Relational Bridges

  ETERNITY IN OUR HEARTS FOR THE NEW YEAR Ecclesiastes 3:11 “Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.” God Has “put eternity in our hearts” so that we might seek after Him. The reality is that apart from His help by revelation and insight given by the Holy Spirit, we will wander about in various degrees of confusion. The reason? We are not God and cannot understand the Infinite with finite minds, broken moral compasses, and vastly limited perspectives. We tend to forget or, for some reason, minimize even in the slightest measure, that salvation is of the Lord…PERIOD! There is no dimension of our lives that we can redeem, transform, heal, salvage, or change to the absolute degree of the holiness God requires of those who will believe and follow Him. God does for us what we could never do. He has, in the Life, Death and Resurrection, and Ascen...

  HOPE-FILLED WAITING “Wait patiently for the Lord, be brave and courage. Yes! Wait patiently for the Lord” Psalm 27:14 “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint!” Isaiah 40:31 If you received notice that you had won a major award and that it would be delivered any day now, you would become expectant. You would check the front stoop to see if it had arrived via Amazon. You would check the mailbox to see if it had come in an envelope. You would race to the door every time the doorbell rang to see if it had come in person. Your sense of anticipation would definitely be heightened as would your sense of sight and hearing. All of us know periods of waiting in life. For the follower of Jesus Christ, our waiting on the Lord is grounded in His promises recorded in His Word, the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 1:20 we read that all the promises of God have been fulfill...

  DO NOT LET THE WORLD SQUEEZE YOU INTO ITS MOLD I Samuel 12:23 “God forbid that I should sin against the Lord by not praying for you.” These were Samuel’s words spoken to Israel after they had rejected God as their king and demanded to have a king like the nations around them. God’s people wanted to be like the nations around them. There has been an ongoing demonic assault against the people of God and the purposes of God, tempting us to adapt ourselves to the paganism of the culture around us. You see, paganism is a mechanistic religious form that runs on a “quid-pro-quo” philosophy. If I comply with the assumed requirements of the gods, then the gods are obligated to give me what I want. It is kind of how Congress works in relation to lobbyist groups. Israel got seduced by pragmatics rather than trusting in the Lord. The pagan nations around Israel had gods of the harvest, gods of the rain, gods of fertility, gods of war, city gods of protection, etc. The God of Abraham...

 UNDERSTANDING GOD'S MERCY Matthew 13:58 “ And so He did only a few miracles there because of their unbelief.” I have heard it said that somehow the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through the Lord Jesus Christ was somehow limited by the unbelief of the folks in His hometown of Nazareth. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Nothing limits the power of God nor His grace give to sinners to redeem, heal, and restore them to God. What we see is the mercy of God towards broken people. He will not reinforce unbelief. If someone refuses to believe who Jesus Christ is and what He has done, the Lord in His mercy will not reinforce that unbelief by manifesting His healing and delivering power upon the one who does not believe. Otherwise, we broken humans might come to think that we can get from God what we want because we want it, not because we have surrendered our lives to Him in faith. Christianity is not refined paganism where we get God to do what we want because we h...

  TIMING Years ago, I head an old preacher say, “The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” That statement is an offense to the culture being worshipped world-wide today. There is a lust for the immediate, as a line from an old movie stated, “Immediate gratification takes too long!” We want faster internet, immediate responses to our texts, mobile orders at the ready when we walk into Starbucks. What we want, we demand to have NOW. We are masters at justifying ourselves. “Well, we’re engaged already and we’re going to get married anyway, so what’s wrong with us living together and being sexually intimate now?” God’s timing in human relationship is not arbitrary, it is protective and covering. Sad to say, even some who call themselves followers of Jesus Christ choose to justify their living in sexual sin now, because they promise that they will one day get married. The context where sexual intimacy finds its true meaning and purpose is in the covenant of marriage. ...

  THE SIMPLICITY OF AUTHORITY Matthew 8:16-17, 27 16  That evening many demon-possessed people were brought to Jesus. He cast out the evil spirits with a simple command, and he healed all the sick.   17  This fulfilled the word of the Lord through the prophet Isaiah, who said, “He took our sicknesses   and removed our diseases.” 27 The disciples were amazed. “Who is this man?” they asked. “Even the winds and waves obey him!” It is five o’clock in the afternoon in mid-town Manhattan, NYC. Traffic is surging down the hill toward an intersection where the traffic lights are malfunctioning. There is a petite New York City cop standing in the intersection. She is at best, 99 pounds when dripping wet. The onslaught of vehicles bears down upon her. She raises a white-gloved right hand to the five lanes of oncoming traffic, and, low and behold, ALL the busses, taxis and cars stop before entering the intersection. Why? It is certainly NOT because she is like so...

   THE GROUND OF TRUTH The Enlightenment was a period in history, occurring, roughly, between the late16th and 18th century. It was a force that seemed to completely change western culture. That is essentially the world view of those who turned their minds from and their trajectory away from desiring to know God and be known by Him. They embraced an intellectual and philosophical frame of reference for life that centered on the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy. On the surface that sounds like a sophisticated way of looking at things but is fatally flawed. Human reason is not reliable. When one separates themselves from the biblical text as having anything to say to humanity, they miss the fact the that the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden (I know I’ve already lost some of you) did not open any vast warehouse of universal wisdom. It irreversibly damaged and short-circuited the potential of the human brain as...

  WHEN GOD SPEAKS When God speaks, things happen. The Lord God has never spoken an extraneous Word. He has never just flung out a word or phrase as some superfluous aside. If you recall Genesis chapter one, God said: “LIGHT” and light came into being. Out of things that did not exist, God has created all that has been created by the power of His Word. He speaks and what He says happens, becomes, takes place…always. Jesus made eyes for a man born blind. He made mud from saliva, put it on the man where eyes should be and when the man did what He said by going to wash his face, he came back seeing. Lazarus, Jesus’ friend had been dead four days. Lazarus had been wrapped up in burial cloths and placed in a tomb because he was a corpse. There was no residual life in him. Jesus speaks at the opening of the tomb, “Lazarus, come out!” What ever had killed Lazarus disappeared. What had begun to decompose was fully regenerated. A regenerated, brand new cardiopulmonary system began to w...

  Advent 2 Meditation on the Word Words from a hymn this morning, “When Jesus spoke the truth was known. When Jesus walked, the way was shown.” As followers of Jesus Christ, those who believe Him and have received eternal life from Him and the Holy Spirit’s power to live that life, our lives are meant to point beyond ourselves to the Lord, Himself. The Apostle John writes in 1 John:2:5-6 “This is how we know we are in Him: Whoever claims to live in Him must live as Jesus did.” Jesus Christ is not only the Truth, what is eternally right, He is the Way, the only direction bringing us into intimacy with God. And He is the Life, the only way of truly “doing” that flows directly from “being” made new creations by the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist’s message was the same message delivered by the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. It was, “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand!” A true encounter with Jesus will result in a life of repentance, a continuous and continual turning from the world, ...

Isaiah 35:1-10 “Even the wilderness and desert will be glad in those days. The wasteland will rejoice and blossom with spring crocuses. Yes, there will be an abundance of flowers   and singing and joy! The deserts will become as green as the mountains of Lebanon,   as lovely as Mount Carmel or the plain of Sharon. There the  Lord  will display His glory,   the splendor of our God. With this news, strengthen those who have tired hands,   and encourage those who have weak knees. Say to those with fearful hearts,   “Be strong, and do not fear, for your God is coming to destroy your enemies.   He is coming to save you.” And when He comes, He will open the eyes of the blind   and unplug the ears of the deaf.   The lame will leap like a deer,   and those who cannot speak will sing for joy! Springs will gush forth in the wilderness,   and streams will water the wasteland. The parched ground will become a pool,   and sp...

 THE DANGER OF IDOLATRY Psalm 135:15-18 “The  idols   of the nations are merely things of silver and gold, shaped by human hands. They have mouths but cannot speak, and eyes but cannot see.   They have ears but cannot hear, and mouths but cannot breathe .   And those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in them. ” Tim Keller once wrote that we make idols of almost anything. “ Idols are usually good things that we turn into ultimate things because we look to them to give us significance and security that can only come from God.” (The Psalms of Jesus, December 9) Interestingly, the word “idol” in Hebrew is also translated as “demon.” This has even greater import when the Psalmist says that those who make idols, those who worship them, become like them. It is a common fallacy, a commonly held deception to think that someone can somehow be spiritually “neutral.” Some might like to think they can be a sort of spiritual Switzerland. No one ...

  FOCUSING ON THE TRUTH Matthew 1:24-25 " When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife.     But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born. And Joseph named him Jesus. ” Mark 6:3 "Then they scoffed, “He is just a carpenter, the son of Mary  and the brother of James, Joseph,  Judas, and Simon. And his sisters live right here among us.” They were deeply offended and refused to believe in him.” There is a theological postulation that has been asserted for some time by some that has no grounding in the Word of God written. It is not to be found in the recorded by Apostolic eye-witness to the life of the Lord Jesus. Falsehood does not become more credible because it has been asserted even for centuries. This religious proposition appeals to the mystical and somewhat Gnostic ideology that would have Mary, the mother of Jesus, to have remained a perpetual virgin.  A s recorded by Matthew...

  ADVENT 1 2023 On this first Sunday of the season of Advent, as I was worshipping in song, I heard a line in the Advent hymn that made me stop and say to myself, “WHAT?!?” The line was that Jesus Christ came to earth to “taste our sadness.” I may seem poetic, but it is so far from the truth, I got stirred up! The Incarnation of God the Eternal Son did not happen so that Jesus Christ could “taste our sadness.” He came the first time to drink that vile cup of sin and death to its dregs and wipe the cup clean of the sum- total of the sin of the whole human race for all time. Jesus Christ didn’t “taste, He drank, fully consumed the cup of God’s wrath against sin and sinners for all of us. Humanity’s rebellion against the love of God had sentenced us all to eternal separation from God, from all goodness to an eternal torment in the hell that had been prepared for the devil and his fallen angels. We believed the lie that life could be lived in completeness, that human beings ...