The Gospel according to…Job.

Yesterday I had a great opportunity to share the gospel. I knew a few weeks in advance so I spent the time preparing my message. I like to share how God is working in my life so I prepped to share the gospel in Numbers. I struggled with it. I worked on it. I prayed about it. I wrote out the message, rewriting it over and over.

Saturday morning I had opportunity to sit down with friends, share a great breakfast, a good cup of coffee and chat. We have been talking for weeks how God uses people, events, struggles and even dogs to teach us His ways. Then we got into Job chapter 1. That’s when the disagreements started. Please note, contrary to popular opinion i.e the news, it is possible for a group of people with differing opinions to discuss their differences in a reasonable and rational way. This should be especially true when the group is a body of believers in Christ.

However, the more we talked the more convinced I became that God would have me speak on Job 1 on Sunday. Our disagreement centered on whether God caused or God allowed the series of events that happened to him. Every one of us who have been in ministry whether preaching, teaching, counseling or discipling know how I felt. I had spent weeks preparing the message for Sunday and now here it was less than 24 hours away and I was starting to read Job 1, intent to follow God’s lead and see what I could learn about the life of arguably the  second most  persecuted man in history. Christ being the first.

You know the story but I hope my words challenge you to look again at the life of Job. God’s own description of Job included his upright character, his blameless lifestyle, his fear of God and his turning from evil. Having God describe him like that humbles me. No one I know including God would describe me that way. But what jumped out at me most and what separates Job from most people I have ever talked to who have gone through serious trouble was his response.

Worship!

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

We could get into many discussions on Job and we could spend years studying this one great book. We could talk about  his wife’s response…curse God and die or the counselors God sent to comfort him but I challenge you to look at the another opposite response, from God.

After sending (or allowing) all these ‘horrific’ things into Job’s life all at once, God didn’t pat him on the back, hug him and say, it is ok Job, I still love you. How does this compare with how we respond to those who come to us sharing their troubles? If someone comes crying to you because of fear, anxiety, depression, worry, marriage problems, children problems, financial problems, etc. how will you disciple them?

 God confronted Job. Get dressed, stand up like a man and answer me…Where you there when the foundations of the world were formed? After blasting Job for 3 chapters, Job was crushed even more than he was after losing everything. He finally saw God for who He is. There was nothing he could say. We all need to get to this point. We need to help everyone God sends our way to get to the point of seeing our absolute need for the Savior.

He repented!

When he repented, God restored him twofold.

I thank God for changing my direction, in 1987 when I was headed for destruction and Saturday when He lead me to learning about Job. Pray for me that I become blameless, upright, fearing God and turning from evil but more importantly please pray that God teach me how to respond like Job in worship and repentance.

I love to share what God is doing and how He is teaching me I thank John Ballard of Shell Banks for the opportunity to share His Word.

If for any reason, at any time I can help you in any way my ministering friends, please let me know. I am here, for you.

Please do me a favor and share this with your friends in the ministry: pastors, ministry leaders, deacons, elders, teachers and those active in making disciples. Thank you for all you do, for Him.

jeff

The Old Deluder

Six score and nine years before Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine and John Adams penned the constitution John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the Old Deluder Act of 1647. It established public schools in America to teach children to read the Bible and thus defeat Satan.

Imagine, the purpose of our schools was to keep children from being deceived by Satan. Harvard was founded only 11 years earlier with this stated purpose:

After God had carried us safely to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

In the Harvard student handbook, you find:

1.     The purpose of your studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. John 17:3

2.     Jesus is the foundation of all learning. Proverbs 2:3

3.     Since the Lord only gives wisdom, seek Him in prayer.

4.     Every student shall spend time at least twice a day studying Scripture.

5.     He will be ready to give account of what he has learned, applying spiritual truth. Psalm 119:130

6.     He will carefully retain God and His truth, so He does not give them over to a reprobate mind. 2 Thessalonians 2:11, Romans 1:28

Note that the Scripture references are not mine but put there by the board of Harvard.

Fast forward about 320 years (16 score) and if you were sitting in my second-grade class at Cahaba Heights Elementary you would have heard our teacher share a devotion from the Bible, then we would recite the 23^rd Psalm and the pledge of allegiance then the principal would come over the intercom and pray for our safety, our learning, our families and the day God had given us.

Now, 50 years later, not only have we given up on teaching the Bible, but we have thrown out everything connected to it while at the same time embracing secular humanism, atheism, psychology, and almost all other ‘religions’.

We tout it is progressive thinking and we pat ourselves on the back for our wise rise to self-autonomy but the very roots of this come from a very old source: Satan himself.

In Genesis chapter 2 God said, ““You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ^lyou shall not eat, for in the day that you eat⁴ of it you ^mshall surely die.” One rule. One tree. Everything else Adam and Eve wanted to do or eat was theirs.

But Satan was crafty. He cast doubt in Eve’s mind... ’Did God actually say…then he created unbelief, you won’t die, you will become like God knowing good and evil.

The puritans who saw the benefits of using the Bible for education, the framers of the constitution who viewed the God of the Bible as authority for establishing our laws, the pastors who later started the Great Awakening all looked not to some unknown or unknowable God but the God of creation, for strength, for wisdom, for education, for provision, for everything they needed.

Society tells us, especially educators, point quickly to the vast amount of knowledge we have accumulated in the last 150 years yet like Adam and Eve we bite the apple (Ever notice the Apple logo with the bite out of it?) of temptation wanting to believe we can be like God or even better. * We think we are smarter, having proved there is no God or revealing Him now dead. We believe we are wiser for we now ‘know’ so much we can’t seem to find in the Bible. We know we are more compassionate for we continually must go in and provide for those who suffer through hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes and school shootings, since God won’t do it. Most of all we know for sure there is no hell and no Satan to run it.

Maybe, just maybe, our forefathers were smart because they depended on God for answers. Today, ironically, we declare our independence not only of England 242 years ago but of the King who required we serve God the way he wanted.

I think maybe it is time for another revolution, one where we repent and learn to worship God the way HE wants us to worship. This Independence Day let’s declare our dependence on Him.

Here is the link to the movie trailer, Monumental.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x58tsql

It will challenge the American history you learned in school.

Also, I have attached a copy of America at the Crossroads, a study guide for those who seek to learn from Scripture and apply it to the nightly news. The study guide is free, but you can purchase the DVD teaching series at: https://www.precept.org/

C.S. Lewis wrote Screwtape Letters, his way of thinking through just how Satan ‘deludes’ us every day. I have attached of copy of this great must-read classic.

jeff

·       One of the books I am working on will be titled Iàgod, taking a serious look at how we in America today think we are better than God.