Tag: Sin

OUR BLESSED ASSURANCE

Our human sinfulness alienates us from God our Creator, but the wonderful and amazing good news is that Jesus Christ gives us everlasting salvation from this self-imposed alienation, granting us reconciliation with God and eternal heavenly life. This is our blessed assurance in Christ! Thanks be to God!

This blessed assurance of God’s grace through Jesus Christ is not merely some broad, uncertain appeal to the generic mercy of God. Rather, through the compassionate life, sacrificial death and redemptive resurrection of Jesus our Lord, we have absolute assurance of our atonement and salvation with God. What good news indeed! What amazing grace this is!

Fully acknowledging and confessing that we are sinners who have alienated ourselves from God, we believe and trust that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised for our redemption. Therefore, by the power of his Holy Spirit, we profess him as our Savior who gives us renewal of life here and heavenly life hereafter. So now, in thanksgiving and praise for Christ’s gospel of salvation and eternal life, I would like to simply bless you with the following Bible quotations:

ROMANS 10:9-13

For if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

SECOND CORINTHIANS 4:16-17

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure…

Brothers and sisters, this life is so brief, and, compared to a heavenly eternity with God, this life is really a fleeting bubble in a stream or flash of lightning in a cloud. And in response to the faith and hope and eternal salvation we have received through Jesus Christ our Lord, we seek to live this present mortal life in light of these great gifts, looking forward to the ultimate fulfillment of God’s Kingdom at the great Second Advent of Christ. With that in mind, I conclude this brief article with the words of the timeless hymn, Blessed Assurance:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Happy & Blessed Eastertide!!!  Pastor Tim

LENTEN PLOWING & SEEDING

The good news of Jesus Christ is for the desperate. Those who recognize their sinful condition and their desperate need for God’s grace are the target audience of his gospel. And recognizing our basic spiritual desperation is the very thing that readies us to receive the all-surpassing consolation and salvation that can only come through the Living Word of God, Christ Jesus our Lord.

Due to the fall of humanity, allegorized in the Garden of Eden narrative, the fallen condition of the spiritual soil of the human soul is nothing but rocks, hardpan, weeds and thistles. Consequently, “good soil” within the human heart is not so much found as it is created. Just like it is with farming, soil suitable for planting must first be prepared by clearing, weeding and plowing.

Therefore, our hearts need repentance to be prepared to receive the seed of the gospel of Christ. When we sinners have the soil of our hearts broken up by the sharp plow blade of God’s biblical law, then our hearts are made repentantly soft and joyfully able to receive God’s gospel of grace. And the Season of Lent is a very useful time of year to get spiritually plowed up by God’s biblical law and prepared again to be planted anew with God’s saving grace in Christ.

Technically speaking, farmers do not plow to make the soil productive, but rather for the purpose of making the planted seed productive. That’s what God does with us, and that’s what he wants to do anew this Lenten Season. He wants to soften us up for an effective implantation of the grace of the gospel. Through the dying and rising of Jesus the Son of God, it is God’s righteousness alone that grants us this renewal, not our own righteousness. For indeed our human righteousness is so flawed and inadequate that God (who is totally good and holy and pure) regards it as something that is soiled and foul smelling at best, because our human righteousness is compromised by sinful pride and selfish gain. 

“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteousness is like filthy rags; we all wither like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”

Isaiah 64:6

Jesus comes to transform the curse of the soil of the human heart. He comes to give us an honest and contrite heart that appreciates its own sinful condition and desperately longs to be renewed by him through his saving gospel. For only a contrite heart can genuinely appreciate its need for the atonement and redemption that cannot be produced by our own merit, but must be first planted within us by our loving God.

“You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Psalm 51:16-17

May the Lord of grace and truth make our fallen and sinful hearts to be soft and receptive, may he take hold of us and lead us with him through his sufferings of the Garden of Gethsemane and the Cross of Golgotha, and may he raise us up to new life in him.

“Thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread everywhere the fragrance of knowing him. For we are the pleasing aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.”

Second Corinthians 2:14-15

Good Lent & Blessed Holy Week!

Pastor Tim

SO MUST THE SON OF MAN BE LIFTED UP

We should not feel bad about feeling bad.  Within our society that idealizes feeling “happy, happy, happy” all the time, we can sometimes be shamed into feeling bad about feeling bad.  However, this is not right, because it is an unrealistic societal pressure placed upon us that only makes us feel worse.

Of course, there are those who suffer from chronic neuro-chemical imbalances that cause prolonged mental illnesses (bipolar disorder, etc.), and our culture is slowly coming to a better place where mental illness is not stigmatized as much as it once was.  But aside from this, everyone can understand feeling mentally and emotionally down from time to time, especially if they have experienced a great loss of some kind.  So we are all in need of healing and wholeness in life, and I would especially say this regarding spiritual concerns.

At the time of the Prophet Mosheh (Moses), the ancient Israelites were being attacked and killed by poisonous serpents, so Moses prayed for them and God gave them something as a means through which they would receive grace for their healing:

“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonousserpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’  So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

NUMBERS 21: 8-9

And later, at the time our Lord Yeshua (Jesus) walked on earth, he declared the following before his crucifixion and resurrection:

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

JOHN 3: 14-16

Therefore, when we are being vexed by the poisonous spiritual bites of sin, death and the devil, we can look to the One who was “lifted up” for our spiritual healing.  The good news is that Jesus (the Son of Man and Son of God) was lifted up on a cross for our atonement, was lifted up from death for our redemption, and was lifted up into the higher dimensions of reality (what we call “heaven”) for our everlasting salvation.  Even in the midst of the poisonous serpents of loss, grief, failure, guilt and regret, we can look to the Savior who was lifted up, and we can find in him forgiveness, renewal and wholeness.

For many people Easter is over, with all the Easter eggs and bunnies now in the rearview mirror.  However, for us Christians, Eastertime is a season of seven Sundays during which we celebrate the Lifted Up One, our risen Lord and Savior.  For he alone has fully shown, affirmed, confirmed and proved to us the love and grace of God through his life, teachings, sufferings, death, resurrection and ascension.  Through Jesus Christ, we have seen and now know that God indeed loves us and the entire world so very much, because he laid down his life for us and is now raised forever.

Christ Is Risen!!!

Grace & Peace,  Pastor Tim