What is your New Year Resolution?

Mine is to read my Bible lots more. The bible tells us all we need to know about God and that is important because we belong to him and we have certain obligations to him which we need to know about. I've been talking to God since I was seven and now I am 64, so that's quite a time. There is nothing more wonderful than knowing God, but you have to come to him his way. We are all sinners and need the forgiveness God provides in Jesus. You can't reach God in your own strength, because he requires perfection. Now you know you can't provide that, but Jesus can. Come to Jesus and he will bring you to God.

What rules are you living by?

Have you got your own rules on how to live life, or do you try to follow God's rules? It is good to want to follow God's way, but you can only do it if you have Jesus in your life. God requires perfection but only Jesus can give that. You need to put your trust in Jesus if you are going to please God. God provided Jesus so that all those who believe in him and trust him can come back into fellowship with God. I would love to hear what you think of this. Tell me if you agree or disagree.

Will you take the risk?

If you have lost your partner in life, been bereaved, will you take the risk of finding another partner. Are the benefits of a new relationship attractive to you , or are you afraid to lose again? Life is full of such risks, but can you afford to miss out because you are afraid of loss coming again? It is a difficult decision to make and maybe you won't even get the chance. There is not a suitable partner just around the corner for everyone. You may have to settle for a life alone. This has its benefits. You are not likely to argue with yourself. Do you want a life of peace which sometimes feels lonely, or do you want to risk friction because you would like company? There, and you thought life would get easier as you grew older. Read below in My Poems of Loss about losing a partner and being alone.

Poems of Loss

Lonely

Christmas and New Year are times to spend with your family, but not everyone has family to share with. For them this can be an especially lonely time of the year. If you are lonely the best thing you can do is to find another lonely person and spend some time with them. Try putting them first. Maybe you live alone but are quite content with your situation, nevertheless find a lonely person and share some of your time with them. A good friendship may develope from this contact and you will both have gained by it. There are millions of lonely people in this world, so it should not be difficult to find one to help.

Having a good time?

Are you really having a good time, over Christmas and New Year? Is all that alcohol giving you satisfaction? You can't fool me, I can see your life is empty and it always will be until you find complete satisfaction in Jesus. Bring all your heartache to him, confess your sin and receive his forgiveness. He has promised to receive you if you come to him, he won't turn you away.All that emptiness will be filled by him in your life.

Already Christmas

It is not quite Christmas day in the U.K. as I write this, but for many of you the day has arrived. This day has no significance, but the baby we celebrate has? He is fully human and yet King of king and Lord of lords. Don't get carried away with all the trimmings, think about the one who came to take away http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsin and bring us back to God the Father. For further reading click the link below,

Justification by Faith

Half Price

Do you ever wonder how the shops can afford to sell you something half price? It's just that their usual price is exorbitant. Selling is all about convincing you to buy things you don't really need. Take a good hard look at what you have recently bought. Of course you need food and a certain amount of clothes, but after that there is so much useless tatt that you will quickly grow tired of and off load it to the waste tip. What a pitiful way to live, being constantly conned by the producers of these things. Break free.

Will you have a good Christmas?

Your Christmas will only be a success if you meet the Christ who is at the centre of it. He came to die for anyone who will put their trust in him. This Christamas could be very special for you if you put Jesus at the centre of Christmas. Forget the booze and the food, this is a chance to start a new life, going God's way.

A Repetitive Life

Does your life seem to go around in circles? Work, eat, watch TV, sleep, work,eat etc.? This is what life is like if you don't have God in it. The book of Ecclesiastes talks about this aimless repetition and calls it "vanity of vanities." The author is King Solomon who was very rich and clever. He had tried everything but discovered that without God his life was meaningless. Do you feel like that about life? Have you discovered that nothing satisfies? Something comes along to create interest, but before long that too is dissatisfying. Find God in Jesus and your life will have all the meaning it should. We were created to worship God and this is the only way we can find true fulfillment.

Do you need a Wii to make your Christmas happy?

A Wii can give you some fun for a while, but for lasting happiness and a guaranteed future you need Jesus. He came on the first Christmas to be born a human baby, who was also fully God. He came because we humans were in deadly danger. Sin had messed up our lives and driven a wedge between us and God. Jesus came to live our life, perfectly and then he died so that we could be forgiven and be put right with God. Don't short change yourself with a temporary Christmas, this year. Go for the eternal worth of what he did, but your trust in him and be set for a wonderful eternity.

At the End

O world, o world,
You languish so in pain.
You wait until my Lord doth come again.
For He will gather all to him
And sort through all
The joyous and the grim.
His choices will be all perfect.
His decisions all exact.
All will be well then.
All will be intact.
Heaven filled with lowly sinners bought by grace,
Hell filled with those who had no trace
Of mercy, tenderness or love
Toward the human race.
Nor worse toward their God.
His decisions all will be true.
No one can with them argue.
Once life is o’er
His decision will be lore.

A broken and a contrite heart

Do you have a broken and a contrite heart? That's the sort of heart God values. If we are sorry for the wrong things we have done we will have a broken heart. That is putting us close to God. If we have this broken heart we will not feel fantastic but it is what pleases God. The happiness will come later. It is important to have a broken and contrite heart, and well worth the pain.

Who tells us most about hell, in the Bible?

It is Jesus who tells us most about hell. He tells us of being "thrown into outer darkness" and of "wailing and gnashing of teeth." He speaks of being sent to Gehenna, the rubbish dump, where dead criminals' bodies were thrown into fire that was kept burning. People try to pass this off as poetic license, but Jesus is usinhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifg these pictures to show somewhere that is awful and terrible. He threatens the religious leaders and the rich with this destiny if they do not repent. The tax collectors and prostitutes are more likely to turn to Jesus for forgiveness.It has been calculated that about 13% of Jesus' teaching was about hell. We must not dismiss it or put it to one side.

Read more about Hell at this link.

The Hottest topic:Hell

Heaven and hell

At the end of January I have been asked to speak to the Local Preachers' meeting about heaven and hell. These are not popular topics these days. I was the one who suggested we should look at these subjects. I will be speaking from a totally Bible-based standpoint as I believe that is the only one that matters. Conjecture can give us no solid base, only scripture can enlighten us. I am at present gaining much help from "Whatever happened to Hell" by John Blanchard. I have two more books lined up to read soon. Hardly a little light reading for the Christmas period. This is a very important topic. It is not possible to brush aside the reality of hell. One needs to think deeply about one's eternal destination. If you wish to avoid hell, put your truat in Jesus and his death on the cross. Ignore him at your peril.

If God is God

And I contend that he is, our leaders in Europe are very foolish in not turning to him for help in these difficult days of economic crisis. We all need to put God first in our lives. If we had done this to start with we would not be in this mess. It is time to repent and put God at the centre of our lives, both personally and as nations and a union.

Believing your Bible

I can understand people, who are not christian, ignoring the Bible, but on what do christians, who do not believe their Bible, through and through, base their beliefs. The Bible gives us a thorough understanding of who God is, how He behaves and what He expects of us. If you start picking and choosing which bits you want to believe, you will soon end up with a rather thin Bible.
We are not expected to understand all we read. Sometimes it is good to leave a difficult passage to look at again another day, but we must trust our Bible. The Bible will feed us with good things and bring us closer to God.Is it not amazing that this book has survived all the centuries so that we can be helped by it today. How kind God is to us to give us this book.

What do you do with fear?

I am thinking of, little everyday fears like phoning someone to make arrangements when you fear they will make difficulties. Do you put it off and put it off, all the while the fear rising in your heart. Surely by now you have found out it is best to go ahead and get the job finished with and usually all is well and there was nothing to fear at all. You wasted all that time worrying for no reason.
But some of you may have very big fears, perhaps you are persecuted for your faith. There is very real danger of death coming your way. If you are living for Jesus and maybe have to die for him the pain and suffering will soon we over and he will welcome you into his kingdom with open arms and say to you, "Well done, good and faithful servant." One day my turn may come, I hope I will be as brave as you.

My thoughts on the Theory of Evolution

You notice I call it the theory of evolution. That is because it has not been proved. Here is just a taste of what I find so difficult about the theory. For instance since the yucca plant and the yucca moth are entirely dependant on each other they could not have developed seperately or even together. There are many instances of this symbiosis where both participants could only survive at fully developed status. This points to a Creator God who designed all things.

I also have a problem with the time scale of evolution and world population. I am not a mathematician, but if you take the population as it is now and extrapolate backwards you find that with the millions of years quoted by the evolutionist today's population would be far,far greater than it actually is and in fact impossibly large, too large for the world to accommodate. Our present population is what you would expect from one couple about 10,000 years ago.

I am a very rare person these days, a christian who believes in a Creator God who created all things in 6 days. Many christians have chickened out to the compromise of believing in theistic evolution. Once you do that you are on a slippery slope to not trusting your Bible in many other areas.

Wonderful or terrible?

One day you will most certainly meet God. It will either be the most wonderful event of your life, or else the most terrible. What makes the difference? Jesus, is the answer. If you have trusted what Jesus has done on the cross in taking away your sin you are destined to delight in God for evermore. If you have continued to go your own way and do your own thing, despite God's laws and ignored Jesus, your end will not be a happy one. You can now put that right if you will trust in Jesus.

God is real

God is so mighty, holy and righteous and yet when we are his, he cares for us even in the little things of life. If I am in a hurry and have lost something, like my car keys I ask him where they are. This is not to make God my little servant, but because I trust him and know he knows all the answers. Is God real for you like that. If we can trust him in those little things it helps us to trust him for the big things in our life too. We need not worry about financial matters when we know God is in control. We need not worry about health matters because God holds us safely in his care. If our trust is in God we are safe for time and eternity. What else matters.

A Christmas poem

You lie on the prickly hay
Protected by the strips of cloth
Around you wound.
That Mary has saved from old soft clothes.
The cow nudges you,
As she digs in
For a mouthful of hay.
And yes you do cry,
Because you are a healthy,
Human baby and they all cry.

On your tiny breaths
Hang the destiny of the world.
Emmanuel,"God with us,"
In a dung-filled cave,
Risking tetanus.
Your only protectors
A young woman,
And a carpenter.
God has entrusted His Son
To these two humble folk,
Who take you from the filthy stable
To a house in Bethlehem,
Once the census crowds have dispersed
And made room for the King of kings
To have humble,
But cleaner shelter.

A humble start for the Man-God
Who always lived humbly
And with utter determination
Made His way over thirty- three years
To the cross of His destiny for us.

See more on this here The First Christmas

The Importance of Friends

When you have important beliefs that you want to hold onto, at all costs, spend time with like-minded friends. There are always people who will scoff at what you believe, so go and get strength from your friends. Read the Bible together and keep reminding each other about those important beliefs. Briefly they are, knowing that we are all sinners in need of salvation, people who have gone wrong and need to be put right. We can only be put right by believing in Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross. this is the best topic to discuss, while enjoying a meal together. We had gammon, cheese sauce, cauliflower and roast potatoes, followed by fruit crumble, then coffee. Who would you choose to share a meal with? What would be the topic of your conversation? What would the menu be?

Living a godly life

This is not an easy option. Other people will not understand your devotion to God.But it is worthwhile and the only thing that will count in the end. I want to encourage you to live your life in the light of knowing God. He is the only one worth pleasing. You will not be living to please yourself as so many do in these days. You will be daily reminding yourself of how glorious God is and that he is the only one worth living for. In 2 Peter chapter 3 we read about people who will scoff at us for our way of life and beliefs. Peter says in verse 11 "You ought to live godly and holy lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming." People who live as they please will reap a harvest of destruction. Those who please God will gain eternal life. This life comes from Jesus and accepting salvation in him. Without his help you cannot live a godly life. With him you can.