Overcome

Romans 12:21(NKJV)

21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Throughout the Bible we see the people of God endure great afflictions, perpetrated on them by others around them. Not always were God's elect able to throw off the evil oppression of the godless that sought to harm or destroy them, but neither we're they destroyed. 

Overcoming evil with good doesn't always look like a revolt or an ability to change the hearts and minds of others. Often it's staying so desperately dependant on God the Father and striving for His will each day, that we ourselves aren't crushed in spirit by the evil that surrounds us.
God's goodness in us can preserve us and our faith through the evilest of storms. He gives us the miraculous ability to forgive, to be good to those that abuse us, protecting us from the evil we see around us. Yahweh, Yeshua,  the Spirit of Truth, alone  can and will defend us inwardly and spiritually, even if for a time, evil has overwhelmed us and oppressed us outwardly.
He will only do this if we will willingly lay all at His feet.
If we completely abandon ourselves to God, His Light resides within us, and His is a Light, no darkness shall ever overcome.

Knowing

Proverbs 8:17 ESV

I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.

A wise and faith filled woman once said, in a Bible study I shared with her, that she knew many facts about Bill Clinton, where he grew up, went to school, his college years, but, she said, " If I were to walk up to Bill Clinton obviously he wouldn't know me at all" Her point was that knowing about God isn't knowing God.

In a world full of lies and half truths about who and what God is and what that means about us humans, we must seek, dig, search out, the truth.
I came to be a Christian because I didn't need to throw logic and reason aside to do so,(No you really don't). You will however need to be ready to discard most of what the world has taught you to believe.

I was skeptical whether the claims of my current faith were true at all, but like many before me, in searching these things out I found the overwhelming evidence that the God of the Bible is who He says He is. I found that we don't live in a universe governed by chance mutation, just take a minute and really imagine what that would look like. I found that where we live, who and what we are, only make sense in a theistic universe, and makes no logical sense at all in an atheistic one. Indeed to be an atheist in this universe we live in takes much more faith and religious dedication than I, or most anyone is capable of.

So in order to get to the truth of our reality, we must peel back many layers of lies our current wicked age preaches to us.

Many learned men in our current society are chasing truth but have discarded God in doing so. Like a rainbow seen from far off but can never be reached, truth will forever allude those who have closed themselves off from God.
So what they find and hold up to us as truth is actually a foolish illusion they've created for themselves. They beg for us to join them in their delusion, not because they are so sure it's true, but because they are seeking validation for themselves.

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
Nikola Tesla

True science is about testing and observing and being willing to follow the logical evidence wherever it leads. In our current culture, the only science taught is of the nature that refuses to follow any evidence that might lead to a Creator. Therefore we get theory patched up by more theory that has little to do with the universe we actually live in, which was obviously created.

Why would God tell us so often in His Word that we will need to seek and search Him out?
Because of where we live. Lies propped up by half truths and deceptions is masqueraded as truth here. Why? Because fallen man wants nothing to do with God.
In a place where mankind seeks to be his own god self delusion reigns supreme.
Man goes about seeking from other humans what he now cannot get from his Creator, love, confidence, identity, and validation.

Knowing God comes by persistence. We must not stop our search at the first answer our world demands we take, but  we must press on digging through the deceptions and delusions of this current age.

Not only learning about Him through His word, but each day taking time to find some stillness and allow our spirit to mingle and commune with His.As He promises us in His Word, if we honestly seek Him, He will disclose Himself to us.
He will place His Spirit within us and then little doubt about God's identity will remain and the most paramount relationship of our existence can begin.

Slaves of Freedom

Slaves of Freedom

 

Luke 4:18

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,

There is much to be learned just here in this verse alone not to mention the verses leading up to it and just after it, we could literally be here all day, but what I want us to focus on today primarily is just one word freedom and not just the word itself but what Jesus meant by his use of that word and what type of freedom He offers us here today.

This is a powerful event Luke has recorded.

If we look further down in verse 23 of this same chapter we can read that Jesus had already been in Capernaum

A portion of that verse states- 'Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.'"

So we can see that Jesus had already created quite a reputation healing and teaching even though in the text it would appear as though he had just emerged from his forty days in the desert.

So it looks like Luke placed this account here not because of any chronological order but possibly because it made a perfect kind of title to place here at the start of Jesus’ ministry because it encapsulates what His  ministry would be about.

This was likely a synagogue that Jesus frequented as a boy and young adult growing up in Nazareth. At this time in synagogues like this one they would often invite visiting Rabbi’s to teach but this wasn’t just any Rabbi, this was a well known hometown boy returning to His local church.

 Nazareth at this time is thought to have had a population no larger than two thousand people and being the son of a carpenter and then being a carpenter himself Jesus no doubt was well known by many here long before his ministry began.

Jesus opens the scroll to this portion of Isaiah that we now understand to prophesy of His first coming and also His eventual return and He reads it aloud. He then takes His seat, which was customary for a teacher to do before teaching or expounding on the text read. He goes on to tell these folks that He’d known all his life, in no uncertain terms, that He was the Messiah that the prophet Isaiah was speaking of.

 But as I said our focus here today has to do with this proclamation of “freedom for the captives” that was prophesied by Isaiah and begins with the coming of Christ into the world and no doubt continues still today.

So to begin to understand this proclamation we should ask ourselves “What is freedom” and who are the “Captives” Christ spoke about?

 Well I believe if you were to ask a Jew at this time in history it’s reasonable to assume that they would tell you this portion of scripture meant the very real physical release of the Jewish people from Roman oppression by a conquering Messiah leading an Israelite army. We here today however know that’s not the case.

Many in this area of ancient Palestine that would be freed and saved by Jesus were “Captive” to the oppression of the warped use of the law and the lies being hoisted upon them by the Pharisees, but what does this proclamation mean for us here today? 

What is freedom? As modern Americans living in an ever growing secularized culture we are again and again told that freedom is the ability to do whatever we want, however we want to do it, with whom ever we want, wherever we choose.

 We will work where we want, be friends with whom we want, dress how we want, talk how we want, listen to what music we want, be entertained how we want, and marry who we want.

 I think if you were to walk up to just about anyone on the street here in America today and ask them what freedom is their answer would resemble this if not be dead on the same. But is this real freedom, is this what God intends for us, is this the form of freedom that Jesus came to give us?

Did Jesus come and live a sinless life and then die the horrific death of being nailed to a tree paying the penalty we owe for our fallen sinful nature so that we might be free from the law to live a life of unlimited self indulgence and self exaltation? So that we might be free to hoist high up on the ladder of priority our own personal preferences and pleasures and follow those to our own ends?

I would submit to you today that when we look at real freedom, this very real and authentic freedom that Jesus is proclaiming here in his hometown church it looks very much the opposite of what our society tells us freedom is, and it is also often this real freedom that even we who profess to follow Christ reject for our own lives.

Secular society preaches to us a steady sermon of individuality and autonomy. We hear phrases like

“Be your own person, be true to yourself, make your own way, and do it for yourself.” The voices on the televisions and the radios tell us we must “Find out who we are and in finding ourselves we will somehow find happiness.”

 According to our culture we hold all our own truths, we alone decide our direction in life, and the best thing we can do to make ourselves happy and fulfilled is to look inward.

 Is it any wonder as we look out on the current landscape of our society that we see so much depression, suicide, drug addiction, divorce, violence, and promiscuity?

 To hold ourselves to such a high degree, to think all our answers lye in the truths we ourselves get to create is nothing more than another delusional form of idol worship. Simply indulging ourselves and being guided only by our own desires, pleasures, and preferences leads to another very real form of captivity. One of the many forms of captivity I believe Jesus comes to set us free from today.

Truth is not something we as created beings get to create. We can recognize it, we can utilize it and we can adhere our lives to it but we did not and we do not create it, and the truth is we are not independent beings at all, quite the opposite we are dependent beings, and we were created to be dependent beings and going further we were created for a specific purpose.

So when we live as though we are an end unto ourselves, as if all the answers and all the truth we’ll ever need are to be found within ourselves or even found in another fallen sinful human being, we get sick, we get lost, and we get imprisoned. When we remove God from the picture and say we’ve been evolved by forces of chance into a being that is totally self sustaining and completely independent we create a truly unnatural environment for ourselves.

 The idea that we are such dependant beings is very counter cultural and something we ourselves don’t like to here but the Word of God makes it abundantly clear.

Colossians 1:16 all things have been created through him and for him.

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

These are just a couple out of the multitude of verses throughout the Bible that tell us that not only did God create us but he created us for Himself and it tells us that He sustains our very existence. The action of the atoms and molecules spinning around right now to create a church pew of solid material for us to sit in is being sustained through Him. Each breath we take is being given to us, willed to us by almighty God. 

We are created beings created for a specific purpose and the Word of God tells us what that purpose is over and over again. These are again only a couple verses out of a multitude that tell us of our purpose throughout the Old Testament and the New.

Isaiah 43:21

The people I formed for myself, that they may proclaim my praise.

1 Corinthians 10:31

31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

Here in his letter to the Corinthians Paul is talking about foods some people abstain from but that others eat and he instructs us that whatever we may be doing we should do it to the glory of God. We were created for God not for ourselves, we were created for His pleasure and purposes not our own, we were created to glorify Him and be in relationship with Him and that is the freedom Jesus offers us, freedom to be what we were created to be and do what we were designed to do.

Paul confronts this modern self fulfilling type of freedom our culture preaches to us earlier in this same letter.

1 Corinthians 10:23-24

23“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive. 24 No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.

In seeking to do good for others we glorify our Father.

Have you ever used a knife for a screwdriver, or a drill for a hammer? You break the tip off the knife ruining it or you crack the plastic casing on your cordless drill, trying to use these tools for tasks they are not designed for turns out to be bad news for us and the tools involved.

Would it be possible to find an electric drill out in the woods and come to the conclusion that nature with billions and billions of years had put that drill together? Take a look sometime at the mechanics and processes of the human cell and you will see something far more sophisticated and advanced than the simple rudimentary cordless drill. We have much in common though because we and the drill were both designed for a specific purpose. Using these specifically designed tools for uses other than they were designed for always leads to frustration and brokenness. 

Some might here a message like this and think we’re speaking of following a bunch of rules and denying ourselves the things we most want to do. But it’s when we have been indwelled by the Spirit of truth and completely placed ourselves under the joyful authority of God that what we want to do most is what we were designed to do, it is then that we experience real freedom.

We talk to Him, pray to Him, have a deep continuous relationship with Him and what we want most is to be about His purposes and His work.

When we stop looking inward and start looking upward we begin to know and thoroughly enjoy what authentic freedom is. We ask Him where we are to work, where we are to live, and who it is we are to be. And we begin the struggle Paul spoke much about. We train, we run, and we strive to abide in the real and authentic freedom the Lord has graciously provided.

In Galatians 5:1 Paul tells us

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

In John 15:5-8 Jesus gives us a remarkable picture, He says

5“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

Jesus came to this planet telling us He only does that which the Father wills and the purpose of His coming was to make us one with Him as He is with the Father and once we have tasted of the joy that is given when we are being made one with the Father through Christ Jesus we know what true freedom really is, and we begin to see that those who the Son sets free are free indeed! 

Irreducible

Irreducible

Complex orders fly from the executive office to the factory floor. Raw materials are gathered from the warehouse and brought to the production floor. This factory can fill orders for products and parts needed for anything from its own maintenance issues there in the plant to products needing shipped out to other locations, also it produces parts for larger products being assembled there in the factory. Once any order is finished it’s off to quality control to make any corrections or final adjustments, then onto the packaging center where the parts will be prepared for further assembly inside the factory or for transport out from the factory. This factory produces its own energy derived totally from the sun and then converts it into fuel for the production plant. It comes equipped with its own maintenance crew that not only disposes of the waste materials but also finds and replaces any deficient parts in the factory itself. This factory is in perpetual production, never shutting down for holidays, repairs, or rest. It must be because it's on a very tight deadline to replace itself. That's right this factory gathers the raw materials, and then completely constructs another factory just like itself, and it does this while still filling all its many other production orders and responsibilities without fail. This amazing factory, while like the one pictured, is a single human cell. 

Over recent decades with the advancement of technology the reality of the incredible complexity in one single cell has been brought into clear view and what has been found is a deeper much more complex set of systems than could have ever been imagined. These systems are Molecular Machines. Machines that have moving parts and that accomplish tasks, they capture solar energy, they build complex protein structures, they bring in food, they allow the cell to swim, they act as cables and pulleys, and haul cargo back and forth. These machines build there own replicas and work to manufacture a complete duplicate of the entire cell structure.

The question this raises is how does evolution stand up to such incredible complexity at what should be such a basic level? In short, it just doesn’t. The Theory of evolution stands silent at the view of the amazingly sophisticated machinery that is working in such an immensely complex way as to keep calibrated the reality of life that we enjoy. Each one of these vitally important machines is in itself so complex they stand up to the modern day machines we have around us and surpass even those in design and efficiency. Each of these machines has an enormous amount of vitally important responsibilities, it would be hard to imagine, even for the molecular biologist, how even one of these workers could be removed from their station or how many billions and billions of years one would need to “evolve” such an efficiently sophisticated and tightly coordinated team of biological machines as we are seeing at the foundations of life. 

Darwin himself is famously quoted saying- If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

An abundance of evidence opposed to the evolutionary theory exists but the discovery of molecular machines is throwing up road blocks from such a myriad of angles that even the very men doing the work to uncover them are calling it engineering. After all these machines are not only complex themselves but are working to build structures that must be precise in there design, so where’s the blueprints, who’s giving the precise instructions, who is the conductor of this tightly organized orchestra of assemblage?

Even the simple tasks we see being completed all around us every day require information to get them started. When we learned to ride our bike, someone had to impart that information for us to practice and complete that task, and we could fail and try again.

The tasks being performed by these machines are so advanced our smartest minds are left scratching there heads as to how they are able to pull them off, and with these tasks there is no room for error, no practice and try again. When any of these cellular systems isn’t precisely completed, and I mean precisely, serious disease, dysfunction, or death follows. The organism fails with not much chance to “evolve.”

Biochemist and author Michael Behe is quoted saying-

"The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach."

Romans 1:20

 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

I’d like to end this rant with a quote by Dr. Robert Jastrow who holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics was the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee for the Apollo missions and after became Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College. He said this, which I love-

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Father!

Father!

Galatians 4:4-7

 4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. 6 Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” 7 So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.

Some of us have grown up having a great relationship with our Father and some of us have not, others haven’t known the presence of a Father in their lives at all. When we use this title for God the Father we are really putting a very human label on a being that is vastly superior to any human father we could ever know and we need to understand that. Many times we can mistakenly take the experiences we have had good, bad, and nonexistent and project those onto the Lord without even realizing it. We can find ourselves expecting the same type of relationship even. If you’ve grown up with a distant father that was very loosely involved in your life you may find yourself expecting the same from the Lord. If your father was involved but that involvement was negative or even abusive you may think of God as an angry disciplinarian that is usually disappointed in you.

Think about being there that day among the multitude of people that had walked with Jesus from many neighboring cities as he healed the sick and lame, gave sight to the blind and then stopped on a mountainside and sat down to teach. As he taught the crowds there how to pray he instructed them to say “Our Father.” This was surely seen as a radical teaching at the time, after all the Pharisee’s of the time viewed any closeness with God as something that must be earned not freely given to the masses.

Jesus is making a statement asking the crowd to pray like this, he is suggesting all the people there in that crowd can come to God and have a very close intimate familial relationship with him. He is saying to this crowd and to us today that we can come to God as a child comes to a parent. God is called father at times in the Old Testament but not in the context Jesus is suggesting here on the mountainside. Jesus through this prayer is offering an invitation on behalf of the living God. He is expressing to those that will hear him the type of relationship God wants from us by instructing us to regard him as “Our Father.”

Are we to see our Father in heaven as a disciplinarian? Is he a God that has set up a system of rules to simply control us and force us into obedience? Is he a God that punishes when we aren’t staying in line? Is God looking down on us with the disappointed look of a parent wishing we’d get our act together? This is very typical relationship between a human father and child so it’s no wonder many that see our faith from the outside and view our God in this way, they will at times even pull verses out of context from the Bible and tout them around as good reason to not believe.

Then there are those in the faith that spend years with this warped view of the Lord. They think of God as having more authority than compassion, as a type of universal detective on the hunt for your wrongdoing ready to administer justice rather than redemption. I cannot help but think that this thinking is much more fueled by the experiences they’ve had with there own parents rather than any real study being done into the Word God has given us. Many can think that we should help this God of condemnation by pointing out the sins of others around us. This is not the Gospel.

Parental relationships are commonly based on a system of work and reward, and rightly so, but we can also carry this thinking into our relationship with God thinking that it’s what we do that will gain his affection, attention, or even prosperity. Some false teachers have zeroed in on this and are touting a message that the masses seem to be flocking to, which is that God wants you to be rich, if you’ll only do these certain things he will lavish you with material possessions, and if he doesn’t it’s something your not doing that’s preventing it.

These false perceptions of the Lord humanize him they bring him down to a lowly view in which he does not belong. His Word tells us again and again that he is not like us, it tells us that God is a being so grand and so deep we as his small creations will spend an eternity gaining the smallest grasp on who and what he is. Jesus was not telling us on the mountainside that he is much like a human father, no. He was describing to us in a way that we might understand it the great love God has for us and the very intimate relationship he wants to give us all.

God has given us rules to live by much like a parent yes, but he has not given us the law as a great set of obstacles we must complete to gain greater affection or rewards from him, no. Nor did he give them to us to produce feelings of perpetual guilt and remorse.

The Lord loved us when we were still steeped in our sin before we ever came to him he loved us just as much then as he ever will. He gave us the laws as a road map or an instruction manual that would lead to our betterment for us not for him. He gave us these laws out of his great love for us. God the Father certainly wants to pour out rewards on us his children but he hasn’t then set up obstacles to those rewards, no, there are ours for the taking, no conditions, no work to be done, if we have accepted his son and fully committed ourselves to walk in faith with him then we can now take and enjoy the full measure of what he wants to give us! We need only to believe and enjoy!

There are some in our faith that have fallen into the thinking that through our obedience we gain these rewards, no, that is not the Gospel, that is legalism and as long as we have this incorrect and lowly perception of God we will not allow ourselves to enjoy the entirety of what he offers us in the Gospel.

We can think with our selfish sin filled human brains “It can’t be that easy, surely we need to do more to get more.” After all we have lived all our lives in a world that works just like that, but it’s just not that way with the Lord, in fact it’s the opposite. The love and rewards he pours out on us in abundance are the very things that produce obedience in us not the other way around. If we do not allow ourselves to believe and accept this gift he wants us to have than we ourselves are the obstacles.

We can say to ourselves “But I don’t deserve it.” Your right we don’t and we never will but thankfully it’s not about us, it’s about him, it’s not about what we do, it’s about what he has already done!

By saying this I am not suggesting that the Christian life is an easy one, it is not and that is why Christ calls us to count the cost. The Christian life however is going to be much much harder if it’s based on you and your abilities rather than based on the Father and what he can bring about in you. God the Father created all there is then created us out of his great love so that one day he could adopt you as his child and lavish you with his great love and joy. Not because you could do something for him, not because you have something he needs, just because he has it to give and wants to give it to you! And more than that he came to planet clothed in flesh, lived in poverty, and died a terrible death being nailed to a tree to buy you, to pay the price to purchase you back from sin, why? So that he could love you for eternity. That is just who he is, so let’s not bring him low and humanize him by suggesting his love comes with a set of expectations and conditions, it does not. His love produces in us a great desire to grow toward the likeness of his son, not to get his love, but because we already have his great love.

If we have truly accepted and committed ourselves to Christ we have access to a joy and a peace that transcends all understanding. He wants us to recline into his Forgiving hands and know that he has forgiven all we have done, past, present, and future. He wants us to recline in his Sovereign hands resting in the complete security of his all encompassing control. He wants us to recline in his Loving hands knowing that we are loved because of who he is not because of who we are. He wants us to recline in his Fatherly hands knowing that he has adopted us as his children and that all that is his is now ours.

Some might say “How can we know we have been adopted by him, or that I am truly now his child?” Paul tells us here in his letter. He will place his spirit in us that then cries out “Abba, Father.” Once we have come to the Lord there is a longing of the soul and of the spirit he has placed within us for the father’s closeness and presence. We seek to grow closer and closer to him, we find ourselves clinging more and more tightly to him like a child wanting to remain in the strong secure arms of their Father. We run to him with our joys, we run to him with our sufferings.

We run to him like a child our arms open, our heads held back, knowing he will lift us up, we will see his face, and be pulled into his embrace our great Cosmic Father, our Daddy, our Abba!