Interesting Article!

http://www.notoriouslyconservative.com/2009/03/something-of-historic-proportion-is.html

A Must Watch!

Please take the 7 minutes to watch this and then pray about it.

Haven't Seen This on The News Yet-But Hopefully Soon!

The link below goes to an article about Alan Keyes being arrested for protesting at Notre Dame regarding Obama speaking at the commencement on May 17th. He is protesting because of Obama's stance on the abortion issue. I will be praying for him and the ones protesting as they stand for the life of the innocent. I pray you will join me.

http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=97621

Comfort in the Changeless

“The godly man does not arrive at spiritual maturity instantaneously. It is a lifelong process, but every stage of that growth must come from the Word.” Dr. Morris

At the church we attend, the Pastor has been talking about the immutability of God’s precepts, meaning that God does not change in what He commands. He has been going through the Psalms to demonstrate this very fact. Last week, he stressed that if we would follow these precepts that God would give us Victory (Psalm 119:87), preserve us for His purpose (119:93), give us increased wisdom (119:104), and guarantees us that we will have enemies and that we will be despised (119:141).

It was a challenging sermon to say the least, and very convicting in what was presented by Pastor Jayakumar through the Scriptures. A day later, I get a phone call and find out that I am to preach on May 3rd, tomorrow for me, and that I am to continue with the theme he has started. Now, I had asked for May 10th, as then I could choose what I wanted to preach, as my friend who is preaching on the 17th is able to do. He gave me a section of Psalm to look at:

Psalm 119:33-40, “Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes, And I shall keep it to the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keepYour law; Indeed, I shall observe it with my whole heart. Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, For I delight in it. Incline my heart toYour testimonies, And not to covetousness. Turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things, And revive me in Your way. Establish Your word to Your servant, Who is devoted to fearing You. Turn away my reproach which I dread, For Your judgments are good. Behold, I long forYour precepts; Revive me in Your righteousness.”

My prayers and studying were focused on how to tie this verse into the immutability of God and His precepts. If you are a regular reader of my blogs, then you know I have written on the immutability of God already and given that defense, so I will not do that here, nor am I going to in my sermon. Taking that out, I started to think upon and asked God what can He say through me in this Sunday. This is what God gave me to preach.

Psalm 119:33-35 tells us that we should observe His Precepts/Word until the end, then, says “Make me,” which indicates a battle going on within David, not unlike the battle we all struggle with today. What can be called the Old Man (sinful nature) battling the New Man (Salvation), as we see Paul talk about in Romans 7. We need God to do it, as we cannot do it on our own.

1 Samuel 15:29 says, “Furthermore, the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or change His mind, for He is not man who changes his mind.” Malachi 3:6, “For I am the Lord, I do not change.” You can think of precepts like boundaries for our life. We all should have healthy boundaries in our relationships that are aligned with God’s Word.

A boundary is like a fence with a gate. The gate allows good to come into your yard, or boundary, and it also keeps out and helps you get rid of the bad. Whether that is sin in your own life, or allowing sin of other people to effect you as well. Precepts/boundaries protect us and keep us safe. They are for our own good and we can know that since God made these precepts that they are good and pure. We can rely on these boundaries if they are in tune with the immutable precepts of God.

Psalm 36-38 tells us that we are to direct our eyes straight on the path. Again, realizing that we cannot do it on our own and need God to direct our eyes, but have to do it through God. If God is pointing us in a direction that He desires we can know it is the right direction, because God does not change and if He tells us it is good or bad then we can rest assured that it is. All we have to do is obey. James 1:17, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

Lastly, Psalm 39-40 requests God to keep me on that path and protect me from the wrong direction. Knowing we cannot do it on our own, we must ask God to keep us on the path and to guide our ways, because as anyone knows who has tried to make it on their own, we tend to move toward sin or against His precepts. God will not take us in a deceitful direction, and we can rest assured that if He tells us to move in a certain direction we can be sure it is for our own good. Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?”

Taking all this together there are some comforts that we can take away in the fact that God is changeless. For us there are many times that it is good to change. We change from evil ways to righteous ways. Those who are believers changed from condemnation to eternal salvation in regards to eternity. We change our attitudes for the better, and at times for the worst.

As humans with a beginning, which means we are finite, we change. We get older, we think differently at different times, changing our thoughts. We change the way we dress to keep up with the latest fashions. We change the music we listen to. We are a people that change. God is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, and even the name He gave Moses also says that He is infinite, which is “I AM.” Being eternal means He cannot change because He is without end or beginning.

We can rely on what we read within the Scriptures as being what God said with confidence and that certain aspects are not going to change. If God could change His mind then maybe He will one day change His mind on the requirement for Salvation. If God can change His mind then it is possible that He could change His mind about salvation, right? But if He cannot change then we have security in our salvation. For the Muslim they cannot have this confidence, because God can lie and deceive, which is why they live in fear, the wrong kind of fear, because they are hoping their “good” works to out weigh the bad. They have to live like this because their God can change.

We know that He loves us continually and is passionate about us, as is proclaimed all through out Scripture. If He could change then He could change His mind about the way He feels about His creation. Yes, He hates sin, but He longs for relationship with His people. 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord does not delay His promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” A Muslim cannot ever rely on this, because Allah according to their Koran can change and lie and deceive. Of the 99 names they have for their God, the only one that comes close to a relationship is that God is close to your jugular, which is not love at all. It actually means that God can kill you at any moment.

He would not be God at all if He could change. Only something that has a beginning can change from one aspect to another. If you could literally change God’s mind that would mean that you in some way gave a defense that showed God He was wrong in some fashion, whether it is emotionally or logically. He is wrong in the way He is being merciful or wrong in the way He decided to perform an action. Either way that would make you smarter than God. What kind of God would that be? 1 Corinthians 1:25, “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” If God could change that also means that He had a beginning, and a starting point somewhere, which means that someone then had to create Him as well.

Lastly, this change means that we can rest assured that the Word of God that has the precepts of God can be trusted as reliable and preserved throughout the ages. God said His word would not change, that not one jot or tittle would be eliminated from His word. Matthew 5:18, “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.” Luke 16:17, “And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail.”

Through Him we can rest assured that as 2 Timothy 3:16 says, that this book is God breathed and everything in it is true. If God wrote it and cannot change then we can rest assured that if we live by what it tells us then we are pleasing Him. If He can change then we can never know for sure. We know that He is not going to change the way of Salvation through Christ, because He does not change.

Precepts of God are good and will not change, but they will change you and me if we follow them. We are the ones that need to change, and not God. We always want God to do things our way, but in reality life would be so much easier if we did things His way by following the precepts He laid down before us in the Bible.

Psalm 119:38-40, “Establish Your word to Your servant, Who is devoted to fearing You. Turn away my reproach which I dread, For Your judgments are good. Behold, I long for Your precepts; Revive me in Your righteousness.”