivalents are warn or admonish. The word derives itself from nouthesia, which is a mild rebuke or a warning. It can also mean to counsel.

So we see that Paul proclaims Christ by warning people. What is the warning? Anytime we interpret scripture we do so in light of scripture. This means we cannot just snatch up a verse in isolation and use it to declare whatever we want. In light of the entire message of the Bible I believe the truth Paul is saying here is the simple truth that Jesus came proclaiming. He began His ministry and He ended His ministry telling us to repent. John the Baptist prepared the way for the coming of Christ by saying the same thing. Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand is what he said.

Witnessing to the world is a hard thing and though God has commanded us through Jesus to do so, He also sent the Holy Spirit to give us both the power and the words to do it. I am not saying Paul instructs us to go out and grab people by the arm screaming a horrible message of condemnation. Remember the word speaks of a “mild” rebuke. What Paul is saying though is that we must share the truth, in love, that all of us are sinners in need of Christ, our savior. If we don’t, then we are leading people to a false sense of security in their eternal destination. The Bible teaches of a hell. There are only two eternal choices; heaven or hell. We must take the truth of hell seriously. I think it is noteworthy that Paul placed in his method of proclaiming Christ admonishment and warning first.

Then Paul tells us to teach all men. Again we see it’s everyone we are to teach. And we are to teach them with all wisdom. The word used for teach, is pretty much as we read it in our word teach. We teach others by holding conversations with them and by telling them what we know. We share the Word of God for the Word of God does not return void. We tell them how Jesus has worked in our lives, and how He has changed us. And the wisdom we teach with is God’s wisdom, not our own. The Holy Spirit is our source for that wisdom and we do not need formal Bible College training to be able to share God’s wisdom. Jesus tells us this truth in Matthew 10:20 saying, “It is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”

Paul then adds the purpose we proclaim Christ. It is “so that we may present every man complete in Christ.” The message we proclaim is not simply that we get to go to heaven at the end of our life and we just get to live on as we were before we were born again. Ephesians 2:10 explains that “we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

Yes Jesus loves us. But we are not being faithful to the Great Commission if we do not proclaim Christ in the way the Word of God commands us to. Being a Christian is not just a free ride to heaven; being a Christian has much more to it. We are saved by grace and grace alone. But with the title Christian comes commitment. Share the truth people.

I leave you with an admonishment. A warning if you will. These are not my words, but the very words of Jesus. Pray over them and ask the Holy Spirit to make them real in you own life and then in your work to proclaim Him.

Luke 14:26-35
 "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.  "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.  "For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it?  "Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.'  "Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand?  "Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.  "So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.  "Therefore, salt is good; but if even salt has become tasteless, with what will it be seasoned?  "It is useless either for the soil or for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Jesus and the Storm

I was blessed yesterday to hear a sermon preached by a man who is without doubt in the middle of a terrible storm. Our beloved youth pastor and his wife are watching their beautiful little girl, just five years old, suffer from the effects of a horrible, cancerous tumor that has not only invaded her brain, but has wrapped itself around her spine. It is a devastating attack on this little girl’s body and she is suffering through a horrible battle that is now over a month long. His sermon was about trusting God even in the storm. The text he used for the basis of the sermon is found in Matthew 8:23-27. Take a look.

And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him.  And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep.  And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.”  And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.  And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”

Many of us are familiar with this passage. I would like to expand a bit on the story in the hopes that in it we can be able to withstand the storms when they come in our own lives. I was intentional in saying “when” they come as opposed to “if” they come, for all of us will face storms of varying intensity in our lives. It was after a difficult storm my family and I passed through several years back that I became called by God to advise Christians that they must build their faith in the easy times, because you don’t want to be looking for your faith when the waves are about to swamp your boat.

The first spiritual lesson to take from this story requires that we accept one important fact about Jesus and that is that Jesus is God. He is part of the triune nature of God in which He exists in three persons. God is Father, He is the Son, and He is the Holy Spirit. The trinity is not a concept that really is explainable in terms of human logic. The trinity is a mystery but it is also a Biblical truth. So as we read this story we must take hold of the fact that the disciples are in a boat with God Himself.

Next we must understand that the Bible is more than a collection of stories. Certainly this story is one that is historically true. But the story also has a spiritual application to our lives and in it God is teaching us important lessons.

Lesson one is that since Jesus is God we can know that He knew the storm was coming. So this begs the question; why would Jesus let the disciples get in a boat that He knew was headed for a storm? The answer can be found throughout the scriptures. Jesus knows that it is in the storm in which our faith in Him will grow. In the story the disciples followed Jesus into the boat. We must see from this the truth that Jesus always does what glorifies the Father and sometimes this seems to us be at our expense. But God is working things out in ways that we just cannot understand.

Then notice something else. Jesus is asleep when the storms hit. What? He’s asleep? As we would react, the disciples are a bit freaked out by this. Doesn’t Jesus care about us? Sometimes in the middle of our storms we think God is asleep. Or we think that He doesn’t care that we are being deluged by the storm and our boat is about to sink. This simply isn’t the way it is. When we read that Jesus was asleep the Bible is teaching us two things. First of all it is showing us that when Jesus came to earth He was both God and man. In His humanity Jesus needed sleep just as we do. But contrary to what some teach, Jesus didn’t stop being God when He came as a man. No, in another of those great mysteries we need to simply accept and stop trying to figure out, Jesus was both man and God. Jesus was asleep in His humanity but He was still God in the sense of being able to control the storms. Here is a good lesson to lay hold of. If you are Christ’s then you can still lie down and sleep even in the midst of life’s storms. How? By believing that Jesus is true to His promise that He would be with you always, even to the end of the age and then knowing He is in complete control of the storm you are in. Jesus didn’t stop the disciples from getting in the boat with Him even though He knew the storm was coming and He does not want us to be afraid to follow Him wherever He takes us, even when that journey is going to encounter storms. We cannot be afraid to live life.

The third lesson we should take from this I have already alluded to. The disciples were still learning this as evidenced by their response as we read in Matthew 8:27,
The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this?—even the winds and the sea obey Him!”

Even the winds and the sea obey Him. Yep, they do. Jesus is God and He created everything in this universe. God is in control. He is sovereign. He is the King of all. Nothing, yes nothing, happens that He doesn’t allow and if He allows it then He must be planning to use it for good.

But we have to believe the truth that God is sovereign. This requires faith. Listen to the response of Jesus after they woke Him up in the boat that day. “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Jesus rebuked them for their lack of faith. Then He showed them that He controls even the winds and sea.

Satan does not want us to live in peace. So he, under the complete control of God (See The Book of Job which explains that Satan isn’t just running around unfettered), implants doubts into our minds. There is a battle for our peace going on but we have been empowered to win the battle. Though Jesus ascended back to the heavens and no longer physically dwells with us in bodily form, He has not left us alone. He has given the Church three things, which give us the ability to dwell here in peace until He returns or calls us home.

First of all when Christ died on the cross He tore the veil that separates us from God and now through prayer we can always enter into the very presence of God through prayer.

Secondly when He ascended Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to actually live inside of every believer. The Holy Spirit empowers us, teaches us, guides us, and comforts us. He even prays for us when we are so distraught we don’t know what to pray for.

Then lastly through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and God’s providential protection, God has given us His Word through the scriptures. In the Bible we can find everything we need to live out our lives. And in God’s Word we are told that faith comes from hearing and hearing from the Word of God.

So take heart this morning and seek God through the hardest of times. But when the storm ends and you are enjoying the peacefulness of a quiet boat ride stay focused on the three resources God has given you. Pray without ceasing, don’t wait until you feel desperate. Walk in the Spirit. Don’t discount the Holy Spirit. He is a person just like Jesus and He lives inside of you. Read your Bible. Keep it handy at all times. Read it all, not just the parts you like. Then believe it. Then when the storm comes, and it will, you won’t have to be afraid.

Trust Jesus. God will bless you in that.