At this time, the Church is beset by easy “believism”: whereby we confess faith in a God of our own making. Some believe in a God that does not judge sin. Others believe God exists to give them whatever their lust desires. Still, others believe Jehovah is just one God of many.
Real salvation is available only from the real God of the Bible, not of our imaginations and idiosyncrasies.
Mary rejoiced in The Lord her Saviour, therefore God could commission her to give birth to His Son.
Where do you find your joy? And what can God do with your life?
Loving God and loving anything not-of-God are mutually exclusive: we can only do one or the other; we cannot do both. If we belong to God, we will magnify Him over everything else. And if we belong to the world, we will magnify the world over everything else.
What benefit is it to us if God blesses us, but we do not believe?
The difference between a good tree and a corrupt tree is the Holy Spirit. Those who are rooted in Christ have been given the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the fruit of the Spirit, the good fruit, can be manifested in their lives.
There is an innate assumption in the modern church that false prophets are hard to find. However… as easy as it is to know that grapes don’t come from thorns… so it is easy to see the absence of good fruit from the ministry of false prophets among us.
Your cross is not your sacrifice. Jesus was crucified ON a cross. Therefore, to take up your cross is to be ready for the world to crucify you for the sake of the gospel. Taking up my cross is the willingness to be rejected by the world.
Physically, a virgin birth was impossible, but spiritually it was possible: God isn’t limited by the laws of the physical universe. God is bigger than that. Mary, however, was limited and she needed God’s intervention to live out God’s will for her life.
For us to accept Jesus as Saviour we must first see Jesus as King, rightly having the authority to offer us salvation on His terms. Sin came about when man rejected God’s authority. Salvation comes about when man accepts God’s authority: when we see Jesus as our King.
Our problem is that we trust our senses more than we trust God. Our tendency is to walk by sight, i.e., to live by our senses and our own human logic. When our sensory experiences tell us that things are out of the norm, our minds conclude, based on that limited information, that we are in danger, that we should react in fear.
