New Testament

Jehovah, what does this name mean to you?

/ Tracy Eldridge / Leave a comment

The Hebrew word Jehovah means He who Causes to Become or God.

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” Luke 2:11 “Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ.” Acts 2:36

In the New Testament, this word is used as a reference to the fact that Jesus is the Lord. He is never called Jehovah, but He is equal with God because He has always been part of the triune Godhead. Our Savior, Jesus, did not think it was beneath Him to come as a common baby, born to a virgin from the house and lineage of David and who was betrothed to a man, Joseph, who was also from the line of David.

This was prophesied many years before His birth, and God knew that this was to be the way even from the beginning. The Promise was given when God told the serpent: Gen 3:15  And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Jesus’ birth was told about all through Scripture, yet He was never referred to as Jehovah, even though He is part of the Trinity. He can do all things and still does because He is our Creator. God loves all of us and He has given us the opportunity to come to Him through Jesus. All that we have to do is to decide to believe in Him and accept Him as our Savior. We cannot help Him to save us, we can’t add to our salvation because He has done all of the work for us.

We also have trouble believing that the gift of God is free, which may be why many people haven’t made that decision yet. So, what are you waiting for? Do you know for certain that you will be here tomorrow or next week? Can you tell with absolute certainty that you won’t die next month or even next week? If you can’t, then I suggest that you get in touch with God through Jesus and ask Him to forgive you for waiting so long, and make sure to ask Jesus into your life as your Savior.

We have the choice to be servants of ourselves or of God, which would you rather be? Considering that I can’t do anything or make anything from nothing, and you can’t either, I would rather be God’s servant than be my own! The love of God is the best reward that you can possibly hope for and even if your financial situation doesn’t improve in this life, eternity will be much better than all the wealth in the world!

Your life and mine are worth a lot to God because He care for each of us and regardless of your own opinion of your life, God cares deeply for you and what happens in your life. He watches over  you and your family no matter what, so give Him your life and your eternity will be secure regardless of the economic situation in the world.


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Irrational belief

/ Tracy Eldridge / 15 Comments

“If there is a textbook example of being irrational, then irrationality believes in something without any evidence.” – Atheist reference to Christianity

What about the seemingly universal belief, in most of academia, in evolution? Do they truly have proof of something evolving into another type/kind of animal? Is there a fossil of an evolutionary form that anyone can recognize as being between (transitional form) from one animal and another?

The most famous claim that I am aware of is that whales came from hippo-sized land animals many millions of years ago, and yet there is not one fossil that has been found that shows such a transformation. It didn’t happen overnight, because evolution takes millions of years, right? This “hippo” just didn’t jump into the ocean and its legs automatically shrank to the size of flippers?! Irrationality and insanity go hand in hand it seems. Thinking that just by belief and the so-called “fact” that there is no evidence for such a thing happening automatically makes evolution the correct assumption! Really?!?

Come on, if there was a shred of evidence that I could look at and perceive that one animal is changing/evolving into another, then I would believe it. But, there isn’t!

The statement at the beginning of this article is really a definition for a type of faith, so this person is not talking of irrationality it is really a jab at Christianity. Actually, it is a definition of “blind faith”, the kind which goes along with things like theories that have no proof but if enough people teach it for long enough it is taken as fact.

Christian faith is not blind faith, it is backed up by history and by eyewitness accounts from historical documents, so the recorded stories in the Bible (Old and New Testaments) can be traced to historically documents and other proofs. Can anyone show proof positive that evolutionary processes took place to create man or are those skeletons just skeletons of apes from thousands of years ago?

I don’t think that there will be any such evidence because it doesn’t exist! Many of the biological life that has been on earth since its creation are still in the same forms that they always were to begin with, so where is the proof of evolution?

Belief in evolution is backed up by this phrase: Insanity that is backed up by enough people to make it acceptable to all.

If you don’t want to believe in Christian beliefs or an afterlife or anything to do with the Bible, then do what most people do when they find something that they don’t like…change the channel! Don’t listen to Christian radio or to television programs that have things which you don’t agree with in them. That is exactly what Christians do! We try to tell people what our faith tells us to say, just as Muslims or Mormons do, but when we do it we are called insensitive, irrational, and narrow minded. Any other religion in the world is tolerated except Christianity.

So, if you want to be irrational then go ahead. I just want to ask one simple question: “What if my faith and its beliefs are right?”

The Bible, God’s Word

/ Tracy Eldridge / 1 Comment

I watched the entire series on the History Channel this past month and I was impressed. They didn’t make fun of it or anything in it and it got some people interested in the Word of God, so it accomplished what it was supposed to.

Many people don’t think that the Word is viable today because of its age but no one questions college professors when they assign the Iliad and it is an ancient story too. There are fewer actual copies of it than there are of the Bible, yet there are many people who still don’t think that the Bible is true. The reason behind this is easy to find and it starts in the first book of the Bible, Genesis.

Satan tempted Adam and Eve and got them to rebel against a command that God had given them, ever since then there have been questions about the veracity of the words contained in it. Yet, the prophecies in the Old Testament have nearly all came true. The ones concerning Jesus were fulfilled when He came and through His teaching, and crucifixion and resurrection they were verified. Whether people choose to believe is totally under their own control.

For many people, I think it is their ability to choose that is the stumbling block in their ability to follow Jesus. We like having the freedom to choose but it is used against us because our nature chooses not to follow Christ until we have come to a point where we know that we can’t control our lives on our own anymore. Some people choose to use drugs or alcohol to numb their perception of life, but this is only a temporary, chemical induced feeling and it doesn’t last.

The Bible shows us that people tend to choose their own ways over the ways of God and following Him. All through the Old Testament, Israel would choose to follow God until things started going good, then they would turn to whatever the people surrounding them were worshiping. At which point, God would send someone like the Babylonians or Assyria to take them as slaves until they decided that they needed God again.

In our technological lives today, we don’t see the need for God and His Word until there is a real turning point in our life brought on by something in our life like a death in the family or cancer that comes suddenly to our attention. When these things happen, we realize that we need someone who can do something about this and for many people that someone is God. Doctors can’t cure everything and many times the treatment for cancer is worse than the disease since it poisons not only the cancer cells but the rest of the body as well.

Can we trust God’s Word? Absolutely! Because it has been proven by archaeology and history and by prophecy that has come true. The New Testament shows the beginnings of the church after Christ went back to the Father and yet He said that He would return one day. With few exceptions, most of the prophecies concerning the beginning of the “end times” have already come to pass. Israel being a country again and the language of the Jewish nation being spoken again after over one thousand years of being “lost” are but two of the prophecies that have been fulfilled in the past one hundred years.

The Bible is a great book of literature but it is also a collection of stories written at the prompting of God’s Holy Spirit. The reason that I say this is because of the way it is arranged and how many authors are involved in it. The Bible spans more than three thousand years, has sixty-six books written by over forty authors from all walks of life and yet they all point to Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection at one point or another in each book, and toward His second coming from the point of the prophetic books of which most were written at least four hundred or more years before He was born!

Read it, study it but don’t discount it. The Bible is and has been the most important book in the history of mankind and until Jesus comes to set up His kingdom on this earth it will remain so.

Why do we go to church?

/ Tracy Eldridge / 1 Comment

 

Matthew 21:12-13

21:12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, (13) and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

There are many reasons people come to church, some out of habit, and some to see and be seen.  Some come for the four reasons below. Whatever the reason that you come for, come expecting to meet the One who can truly change your life in more ways than one.

We come to worship

This was why God put the church here. We, each of us, make up a part of the body of Christ which is the church. It doesn’t matter what denomination you claim or have been all of your life because if you belong to Christ, you are part of His church, His bride and that is all that matters. There are many so-called “churches” which claim to be the “true church” but the only one that is true is the body of Christ and that is made up of believers! We don’t need a denomination or rules to govern by as long as we are faithful to Jesus and the calling that He came and died for. He rose from that grave so that He can come again to receive us unto Himself and to give us the hope of resurrection. No other religion in the world claims anything like this and not one of them can because Christ is the only One who could.

Christ said to assemble ourselves. We are to do this for encouragement, for support of each other, for many reasons but mostly to praise and honor God. We also come to lend our voices to God in prayer because God’s house is a house of prayer. Each church is a house of prayer. We offer up prayers for praise, for thanksgiving, for our infirmities, for exhortation, for forgiveness and for strength. All of these we need if…

We come to grow

There are people in churches that have never grown as Christians. Why is that? Could it be that we don’t know how? Is it possible that we wait for our preacher to give us all that we need to grow in God’s kingdom? Preachers, Sunday school teachers and other ministers can only give us a certain amount that we need; we have to dive into God’s Word in order to truly grow. Grow in grace toward God and be thankful for the grace given to us. Growing in grace is realizing who we are in Christ and being thankful for the position of grace that we have in Him.

Grow in love toward each other and our love for Christ because He loved us first. Not only that, but love Him because of the forgiveness that we have in Him. When we grow in that kind of love we will love others the way Christ does, not in our human hearts but with His heart and His power.

Grow in the word. We must grow in the knowledge of God’s Word so that we will know Christ more intimately. He is the Word made flesh so if you know God’s Word, you know Jesus even better than you did before. You may even, eventually know Him better than you know yourself. Many of the passages in the Word, in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, directly complement each other. To put it another way, the Old testifies of the New and the New fulfills the Old.

We come to serve

God has work we need to do. The work that He asks us to do is not hard work, most of the time and yet it is vital to His kingdom. God wants all men to come to know Him but if we don’t do the work that we have been called to do, how will they know? We perceive this as hard work, but it is only hard because our “old nature” is against it, we have to do it in love and by the power of Jesus because we can’t do it on our own strength and power.

By the way we are his servants. Jesus called the disciples to be servants to others and He calls us to do the same. Working as Christians for Him is a job that others look at and say that they want someone else to do it. That is the “old you” talking, not the new you that came alive when Jesus entered your heart.

We are his witnesses to win souls. This is a subject that many new Christians, and some who have been in the church for years, never get around to doing. We are supposed to be Jesus’ witnesses just as those that He healed went away and told others about what He had done for them. We are to do the same in order for others to see that what Jesus has to offer, they need in their life. Our “old self” doesn’t want to do this, but we must and we will when we have given our life to Him. Christ is the answer to life’s problems, not drugs or alcohol or money or power.

We come to give of our:

Time, Service, Money, Talents

But most of all we are to give honor to God, with yourself and all that comes with you. A Christian must fulfill God’s will in their life. But, how can you know His will for your life if you don’t read and study His Word so you will know what that will is? Your time is valuable so God honors you when you give any amount to Him and you honor Him as well. When you give your time, you are also giving of a service to God in one way or another whether it is cooking or cleaning the church or anything that you do in His name and for the right reasons.

When we give our money to the church or to worthy causes, we are giving back to Him a part of the blessings that He has given us. When we use our talents, whatever they may be, in a church setting or in our daily lives we are using what God gave us. If we use those talents to praise and worship Him then He gets the glory and honor from it as long as we aren’t being prideful about what we are doing.

All of these things from our time and talents to our service and our money have come from God. They are only ours on loan from Him and yet if we give of them from our heart we are honoring Him and giving Him the glory. Doesn’t Christ deserve at least that much from each of us? We are given a world to live in and the air to breathe so as to learn from Him how we are to serve and be His witnesses to those who may not know Him. God has given us our children and grand-children and friends and all the other people that we know in our community and that we work with and they are blessings to each of us.

They are also the “field” that we are sent into to bring them into God’s family because if we don’t tell them about Him and what He has done for us and will do for them, who will?

Are you a child of God? Have you given your heart and your life to Jesus and asked Him to come into your life and truly make you whole? If you have not, do so today because we are not guaranteed even our next breath, let alone tonight or tomorrow. You may not have a chance at accepting Christ on your “death-bed” because your life could end unexpectedly. I am not saying this to scare you into accepting Jesus but truly we all need Him and if you don’t know Him, you need Him most of all!

 

Can you imagine a world without Jesus?

/ Tracy Eldridge / 1 Comment

I know that today there are may who think they would enjoy a world in which Christianity didn’t exist and one in which Jesus had never been born. Could anyone truly want to live in a world like that?

There are some who would truly enjoy this because it would give them so much “freedom”, in quotes because they would not know what they were free from. The world would be a very ugly place, even more than it is today if Jesus had not been born.

Satan would have completely free reign over our world although God would not allow him to go too far. God’s plan was in place before Satan ever rebelled and convinced a third of the angels to follow him. There couldn’t be a world without Jesus, period!

He is the Word of God who came to ransom our souls from sin and He is the Creator along with the Father and the Holy Spirit. They are the triune God, the Trinity and without them the entire universe would not exist.

It is humbling to know that the Creator of the universe cares for each of us and craves a relationship with us!

My imagination can’t come up with a scenario to illustrate how different the world would be if Jesus had never been involved in it. Put bluntly, the world would not exist as it is today. He is the Word of God incarnate who became a man to die for our sins so that we can be covered by His sacrifice and forgiven of our sins.

To answer the question I will attempt to list some things which would be vastly different if Jesus had not come to die for us.

1. If Jesus had not come, there would be no church of any denomination, only other religions would exist.

2. The only knowledge of God we would have would be from the Jewish Torah (Old Testament) because there would be no New Testament.

3. We would all be looking for the Messiah since He was prophesied to come in the Old Testament. This is why we couldn’t have a world without Jesus, because if He had not come at the time that He did then God would be a liar and therefore He wouldn’t be God.

The promises and prophecies that the Old Testament prophets wrote down came to them through the Holy Spirit so if they weren’t true then the whole story of Creation would be suspect.

God has to keep His promises because He is God and cannot lie, so the Messiah had to come when He did and at the time that He did. He will come back at the appointed time as well so there is no question about His coming, we just don’t know when things will come about. The time will be accomplished in God’s time not our own, just as everything else is and has been from the beginning.

In this world and at this time, we have been pushing God out of every aspect of our lives. From public places and government and schools to television, there are people who cannot stand to hear any reference to the Bible or Jesus or salvation. God has always wanted a relationship with us but humanity, since the fall in Eden, has been on an ego trip. “I can do it myself” has been our mantra for many generations and it is not true! We cannot do it alone, just like toddlers who say “I can do it myself” we have to have help.

In spiritual matters we are dumb without God and His Word! The man-made religions of the world are just that, “man-made”! They didn’t do anything or create anything or anyone. Like a block of wood or stone or gold formed into an idol, man-made religions don’t have the ability to truly do anything! Just like those idols, our religions are static, stagnant, and dead.

God is everlasting and the Creator of all. To worship Him is to worship the True God not something that was brought on by a drug or lack of sleep or lack of water! Dreams, visions, and feelings can’t form a seed or a fish with a word or put stars in their places by thinking of where they should be, but God can and He did! Trust Him, follow Him and ask for His forgiveness because He loves you!

Are we living on the edge of Revelation?

/ Tracy Eldridge / Leave a comment

According to the prophecy that is in the book of Revelation, I would say so. Mainly because of the number of prophecies that have already been fulfilled. In general, all of the prophecies that were to be fulfilled before the time of tribulation have been fulfilled. The only ones left are those which precede the seven-year peace accord that the Antichrist will broker between Israel and her enemies.

There are many people in the church today who think that we, the church, will be gone before this happens. I am not so sure. There is another view that shows the church being subjected to the first half of the Tribulation and then taken away to Heaven before the wrath of God is poured out on the world. It is a very compelling argument and it has many scriptures to back it up. I am very interested to see just what will happen in the next few years because I believe we are that close to the time of Tribulation which will come on the whole world.

“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only”. Matt. 24:36; our Lord told His disciples this in the Olivet discourse after they asked Him about the signs concerning the end of the age. We are living at that time or immediately before it right now. I know there have been many people who have said that the end of the world is on this day or this day, but no one knows! Your last day on earth is your personal “end of the age” and we have no clue as to when our last days are, thankfully! The times that we live in are and have been told about many times in God’s Word, from Daniel and Ezekiel to Joel and Isaiah then to the New Testament and the book of Revelation in particular. This time in our world should not surprise anyone if you have ever read God’s Word.

There are many who say that they will wait until their last day to accept Jesus as their Savior, but you and I don’t know when our last day is! It is arrogance beyond measure to plan your life that way because as soon as you leave home, your life is in danger! Even when you are at home, you may die of a heart attack, stroke, or any other ways. We are not given X number of years and days to live, and we don’t know when our last day is, only God knows that. Thankfully, He keeps that a secret from us.

The end of the church age is near and we are living in the “last days” right now and have been for a long time. Since the state of Israel became a nation again, there are few prophecies left to be fulfilled before the times foretold in the book of Revelation. In the past sixty years technology has advanced at a rapid pace, the world has grown smaller due to the rise of the amount of technology that is available to us on a daily basis. We do have the ability to talk to someone on the other side of the world and see them talk to us by way of the Internet. The Bible says:  “But you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.” Daniel 12:4

Our world is beginning to see some of the signs of the “end of the age”, but not the ones foretold that would be immediately prior to it. God loves us all and wants us to have a relationship with Him. If we choose not to accept the gift of the grace offered to us through Jesus’ sacrifice for us, we are the ones who will condemn ourselves to everlasting punishment! The day or the hour may not be known by us because our personal “day and hour” could be at any time since we are not guaranteed tomorrow. Get into God’s word, the Bible and ask Him to reveal what His will is for you because it is important to Him and to you and your family. He loves you and all of us and doesn’t want any to perish, but if we wait too long our chance to accept His gift of Grace may pass us by and then all you can say when you stand before Him is “I am sorry, Lord, I waited too long and I didn’t realize my condition in time”. The most dreaded words that anyone could hear at that point are “Depart from Me into everlasting punishment because I never knew you”. There will be a tear in His eyes when you are told this, but it will be too late. Don’t let this happen, come to Him and give your life to Jesus before it is too late!