You will sin and you can't hide it!

Psalms 5:4 For You [are] not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, Nor shall evil dwell with You. 5 The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity. 6 You shall destroy those who speak falsehood; The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.

It has been said or written that one can tell the true nature of a
person by what he or she does when no one is watching. It does
seem true that being in the midst of others might act as a
deterrent to doing wrong; yet, our very nature assures us that
we will sin.
If it weren't of eternal significance, one could almost find humor
in the way people deal, at times, with sin. We create our own
hierarchy of sin. The little "insignificant" ones aren't so bad as
the nasty ones. The sins done by "bad" people are surely more
reprehensible than those little mistakes by a good person. Plus
if we aren't caught...... did a sin really happen?
We have a problem when it comes to God and sin. He doesn't like any
sin. He must punish all sin to remain true to His holy, righteous
nature. What's even more problematic is the fact that He knows
of all our sins- every one- and we cannot hide them from Him. We
can pull the covers over our head, close all the blinds and curtains,
even build a lead-lined fallout shelter; He knows. In fact He knows
of each sin before we commit it.
Accepting Jesus into our hearts, believing on Him and being
adopted into the family of God means we have been forgiven
our sins once for all; yet, even then we sin.
I would suggest that we listen to the Holy Spirit, recognize our
sins, go to God and present them openly AND use the fact that
we cannot hide them as a mighty help in avoiding them in the
first place. Christ took our sins on His back to the tree
at Golgotha; we need not add even one to His precious sacrifice
if we can avoid it.
Praise God!

Love Me Three Times.....

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.”  John 21: 15

It is called, by some, "the reinstatement of Peter." It is, to me, one of the most powerful
examples of the love of Jesus presented to us in the Holy Book of God. When one
continues to read, Jesus frames the question three times and responds to Simon Peter's
reply in slightly different, yet similar ways.

The denial of Christ, as predicted by our Lord, is one of the more painful things... just
reading it. Peter is certainly an interesting character, too anxious to speak at times but
full of love for Jesus. He refuses to allow that Jesus would die, falls asleep when most
needed for support, falls into the water after first walking upon it and, sadly, refuses
three times to acknowledge the Messiah, as it was foretold. Oh the pain that must have
coursed through him as it happened. Yet, what would we have done? It is easy to
say that we would have, under the same circumstances, ignored self-preservation and 
stood up for the Son of God, risking our lives. I know what I would wish to have done; I
just do not trust that I could follow through even as Peter did not.

So, after having denied Jesus three times, Simon Bar-Jonah is called upon to by
the risen Jesus to reaffirm his love and fealty.. three times. What an astonishingly
beautiful thing that so clearly shows the loving-kindness of God. It is a microcosm
of the entire gospel message; God walking among His creation to share the one way
of reconciliation from sin. God willing to forgive, not overlook, the fallen because
He loves them as the shepherd loves His sheep. We, in a very real sense, are Peter,
each time we fall short and deny what our Savior endured for our salvation. Yet,
we have been forgiven for all sins based on our acceptance of Jesus as Lord of our
lives. 

We don't have to ask his forgiveness three times because He has forgiven us enumerable
times. We ought, I believe, to pledge our love and appreciation for Him in every
thought, word and action as a way of thanking Him for His grace.

Praise God!

Covenantially speaking.....

Jeremiah 31:31-34 ESV 

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Saw a beautiful rainbow this morning! I always enjoyed "rainbow hunting" with my daughter.. it's really a wonderfully predictable science. You need rain drops or moisture and sunlight at a certain angle, and you have it- God's beautiful reminder.

He is, of course, reminding us that He has made a covenant with Noah agreeing never again
to "rain down" His anger for "40 days and 40 nights" with the intent to destroy evil. Oh He
has no problem destroying evil, in fact, at the appropriate time, Christ will return with the
hammer and take care of all evil. 

Covenants are agreements, not unlike contracts, where two sides agree upon something. God's covenants do not require a signature for proof because God never goes against His word.

The Bible is a covenant document.  The Old and New Testaments are really Old and New Covenants.  The word "testament" is Latin for Covenant. 

The Eternal Covenant is the agreement between the Father and the Son regarding the elect, a covenant made before the universe was created that the Father would bring to the Son all who the Father had given Him. The Covenant of Grace is made  between God and man through the work of Christ Jesus to bring eternal salvation to those who trust on Jesus.

So it's all a about how God has chosen to  deal with His creation. There is nothing complicated about the terms, they are spelled out in the Bible. The conditions are quite clear and based upon a loving God who is willing to provide a means of redemption, even to the extent of delivering His only Son as a propitiation. What do we have to do?

Accept the glory and the grace of our Covenant God, Jehovah! He is LORD; He is God!

Yes, Virginia, that's manna in our back yard!

The food miraculously sent to the Israelites during their forty years sojourn in the desert (Exodus 16; Numbers 11:6-9).  (catholic encyclopedia)

Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. John 6: 35


Give us this day, our daily bread....

It was food needed as thousands of Israelites traveled across the desert searching for
the promised land; people who were made to travel much longer than necessary due to their
failure to heed God's commands. It, along with water provided in mysterious ways, was
totally sustaining.

There's grace and then there is grace. There is salvational grace, grace provided by
God that, though not deserved, allows His creatures to be saved. It is the grace that
most folks think of when grace is discussed. It is a monumental gift that pulls us out of
conflict with God and into adoption as His sons and daughters through, and only through,
the work of Jesus Christ.

But there is another very important grace; it is provisional grace, that grace which
allows us to survive. Without this grace, we would not live. This is a grace that is given
each minute we exist, one that provides the necessary life-giving things like a beating
heart, breathing lungs, an environment so closely fine-tuned that the slightest change
could well mean extinction.

When we get up out of bed, when we fix meals to eat, when we travel to work or
school, when we accomplish anything, it is through the provision of our Father in
heaven...we didn't allow or cause any of it to happen. 

So how should this make is feel? Well, I'd start with a good dose of thankfulness!
It's really no secret why we should glorify God, is it... without the glory of God we,
his clay, would not exist. He is a sovereign, loving, all powerful and all knowing
God. We.... are served well by remembering His grace each and every time we
pray!

Praise God!

Here come da Judge....

⁴² He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead.  Acts 10:42

John MacArthur, in a two-part set of sermons on the resurrection, takes a different
approach from many on the Resurrection. He discusses What the Resurrection proves
as opposed to What proves the resurrection. The later, paraphrasing here, is proven by
the Holy Scriptures.

One of the five major areas that he discusses regarding what the Resurrection proves is
that it proves that Christ is the Judge of all creation and that upon His return, all will be judged by a righteous and just judge.

Well, we don't necessarily feel real comfortable with this whole judgment thing; yet, the
fact remains that there will be judgment of all by Christ as granted by God the Father
based upon Christ's fulfillment of His incarnate walk and Resurrection.

So we have two final and eventual verdicts: eternal life with Christ in a place He has
prepared for us or eternal life away from Christ in a place inhabited by the fallen angels
and those lost and deemed unrighteous. 

Without a belief and trust in the atoning work of Jesus Christ, we cannot and will not
be welcomed into rest and grace. In a very real and frightening sense, this is a choice
that we have the ability to make. It seems a very easy and uncomplicated one, but there
are many who simply choose to be their own salvation makers, whose efforts center
around their own ability to do enough good to reach a level of acceptance. There are even
those who believe that they can, through their own efforts and deeds, reach a state of
'God-ness' themselves.

God and man are simply in opposition; God is holy and just, unable to tolerate sin, and
we are sinful creatures unable to stand before a Holy God, ever, without the gift
of justification provided through, and only through, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His
Resurrection, His Ascension and Intercession. 

So we are faced with a choice. It's monumental in its significance and so simple in 
its nature. We have to accept that we need a Savior and realize that a loving God showed
His amazing grace by offering His beloved's life for the chance for us to make that
eternal choice.

How, then, can we avoid praising God!

Cannot hack into what has been forgiven!

For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”  Hebrews 8: 12

I spent the morning walk listening to an Alistair Begg sermon on atonement. That's a
great way to grow while exercising! In going through the many aspects of what Christ
Jesus accomplished in the atonement of sin, Mr. Begg spoke of a computer analogy that
really hit home for me.

I do not know about you, but every so often I recall some of the downright horrible and
ridiculous things I did as a younger person. I could use the true excuse that I was simply
twenty-one going on fourteen, but the fact remains that some of the things I remember
both horrify me and sadden me. While I would be embarrassed to really go into detail
about many of these, I do find myself, at these times, reminding God that I am really
sorry to have acted in these ways; in a sense, I re-ask for His forgiveness. 

It has become common knowledge that once something is typed and saved on a computer,
all of the deleting one does really never truly expunges these files completely from that
computer. Somebody, somewhere has the geeek skills to retrieve things that we may
mistakenly think have been erased. It calls, certainly, for some forethought before doing
certain tasks and, certainly, some real contemplation before hitting 'send' or 'save!'

Well, I'm not going to go very far in comparing our Holy God to a computer, but, certainly,
being an all-knowing God, He would have and does have the ability to know what we are
thinking, saying, even typing. He also knows our every sin which, without the righteousness
of Christ, would still count against us. Yet, and here's the amazing part, with the
atoning sacrifice of Jesus, God could very well say, when we go to Him and apologize
for past sin, "I do not have any record of that sin. I have forgiven and forgotten that and
all other sins because they have been washed clean by the very blood of my beloved
son, Jesus."

That's atonement. The price, cost and debt has already been paid by He who become
sin despite being totally without sin so that we could be forgiven, completely, for
the sins we have, are and will commit. No hacker could retrieve these nasty files,
even Al Gore would have no chance and he, after all, invented the internet. The
point is that though we remember things that we have done we'd like to take back
and erase, God, in His infinite grace, through the precious spotless lamb, does not
remember them, forever!

Praise God!