Camels are amazing creatures: Arabian camels, also known as dromedaries, have only one hump, but they employ it to great effect. The hump stores up to 80 pounds (36 kilograms) of fat, which a camel can break down into water and energy when sustenance is not available. These humps give camels their legendary ability to travel up to 100 desert miles (161 kilometers) without water.

When camels do refill, however, they soak up water like a sponge. A very thirsty animal can drink 30 gallons (135 liters) of water in only 13 minutes.

This is a strange post, I know, but I think that we have a tendency to think like camels when it comes to getting spiritual food and drink.

Christ in Matthew 4:4 said: It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

And here is I Peter 2:2,3: As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby:
1Pe 2:3  If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.
Even though we are blessed to be in a country where the Bible and spiritual teaching is readily available, yet we tend to think that we only need to “fill up” on Friday nights or maybe Sunday mornings… God didn’t make us like camels! We live with desires and cravings of our old nature that must be starved, and God gave us new desires that must be fed constantly.

Even if we succeed in starving the old desires (which will be unlikely without daily bread from God’s Word), and we do not feed our spirit, the enemy has still succeeded in preventing us from living the life and the purpose God has called us to: bringing Him glory!

When I was in Boot Camp, one thing was drilled into me by the sadistic overseers was hydration: they constantly yelled at us, “Never pass up a drinking fountain!” They would periodically stop their abuse to scream a one-word command: HYDRATE!!!!

I wonder how many times we pass up an opportunity to fill up on spiritual food and drink? I challenge you this week to find ways to keep drinking! Maybe you could read your Bible or a biography of a great Christian leader during your lunch break instead of a novel. Try turning your radio off of the top 40 and onto a Christian station that broadcasts sermons and biblical truth. Get some good audiobooks or sermons on your IPod, burn some CD’s, do whatever it takes, but stay hydrated!

We will be having some great special music this Sunday night at 6 Pm, and great preaching as always. They are only coming to spy on our amazing music program, but I am sure they will be a blessing! OK, so maybe as our guitar player I am slightly biased, but don’t burst my bubble…. Hope you can make it!

I would like to invite all/both my readers (Hey Mom and Grandma) to an amazing event: the Our Generation Summit, January 1-3.

The Our Generation Summit is an annual gathering in Gatlinburg, TN, of Christians with a heart for world missions. Pastors and missionaries, teachers and students, businessmen and families join for three days to address the needs of a world waiting for the Gospel.

Located once again at the beautiful Music Road Hotel in the center of action-packed Pigeon Forge, the OG Summit provides a fantastic venue for any church or youth group seeking an easy-to-organize winter retreat filled with excitement and passion for Christ.

Speakers:

You will hear from one of the greatest ambassadors for missions of our day, Austin Gardner, as he presents the need for missionaries to take the gospel to the world.  Also your hearts will be challenged by the preaching of Trent Cornwell, Tony Howeth, and Charles Blackstock.

There will be missionaries flying in from their fields all over the world for this special event to challenge you to allow God to use your life for the cause of missions.  You will hear from Jacob Taube from China, Aaron Bashore from North Africa, Kevin Hall from South Africa and many more!

The OG Summit is proud to introduce some of the most exciting mission projects and missionary speakers in the world.

For more information, visit www.bcwe.org!

You’ve done it AGAIN.

You drank again. You shot up one more time. You looked at that website. You…. fill in the blank with your habit.

Things were going so well, you were making progress, taking strides in the right direction, making new habits that you knew were honoring to God. You were in your Bible, in prayer, surrounding yourself with the right people, but somehow, here you are again, feeling like those that go down into the pit.

The words of David are burned on your heart, and you know exactly how he must have felt when he wrote, “My sin is ever before me... ”

You know that God has already forgiven you, and He knew that you would make this mistake from before time ever began, and He still chose you and redeemed you. But even though you know that this should comfort you, the thought of God’s perfect holiness only makes you more miserable, because you know how far short you fall.

Then you read a verse in Psalm 30:

Psa 30:4  Sing unto the LORD, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness.

How can you give thanks and sing praise when you feel like the lowest creature God ever made? How can the thought of His perfection comfort you when you are a failure?

Then His sweet Spirit speaks peace to your broken heart: “Your relationship with me never rested on your holiness, it rests on MINE! Rejoice in the beauty of my holiness and sing praises because I cover you with my own righteousness, in all its perfection.”

Php 3:9  “And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith..”

When I was growing up, we had a rule in our house: if some treat was to be divided between us children, the one who cut the pie, cake, or whatever it was, could not pick his piece. This was designed to prevent squabbling over “unfair” portions. It still happened, of course, but such was the rule.

I think that many times we fall into habits or addictions when we succomb to the temptation to look at what God has given us, and cry “unfair”! We see other people’s possessions, family, spouse, church, background, etc, and think that God hasn’t been as good to us as He should have been.

I was reading in the Psalms this morning, and God really spoke to my heart with one verse:

“The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot.The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”  Psalm 16:5,6

The psalmist looked not at what God had done for him or given him, but saw that God Himself was his portion, and his inheritance, and said that the lines (or divisions) were very favorable to him! Basically, he said, “keep the cake, give me the cutter”.

We all know that He is all we need, but how great of a relationship would we have with Him if He were all we wanted?

Is your love conditional or based on a person’s race, looks or stature in life?

Sunday evening had us finishing a 4-night mission’s conference at Vision and what a mix of emotions it was. I can’t see how anyone could have sat through the messages brought by these men and not felt the tug of the Spirit on them in some way. Be that as it may, I thought I might share how it went close to home and touched me.

First let me say that like many folks living in the United States of America, I live a life that is comfortable, even with the recent economic challenges we’ve seen lately. Well comfort breeds complacency and with that said, it’s human nature that I like most folks; try to avoid placing myself in situations where I’m uncomfortable. As a for instance we were going to a Braves game and couldn’t park in one of the adjacent lots so we had to park on one of the back road side streets where the neighborhood was let’s say “less than safe” feeling with folks walking by that were obviously challenged with drug, alcohol or other addictions & challenges. Sure, anyone who knows my story knows that I learned early on how to raise what I call “situational awareness” but still, I felt uneasy about being around “those” type of people.

STOP! Think about what I just said. How often do you do that? How often have we all felt like turning away from that destitute person or addicted individual because they were not “like us” in some way? Well that couldn’t be further from the truth, especially in my case. Where was I before the Lord took me into his family? How can I possibly be placing myself on some pillar to look down on someone else but yet I (we) do that without even realizing it far too often.

Now I’m not saying we foolishly put ourselves in harms way but I am saying that we have a heart for people that are stricken with sin in their lives and realize they need Jesus just as much if not more than we did. In Matthew 28:19 the Lord gave us all the great commission – Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Unless my Bible has a misprint, I see that it says ALL nations, meaning ALL people, including those we’d normally walk the other way from when they shuffle past us on the street.

Let me share with you that I felt so convicted from hearing Chris Gartner preach that I had to do a head and heart check because I too suffer from not wanting to get out of my comfort zone. Oh sure I say, I’m not called to preach so those fellows doing missions work, putting themselves at peril in some cases on the foreign field, giving up the comforts of home – well, they were called by God to do those things and not me right? Wrong! I of all people should remember that I was nothing more than a pathetic sinner raised in a family of sinners on my way to a devil’s hell until the day when someone took a chance and befriended me. He explained why it was that I couldn’t totally “break the cycle” of sin in my family’s history by just abstaining. That my friend, only got me so far and often led to what the secular world therapists call slippages which did nothing more than heighten the guilt I carried. In order to truly gain freedom over sin I’d have to call the specialist – Jesus Christ, who without condition, willingly gave his life on a cross to pay my sin debt once and for all and who, if I do make mistakes won’t be there to condemn but to console me with the knowledge that my salvation is eternal. Forever.

Several years after I asked the Lord to be my savior I was on the phone with my older sister. She had recently gone through her latest round of clean up and was struggling with how best to stay sober and healthy. You see she was one of those rough looking people that often look kind of scary to us normal folk. A couple of decades earlier she had contracted AIDs from the use of needle sharing and was then trying to deal with the damage done in her life. It’s said that sometimes the hardest people to share the gospel with are those closest to you & those conversations we had were no different. At the time I could only throw out perhaps one or two things I had learned about Christ but pressed her to do her own spiritual inventory. To this day I have no idea who she spoke with but also have no doubt it was someone who took a chance, defied the fear of AIDs & the look she had and shared the gospel because I’m convinced now, years after, that she passedinto eternity knowing & being sure of her own salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

Thinking about all of this has me remembering how this week when Jake was preaching; he spoke about how Jesus was visiting with the Pharisee Simon and how He used the sinner women to teach us a valuable lesson (Luke 7:36-50). The lesson is that sin is sin and that there are no higher or lower levels of sin. To be dead in sin is still death regardless. Dead is dead right? I heard the Spirit speaking loud and clear to me that night and today through the Word: Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. (Luke 7:47)

Heaven help us all to be mindful of that truth so let’s not forget that we were all dead in the same sin that ranks right up there with the worst of it. Personally I could stand to show a WHOLE lot more love based on how much I was forgiven. We need to love ALL people and have a heart to see missions work done at home through outreaches like Reformers Unanimous just as much as those works in other countries where we’re spreading the Word.

God bless - Jonathan

Have you ever found yourself tired and overwhelmed by everything in your life, decided to take a breather, and ended up falling into some sin? Maybe an old habit that you thought was no longer an issue, or something that you never imagined you would do. The feeling afterward is terrible: you are ridden with guilt, ashamed to have let your Lord down, and wondering how in the world it happened; after all, it started out so innocently!

If you have found yourself there, take a little comfort in the fact that you are in very good company! Even a man “after God’s own heart” (David), fell for this same trap. We find his story in II Samuel 11:1-4:

“And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.
And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite? And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her;”

This day would be a day that haunted David literally for the rest of his life. The poor decisions that he made affected his relationship with God, his family, and his nation in terrible ways. Here are some lessons we can learn from his sin:

1. Personal Discipline is a Spiritual Battleground!

David had a specific place to be, and a specific job to be doing, but this passage finds him tarrying at Jerusalem taking a break from the fighting. There is nothing wrong with resting, but this was not the time to rest.

When we fail to do what we are supposed to, we are making provision for our flesh, which can never be trusted. We are to redeem the time because the days are evil, but let me say that we should also redeem the time because our hearts are evil. God’s Word is pretty unambiguous about what our flesh is capable of: anything.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9

David’s first mistake was thinking that irresponsibility in his personal life would not lead to irreparable damage to his spiritual life.

2. Take an Accountable Break, Not a Break From Accountability!

I hate accountability. If you are honest, you do too. I don’t like people checking up on me making sure I am doing what I should, but, even though I don’t like admitting it, I need it desperately. One of the biggest open doors to temptation is when we put ourselves in a position of having no accountability.

I’m sure David never once thought “I think I need a break, so I’ll have an affair with a married woman, then kill her husband”. He probably just wanted to get away from his men who required so much of his attention and energy, and just have some time to himself. This passage tells us that he was alone on his roof, his leaders away at war, and he gets out of bed in the late afternoon with nowhere that he had to be, nothing he had to do, no one he had to see, and when temptation came, he fell hard.

Even the king needs accountability.

3. The Shrinking Nature of The Way of Escape

“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it” I Corinthians 10:13

Have you ever looked back on a time that you fell into temptation and thought, “There was no way I could have stopped! Where was the way off escape?” It might have been farther back than you think!

David could have said no to temptation when Bathsheba was in his room after he summoned her. But I am pretty sure it would have been easier to say no to asking about who she was, and even easier to look away when he saw her bathing. Of course, just refusing to give in to the temptation to stay in Jerusalem would have been the easiest of all.

Temptation leads to… more temptation! God makes a way of escape for every temptation, but with each capitulation it becomes harder to take that escape.

David made the same mistake that we do: he toyed with sin. We play with fire and then get upset when we get burnt. We blame God for temptations that we think were too much for us, or justify our behavior by saying that we couldn’t help it, but God could probably point out half a hundred gracious ways of escape that we jumped over in our headlong rush toward what our flesh wanted.

Don’t toy with sin, don’t ignore the importance of discipline in your spiritual walk, and embrace accountability!

My friend Scott asked me to write an entry or two now and then on the blog when inspired to do so. Well today’s a day when I couldn’t help but remember how those towers I watched go up during my youth fell to the ground 7 years ago. Somehow seeing the video shown during this evening’s service triggered a thought that I had in many ways grown up so seemingly high only to come crashing down myself. What I thought then in the folly of my youth was the pinnacle of having “arrived” was only vanity & foolishness not unlike those in Genesis 11 that built the tower at Babel only to see it too coming crashing down on them.

Mine is a story that almost defines the word Grace and shows how merciful our God is, even when we thumb our nose in his face or are ignorant of whom He is in the first place. You see I, like a good deal of folks with histories of addictions, I had ready-made excuses laid out and ready to leverage when the situation suited me. Both mom and dad were kids of the early 40’s that by their late teens had fallen in with the worst of crowds in New York City and succumbed to the temptations of this world. In their cases heroin was the rage and the order of the day. Their use and abuse didn’t stop when my sister and I came along during the sixties. Oh sure, they cleaned up real good now and then and even helped start the “therapeutic community” (TC) scene as early members of Synanon in California but were missing the critical ingredient in any lasting sobriety, the cleansing that only the Living Water of the Lord Jesus represents and can supply (John 4:10).

My sister and I were actually born into the worst of it almost right off so it’s no surprise we heard and saw way too much, way too soon. We’ve all heard that addictions rob people of a good deal in life and Kelli and I weren’t exceptions to that rule having lost innocence and the simplicity of childhood every kid should enjoy.

There were brief respites on the occasional weekend when we’d be shipped off on whatever church van or bus was picking up kids in the neighborhood. At this church or that one, we’d spend a few blessed hours in peace without the fighting and constant stresses of our home. The irony is inescapable that while mom thought she was the one looking to catch a break for a couple of hours of quiet boozing, it was no doubt the Lord’s way of seeing us kids break away and see what life was like without alcohol or dope. Those church folks we’d meet seemed so strange back then, almost too nice and caring, something we initially thought was a ploy in some odd way. So here’s a bus kid from the wrong side of the tracks with a professed Catholic leaning hearing about how only Jesus can help when you’re at wits end. Talk about timing. WOW!

During those days I’d kneel down & cry out in prayer even though I had no concept of how to do so or who it was this Jesus guy really was. It’s said that God works in mysterious ways right? Well here’s me in the middle of some non-denominational charismatic church sensing there’s more to this story than meets the eye. I couldn’t have told you then but now with the benefit of more than 30 years of hindsight I can see how the Lord was speaking to me then and working out situations in my life so I’d lay it all down one day. Too bad it took nearly 20 years of pounding that into my thick skull before I finally got the message He was sending but hey that’s another story for another day ☺

I guess the point and moral of this entry is that God can get glory from and plant His gospel seed even through the worst of circumstances. It’s sad that even today I sometimes forget this and the old haughty & high minded nature of self clouds my perspective. I’m sorry Lord, I am truly not worthy of your incredible Grace. I know you loved me then just as much as you love me now and I shouldn’t have to face dire circumstances to humble myself and hit the floor in prayer. In many ways I’m still that scared kid looking for an easy way out of the messes I’ve made for myself. That said, it’s different today in one very important respect – I know You as my Savior and that you’ve adopted me in your family where there is no condemnation or strife and we’ve all had the power of the Lord Jesus Christ’s cleansing blood wash away the stains from yesteryear.

Am I carrying some baggage? Sure, but show me someone who doesn’t in this world. But this time when I find myself at wits end, I know my Lord is carrying the burden that I wasn’t able to years ago, can’t today and now don’t have to. Have you seen those T-shirts with the “Life is Good” logos on them? Well I’m here to tell you that if you find yourself thinking that life isn’t good at all, take a moment and share your burden with our Father in heaven because not only can he handle it, he can save you from a life (and eternity) of despair. You see it was because of his Grace He saved even a sinner like me. God is good!

God Bless - Jonathan C.

I Samuel 7 has one of the saddest verses in the Bible. Here’s what’s going on in the chapter: Israel has left off serving God (AGAIN), and as a result, they have lost their influence, their joy, their power, and now even the physical symbol of God’s presence among them, the Ark of the Covenant.

Things are terrible. Their country is a shambles, their lives shattered, all from poor decisions. Does this sound familiar? I think that nearly everyone can relate to this story, we have all made some poor decisions that we knew were wrong, but went our own way regardless of what we knew to be right.

The fact that they failed God is not the worst tragedy of the story; read verse 2:

1Sa 7:2  And it came to pass, while the ark abode in Kirjathjearim, that the time was long; for it was twenty years: and all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD.

We learn from the rest of the passage that a prophet and leader named Samuel stirred them up to return to the Lord and live the lives God had in store for them, but only after 20 years of feeling sorry for themselves! Just think of all that wasted time, all that they could have done for God in those years.

Have you made mistakes in your life? Have you let habits and addictions keep you from serving God and enjoying life? Don’t let past mistakes and failures keep you there for years!

Many people think that repentance is feeling bad for what they have done, and that is not true. That lamenting is what brings you to repentance! Repenting is turning around and doing what you know is right, forsaking that sin that has kept you from abiding in Christ.

The road back to victory was not instantaneous in this story once they turned around, it still required faith and obedience, but I guarantee it was a lot faster than twenty years of useless lamenting.

Don’t waste your life lamenting your past, or despairing of the future, live it right, and live it right now!

I just wanted to brag on one of the ladies who has been coming to RU on Fridays. Her name is Paula Schaeffer, and I am amazed at her work ethic. She has only been coming for a few weeks, but has already memorized more Scripture and completed more challenges than any of us who were here before her! She is a super lady who really loves God, and we are privileged to have her with us. I had better go memorize something before I look bad again….