The Fundamental Blog

There are many opportunities, at this time of the year, to encounter those who will encourage you to give thanks to the Lord for all His blessings. This is something that we should not hold back until the holiday is upon us, but rather, we should make every day, a day of thanksgiving. Still, at this time of the year we are especially drawn to gather together in thanks among our family, friends and loved ones. Thanks is only rightly directed to the Lord. Even when we are blessed by those who are among us, we owe our thanks to the Lord because it is Him working through those who bless our lives. Thanksgiving is rooted in worship, it is owed through our prayers and needs to be embodied in our daily lives.

As far as an American holiday, I think I like this one the best. Yes, it has become largely secularized but it seems to me that it remains the one day of the year when families are put in the forefront. Easter stands as the most important of the Christian holidays, it far outweighs Christmas in importance. The marking of the death and resurrection of our Saviour causes His birth to pale in comparison. After all, all of us were born into this life, but who can claim resurrection? Now, neither of these holidays, nor any other we normally celebrate, are mandated by Scripture, and every year they are all becoming less holy than they were intended, and more commercialized than ever. Thanksgiving remains the paragon of family values.

The first Thanksgiving in 1621 was, as most of us know, the grateful expression of thanks to God for the first successful harvest in the, “New World.” Today, especially in the farmlands, this is still the basis for the day. With the fields harvested and prepared for winter, it is only fitting to thank God for the bounty which He has supplied. But what if you’re not a farmer? What if you lost your job this year? What if it feels like there is nothing to be thanking God for? The government is doing all sorts of things that are scaring the sensible person to death and it seems like we are on the downward slope to destruction with no way to stop the chaos! There is still plenty of room for thankfulness.

The offering of thanks has always been a very important part of the human relationship with God, and with God’s relationship with us. At the dedication of the rebuilt wall of Jerusalem, Nehemiah assigned two large choirs to give thanks as they walked along the rebuilt walls of the city. In Psalm 95:2 we are told to, “… come before Him with thanksgiving …” And in Psalm 100:4, “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise.” In any situation there can be found a reason to be thankful. Even if it is only that we had opened our eyes this morning, which reveals that God has found us worthy to live another day for His glory, there should be thankfulness.

I know that there is much in this world to drag us down and sometimes the effort of enduring is almost unbearable, but God is faithful and His Word is the truth. In Philippians 4:6 we see the familiar words telling us, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving present your requests to God.” I believe that our problem is perceptional, and I struggle with this as much as anyone else. We have to keep our hearts grounded in the Word and trust that there is a reason that God has brought us to this point, to the trials we face every day. God has a plan and even though we may not be able to see the final picture from our limited viewpoint, we must say, like Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

When the bottom seems to be falling away and we are left without a hand-hold, we need to go to Scripture. Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” So if our lives seem upside down, we need to rejoice, (that is if we truly do love Him), because this tells us that though we may feel lost at the moment, God is working some extraordinary good in our lives. This is cause to be thankful. Are we facing a trials? Give thanks because it can only mean that God is growing us through it. God has a plan for each of us and it is a perfect plan. God’s plans can not be anything less than perfect and we must believe that if there were a better, more perfect way, to accomplish His goals, then He would surely be using them! So we can be thankful that God has found us worthy of the testing, and rely on the promise that no matter how unlikely it may seem to us, God is refining us through the most perfect process imaginable, His!

Our worship of God is the one area of our lives, above all others, that we want to have be the most acceptable possible and so then thanks is mandatory. “… let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe …” Hebrews 12:28. In our worship we are directed to come with thanks and Christians, we have so much to be thankful for. We, that are saved and being daily perfected in Christ are the recipients of the highest gift of God, something for which we can never hope to adequately offer thanks. Once we realize this, everything else is merely icing on the cake!

The example of the Pilgrims back in 1621 is as vital today as it was back then. They offered thanks to God for the provision He had supplied to carry them through the long cold months of winter. They rightly ascribed their thankfulness to God, not to themselves for their hard work, not to the Indians who had taught them the techniques necessary to produce the crop, but to God through whom all things have their substance and are held together. To us, the gift of life through Jesus Christ is the incomparable blessing that demands our attention, our faith and our thankfulness. “So then just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord continue to live in Him, rooted and built up in Him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught and overflowing in thankfulness.” Colossians 2:6-7.

If we suffer, we suffer for Him and if we prosper, we prosper by His will. Since before the beginning of time there has been a plan and though we can not see the end from our position in it, we have already received something so wonderful that the powers of Hell can not shake it. Our debt of gratitude is so overwhelming that our thankfulness can not be contained but is to be overflowing. The same misfortunes which the worldlings may curse is to be met with glad hearts by those of us who have responded to the call of Christ. What they receive as oppression, we can accept as preparation for a greater blessing. We must be salt and light for the world to see, be gracious in our relations with all, and proclaim the good news to a dark world whenever the opportunity presents itself.

I pray that if you, or your loved ones, are traveling this holiday, you find the roads easy and the blessings obvious. I hope that you find yourselves among those whom you love. In all the celebration, whether you have little or much, I pray that you recognize that it is God who is the founder of your feast. I also ask, (having served in the armed forces myself through holidays past), that you remember those who can not be with the ones they love. To all those who are serving our country in whatever capacity, offer a special prayer of thanks because it is because of the grace of God through men and women like those, that we can enjoy the freedom we take for granted each day. Teach your children to understand the importance of God in their lives, in all we do and as the reason for all of our celebrations; then they might truly understand that all thanksgiving is really intended to be …


All for the Glory of Christ

Sometimes the words just flow and other times they seem as though they must be forced from my fingertips. This has been a difficult week for those of us living in the United States, we have had to reconcile the horror of the mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas and the memorial service there, with the Veteran’s Day tribute to all of America’s servicemen and women the very next day. It seems as though the conservative media is hoping that the senselessness that led to the death of so many was stemmed by the ignorance of political correctness; this only because if it was, in fact, something else, it is too sinister to imagine. Is this a part of the fulfillment of end-times prophesy? I don’t know.

There are many, too many, who would have you believe that everything that happens is the manifestation of the concluding chapters in the book of Revelation. They can tie the pandemic of H1N1 flu to the end times just as easily as they can the proposition of global warming. They may claim that the attitude of Iran is the embodiment of the biblical resurgence of, “Babylon the Great,” getting ready to descend again upon Israel. Some would even have you believe that they can predict exactly when Christ will return. They can not. Jesus told us that, “… not even the Son knows the hour …” But as we look around who can deny that the days seem darker and darker?

It is not important to know when Jesus will return for His bride, the church, but it is very important that we live as though it were going to happen in the next few minutes. There are still some things that must occur before Jesus can come back, in power, to wage war against the evil of this world and cast out the serpent of old, once and for all, one of which is the rapture of the church. However; there is nothing that must still be fulfilled before the rapture of the faithful happens. Jesus could come for us before I finish writing this article, or before you finish reading it!

Still, people run to and fro calling out, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” They point out that so much is wrong in the world today that the end must be right around the corner, but even so, they don’t live as though they believe their own professions of calamity. These are but the beginnings of birth pains and there is yet worse to come. Consider, for a moment, how bad our world is right now. It’s a mess. Our leaders don’t represent the truth, or even agree that truth exists, they act as though they have all the answers to all the problems we face and though Jesus taught that a house divided against itself must fall, there care not one whit that they are tearing the fabric of faith apart. Good is called evil and evil is called good. There is an incredible amount of biblical corollary to be seen every day.

Granted, the world is in sad shape. But do you realize that the church is still here, in the world! It is the bride of Christ that is restraining the evil that Satan would love to unleash. If it is this bad today, what will it be once the church is taken up to be with the Lord, forever in the air? We are only hearing the rumors of what is to come. The description of the tribulation period that we have been allowed to see in the book of Revelation is beyond comprehension. The terrible wrath of God, poured out on the non-believer and un-repentant is so devastating that most of us choose to not even read it. I can only thank God that the church will not have to endure that wrath, and that we will be lifted out before that great and terrible day.

Why do we not consider the reality of the truth of God instead of the whimsy of self appointed heretics. Global Warming is a fine example. Global Warming WILL destroy the planet! Not the excess of carbon emissions which are thought to be depleting the Ozone layer and allowing the sun to melt the ice caps, no ; the Global Warming that will destroy the earth is that caused by the judgment of fire which will fall from Heaven, purify the earth and reveal that which is worthy and consume all that is not. This is what God has forecast in His Word. Society replaces the truth of God and in it’s stead leaves the fantasy of misguided humans because we like what they say better, even if it isn’t true.

Man is sinful and desperately wicked beyond all measure, we are all bound for Hell, (a very real place by the way), without the grace offered in Jesus Christ by faith. But since we don’t like the idea of risking the self esteem of the lemmings, lets all be fundamentally good creatures that occasionally do bad things. That’s a much nicer view of humanity. Jesus the only way to Heaven? No, no, no… Oprah tells us that all religions are the same and that Christ is but one way, not THE WAY, to be reconciled with God; and how can you dispute Oprah? She has more money than God Himself right? Surely anyone with that degree of wealth and success must be right, besides, she has a spirituality that makes so much more sense to the depraved human psyche.

Wars, and rumors of wars. Gays now demand rights, and are given protections that have no basis in right, and if we speak the truth against the things that God reveals as abomination, we are liable to be prosecuted. If we maintain that Jesus Christ is the ONLY means of salvation, and in that belief exclude all who do not believe, than we are guilty of hate-speak against all the other religions of the world; even though we know we are right. When we stand up for the rights that our founding fathers penned which are declared as God given, and inalienable, we are in danger of prison. We are in line to be persecuted for erecting a cross, or other Christian emblem where others might see it but we allow the public warning system in an American city to be perverted into a device for calling the Muslim community to worship 5 times a day, (isn’t that at least as offensive to the Christian as anything we are accused of doing to anyone else?).

We are being forced to allow an education system to foist upon our children the morally relative views of a world that has gone crazy. They don’t like absolute truth so they make up their own. We can not mention God in the classroom but have to stand by and see the children be inundated with the idea that there is no absolute truth except for the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. Are we in the end times? I don’t know, but it is sure getting harder to make sense of the foolishness that we see all around us each day. So what can we do? Pray!

I doubt that we will ever be able to stand unless we first get comfortable on our knees. Read and study the Bible. Get into God’s Word and find out what it says for yourself. Let the Holy Spirit teach you the truths of God as He has for countless others over the centuries. Learn about the full armor of God and wear it daily, it is our only hope of bearing up until the day we are taken out of this world. Wars and rumors of war, you bet! Look, we are in it whether we like it or not. We have to train ourselves to know the truth and then come what may, we must, (and by the grace of God will), be able to defend the faith, maintain the dignity of integrity and face the battle which is…


All for the Glory of Christ