Relational Bridges

  THERE'S STILL TIME He's coming soon. There's still time to turn from the deception that sin can make your life whole and complete or that you can restore your own soul. Turn to Jesus in humble honesty and receive the forgiveness He has already paid for on your behalf. He is ready and waiting to give you a new heart and a new spirit, to give you eternal life and a living, dynamic relationship with Himself. He loves you and wants to make you whole again, fully human. Time is short. Do not procrastinate as procrastination is nothing more than disobedience in slow motion. Turn to Jesus Christ and live!

  THE FEAR OF THE LORD The "fear of the Lord" (which is the beginning of wisdom) is not being scared of God. It is being terrified of being apart from Him. Life without the Lord Jesus isn't life; it's barely even existence. It's certainly not being fully human.

  1 John 2:15-17   “ Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.   16  For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world.   17  And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever. ” Jesus said, “If you love Me you will do what I command.” His commandments are not the impossible demands of a tyrant, but the Truth, that, if lived in the Holy Spirit’s power heal, protect, guide, rescue, restore and renew the life of anyone willing to take Jesus Christ at His Word. When God gives a command, in that command is a promise to empower us to do it. Loving means obeying, actually submitting ourselves to the thing or one we obey in order to draw life, meaning and ...

  A MAN BORN BLIND   When someone is born blind, they have no reference to the statement, “What a beautiful summer’s blue sky!” They can’t fathom the words, “What a dark and moonless night.” They have no sense of sight. What appears normative for sighted folk has no ground for thought in them. So it is with those who are spiritually blind, as we all have been since birth. The DNA of Adam was passed onto the whole human race; the result of “the fall”. At the core of who you are as a human being, you were born spiritually dead, spiritually blind, and deaf. There is no one more ineffective than a dead person. They cannot change their condition. Even a person, moments before physically alive, if their heart stops, they need immediate help from the outside to try and restart their heart by whatever means there are at hand. That is why the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ seems foolish to the world. Unaware that they are lost, why, they reason, do they need to be found? Bli...

  Ezekiel 34:25-28 25  “I will make a covenant of peace with my people and drive away the dangerous animals from the land. Then they will be able to camp safely in the wildest places and sleep in the woods without fear.   26  I will bless my people and their homes around my holy hill. And in the proper season I will send the showers they need. There will be showers of blessing.   27  The orchards and fields of my people will yield bumper crops, and everyone will live in safety. When I have broken their chains of slavery and rescued them from those who enslaved them, then they will know that I am the  Lord .   28  They will no longer be prey for other nations, and wild animals will no longer devour them. They will live in safety, and no one will frighten them. ” God is speaking to His people Israel in this prophetic passage. The same promises are also part of the blessing of His people now, those who have trusted Him for salvation. God, Hi...

  St. Patrick's Breastplate Prayer I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness of the Creator of creation. I arise today through the strength of Christ with His Baptism, through the strength of His Crucifixion with His Burial, through the strength of His Resurrection with His Ascension, through the strength of His descent for the Judgment of Doom. I arise today through the strength of the love of Cherubim in obedience of Angels, in the service of the Archangels, in hope of resurrection to meet with reward, in prayers of Patriarchs, in predictions of Prophets, in preachings of Apostles, in faiths of Confessors, in innocence of Holy Virgins, in deeds of righteous men. I arise today, through the strength of Heaven: light of Sun, brilliance of Moon, splendour of Fire, speed of Lightning, swiftness of Wind, depth of Sea, stability of Earth, firmness of Rock. I arise today, through God's st...

  Yaweh Jireh: The Lord, our Provider   Jireh means so much more than “Provider.” It means “The One Who sees ahead.” The Lord saw ahead that Abraham was going to obey Him in offering up Isaac on the mountain and sent ahead a ram caught in the thicket. The Lord saw ahead a massive famine was coming and sent Joseph ahead to Egypt to save nations and peoples. The Lord saw ahead that Haman was going to destroy all the Jews in Medo-Persia and He sent Esther ahead to become Xerxes’ queen to save His people from destruction. The Lord from the beginning saw ahead the relentless hopelessness of humanity, dead in sin and lost to the relationship God had created us for and He spoke that He was going to send ahead His own Eternal Son, to be born of a woman to take the sin of the world upon Himself so that we might be saved from eternal separation from Him. God sees ahead and sends His provision for whatever is ahead, things we cannot see or imagine, so that when we arrive at...

  Temptation is not sin. Internalizing and personalizing the temptation and acting on it, is sin. We will be shocked at what we have the capacity to do. God isn’t shocked. He knows exactly what we are capable of: pride, religiosity, fear, unbelief, lust, greed, rage, murder, gossip, malice, sloth, envy, bitterness, resentment, hatred, theft, sexual sin of all sorts, self-righteousness, unforgiveness and the list could go one and on. When attacked, the first tactic of the demonic, it to try and isolate us, as if no one else had ever had his mind, will or emotions attacked in this way…especially no follower of Jesus. That is a very useful lie that Satan uses. But we know better. Hebrews 4:14-16 “14 So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe. 15 This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for He faced all of the same temptations we do, yet He did not sin. 16 So let us come boldly to the thron...

  Hebrews 13:20-21 “Now may the God of peace— Who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep,   and ratified an eternal covenant with His blood— may He equip you with all you need   for doing His will. May He produce in you,   through the power of Jesus Christ, every good thing that is pleasing to Him.   All glory to Him forever and ever! Amen. ” It is because of what God has done, and ONLY because of what God has done, that we not only have been given a new heart, a new spirit and a new life, but God empowers us to live that Life. How? We are empowered to live a new Life because Jesus Christ comes and makes His permanent home in us to live out His life within us by the Holy Spirit. God equips us to DO His will, not merely give mental assent to the goodness of God’s will, but to do it! It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that God produces in us and demonstrates through us every good thing that is pleasing to Him. The f...

 END OF DAYS There is coming a time, and it seems closer now than farther away, when a world “leader” will arise at the culmination of the chaos that we see brewing all around us today. He will promise peace and safety for the whole world IF ONLY the nations will surrender their sovereignty to him. His claim to being able to provide world peace will be preceded with sensory-overwhelming signs, miracles and wonders. These phenomena will not confirm anything he claims, but will proceed his claims so as to cast a spell of awe over the peoples of the earth. In direct contrast, the miracles done by Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit through the church down through the ages have been manifested to confirm the Word of God proclaimed. Jesus Christ even did many miracles away from the crowds to not call attention to Himself. True Holy Spirit signs and miraculous wonders will always point to Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the only Savior of humanity. The demonic signs and wonders done by ...

  BEING LED BY THE LORD When God calls you to follow Him, He doesn’t give you a road-map. He gives you Himself. God will lead where we can’t conceive of going. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. That is why the Holy Spirit works in us constantly to renew our minds that the mind of Christ we have been given demolishes the strongholds of thought that our flesh has relied on as “true”. Those thoughts that try and exalt themselves in pretense above the Knowledge of God must be dismantled and swept away. It’s now God’s Word defines who we are, what the Holy Spirit has made us to be by uniting us into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: new creations given a life we have never lived and could never conceive of living apart from the Holy Spirit living it within us and through us. The Lord leads us by His Word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. It’s not a halogen spot, because we, in seeing what’s up ahead, would try to figure out how to get...

  The world demands your conformity, caring nothing for your integrity.

  THE DAYS OF NOAH AND LOT The world today, transculturally, has gone the way of the world as it was when Noah was building the Ark. For over a hundred years he warned the people of the coming judgement of God. He plead with them to turn from worshipping themselves and seeing themselves as the ground of truth and reality. He cried out to them to turn from going heedlessly their own way. He reminded them that their way of living was not producing anything they would want to keep or preserve. Violence and injustice were normative for them. The world today, transculturally, has gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, ignoring the cry of the widow and the orphan, giving evil where good was most needed. Confusion about human nature flowed from their worship of their own passion and lust. They had become blinded and the only “light” that they had was darkness. They reviled anyone who refused to agree with them. They demanded that all people approve and condone anything they chose to declar...

  HOPE 1 Thessalonians 1:3 Followers of Jesus Christ have an enduring hope because of Who Jesus is. It’s a hope that lasts, its eternal because it’s grounded in The Eternal One, God the Son. Because of Who Jesus is, all He has done and continues to do in us with the promise to bring to completion what He has begun, we have hope. It’s not wistful thinking. It’s not grounded in circumstances; it’s grounded in Him. No matter how many promises God has made, they are “YES” in Christ Jesus. That is why we can agree with our “AMEN!” That hope will never bring us shame because the Holy Spirit has been poured out within us like a flood, sealing all God’s promises in us. The “River of Living Water” that the Holy Spirit is, will keep working in us to reproduce the character and obedience of Jesus, Himself. We are people of hope.

  WHEN THE GOSPEL IS RECEIVED When the Gospel is received, embraced, and surrendered to it does major things in the life of the one who believes. It changes the way people live. They turn from idolatry to serve the True and Living God. Idols are those things in life people look to, sacrificing time and resources to try and find meaning, purpose, esteem and recognition, safety and hope. Those things are not inherent in anything this present world system has to offer, regardless of the plausibility of the promises that are made. Wholeness of life is not the product of human effort. Wholeness of life is only found in God. Wholeness and soundness of life are only known when God, Himself, comes and makes His home in you. Only He can restore a human life into wholeness. That is what salvation means. When a person believes what God has done through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, they see that all they have ever hoped for has not been done by human effort, but by the power...