FELLOWSHIP IN CHRIST

      SHALL HE FIND FAITH? “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:”       Luke 18:6-9 We begin our study this month with the words of our Lord as He taught on humility. Whilst we should not push the thought that His rhetorical question implies that there will be no faith on earth when He, the Son on Man, returns to establish His kingdom, we must be aware that He will still reject the wrong kind of faith ! Here our Lord’s warning against the sin of self-righteousness and pride reflects His hatred for a  sin which was with the religious Jews of His day, and is still so readily manifest in His ‘Church” today. Jesus illustrated this concern re “faith” with the story of the publican and the Pharisee. (vs. 10-14) The beating of one’s chest by so many of our present, errant Church leaders (and perhaps most of their ‘disciples’),

        WILLING IGNORANCE: The denial of anything known to be true.  “ For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water...”                 2 Peter 3:3-6.                                                                                                                                                                 If there is one thing which unites all fallen mankind it appears to be the fact that most of us  think we know better than God! “Willing Ignorance” raised it’s ugly head on a daily basis during our Lord Jesus’ earthly ministry and  the religious leaders of His time who had known of God and His ways from the beginning, stood against Him at every turn. “Knowing, but ignoring”, often coming with a smart put down, has been the hallmark of the “scoffer” since the dawn of time and God’s word has suffered the bitter, cynical scoffing of men and women until this day.         

WHEN GOD SPOKE TO NOTHING “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Gen. 1:1 Over the last one hundred and fifty years many people, including members of the clergy, have openly departed from the faith. Many, many more whilst retaining their vocation in the ministry, have secretly stopped believing in the Genesis account of creation and embraced a form of ‘evolutionist creationism’. This “two bob each way” form of Christianity has contributed to, and hastened, the decay we see in our theology today. Where once our preachers stood their ground and thundered at the apostasy of Charles Darwin and his cohorts, we see countless numbers of our leaders hiding behind a weakened Gospel, which is no Gospel at all. To abandon the plain teaching of the Bible on Creati

        WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ‘BEGOTTEN’? “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John. 3:16. (cf. Jn. 1:18) For almost two thousand years the most famous verse in the Bible has been the one quoted above. To day, I am almost sure it still remains so, but I wonder if the average man in the street has any idea of what John actually meant, when he referred to Jesus as God’s “only begotten Son”. Sadly many Christians, for the last one hundred years or so, have grown up with that same blank space in their knowledge bank, for gone from the majority of our modern Bibles is the adjective “begotten”. Some versions which do retain “begotten”, will drop the pronoun “His” and add the definite article “the”,  forcing the idea that Jesus is “the only begotten Son”, one unique, but not necessarily the Second Person of a Godhead, thus making Him a somewhat “lesser god”. Whilst it is certa

DID GOD GET IT WRONG? The Gay Lobby thinks so! “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”                                                                             1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 The Holy Bible has for almost three and a half thousand years been the only standard mankind has had to learn of God’s holiness, justice and grace. The devil has spent an equivalent number of years seeking to corrupt God’s written word to us in order to lead men from the truth and miss what God has actually said. If the Bible is to mean anything to His creation, then it must be presented in the simplest of language with no hidden meanings which can only be understood by those whom are consider themselves to be the “enlightened” o

  WHEN CHRISTMAS   WAS A GIFT   “...the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” Romans 6:23 I think it would be safe to assume that up until a few decades ago the great majority of all households in Australia celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas.  Who doesn’t remember, when as children, our sheer pleasure of opening parcels with a variety of oohs and aahs as we ripped away the wrapping?   We all know this ‘ritual of Christmas’ was played out by believers and unbelievers alike and in many cases its message was soon lost on families as the busyness of   life re-engulfed most of our population. Today in this country, and I venture to say, in a growing number of Western Countries, Christmas has, at best, become something of a joke, or even a dirty word in million of homes across these lands. Third World cultures and First World cultures are facing off in ways never seen before and the atheists of this world have seized on this ‘clash’ to,