Sunday a new day

Today as I ponder and prepare to teach, peach and encourage the people of God, I am reminded that no matter how prepared I feel I am still at the mercy of the Lord.   Though I study and train and pray yet I find myself often nervous with the weight of sharing God's Word.   But what ever yesterday was it is gone and today is here.

God has given us this day for His purposes and glory.   No matter if you feel prepared for it or not the day is here and it is His.   So we serve Him fully and without restraint.  

Once again I proclaim "not me, but the Love of Christ control me".  I pray that today He will be greater and I will be less.

Let us walk together today in the Love of Jesus Christ and in so doing live in humility giving glory to God.

Pastor Bruce

What compels you? What controls you?

Last Sunday I spoke about Mission and Vision for 2014 and we talked about 2 Corinthians 5:13-15.  I would encourage you to read that passage or the whole chapter and ponder the question of "what compels you?" or "what controls you?". 

The challenge we receive in this passage of the Scripture is that the "Love of Christ controls us".  As we digest this statement and how it should affect us it can be problematic if we are not careful.  While I will not take the time to be exhaustive in such a study in this write up, I do hope to share with you what God has been showing me and reminding me about in this portion of His Word.

First I want to expose some pitfalls that we need to avoid.  We must not read this or any other passage of the Bible and believe that we just need to try harder to be like Jesus.  That we need to work to show His Love better.  We must not enter into any such forms of legalism where our works become something of value in our salvation.  Always be reminded that the sacrifice of Jesus is not only sufficient for you to be saved but His righteousness is in every way superior to any form of righteousness you can do on your own.

So when we are challenged to let the Love of Christ control us, what is this to mean if it is not about works?  Well is it about works in a way but not in the way people usually think or talk about.  The works of righteousness are Jesus works.  The works of people are sinful.  If you are a Christian then the Love of Christ is to control you.  The Jesus that saved you has taken up residence inside you by the power and person of the Holy Spirit.  His Love controlling you means that He (Jesus) is working in and through you and as such you are NOT doing the works but He is.  The basic reality here is that if we are to live in submission to Jesus then we will be controlled by His Love and we will desire to live in obedience to Him and His Word.  It should be the natural state of the saved.

This is hard teaching when you think about it.  If sin and selfishness is in me and flowing out of me then it is me doing that and it is something I need to repent of.  If true righteousness is happening in me and flowing out of me, something that truly glorifies God, then it is Jesus Love controlling me through the Holy Spirit.  So when I sin, I need to quickly and with great humility repent.  Then I need to submit myself afresh to the Lord so that He and NOT me is controlling my life.

It really is all about whether we will live God centered in and through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit or ...  we live for our own selfish selves.

At FFBC we repeated a phrase this week and I will share it here as something you can use to remind you of this Truth. 

Not me, but the Love of Jesus Christ control me!

We are called to walk together in this mission we are on under our Lord Jesus.  Let us walk on with the courage to submit to Him fully daily.

Amen

Pastor Bruce

Oct 7 2013 Jesus is God, one with the Father

John 10:22 to the end of the Chapter.  Jesus makes it clear and plain that He is God.



Read the Bible and understand the Truth from God and your life will be changed as you understand your need for Jesus and the saving grace given to us through the finished work on the cross.

Jesus is God come in the flesh to make a way for us to be in communion with the Father for His glory!

Pastor Bruce

Aren't your sermons recorded and online in video format?

What do you do when your technology fails?  Well I hope you continue on as best as you can.  Like at our Church FFBC in Brandon, the last few weeks the internet drops out often.  Now the techs are looking at it this week and hopefully it gets fixed.  But as the problem has been present it caused us to not have video feeds or recordings of the last few Sunday sermons.  Whether it is your internet, your IPAD, Laptop, Projector or Sound Board, if your technology dies your message must continue on.  The message is much greater than the technology we use.

God will use the message and like the many generations of Christians who preached and taught without such technology we too must be prepared to minister without them.  The message of the Gospel, the teaching of God's Word is not to be held back by our "program" crashing.

So all that being said for those of you who missed Church in the last few months we do have a link for you to access the audio files if you would like them.  I will post this same info in a few other places as we do not have the Church website updated yet with the files.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bz69ajNSG55pRk1FV0ZXdkNrMXM&usp=sharing

It should be sorted in folders of year, then month and then the files should be named in dates on which they were recorded.

Lets us seek to grow together and not be restrained by our modern technology or lack of it.

Pastor Bruce

New Blog

Link to my new blog
http://ffbcpastor.blogspot.ca/2013/04/what-about-sin.html

Of Great Concern

I saw an article today that told of the Ontario Minister of education telling the Catholic school board that they cannot teach pro-life, even though they are a religious based school and it is part of their faith.  Whether you like the catholics or not you have to see that this is a matter of great concern.  The idea that any religious group should be told by the government that they cannot teach their faith should concern us.  It would be different if this was a matter of a group that was teaching "hate" or "violence" but this is not related to teaching against the laws of our country.  

This is another evidence that these supposed laws like ones about "abortion" are actually now being used to restrict freedom and not to grant it.  So instead of such laws that are contrary to the Christian faith, allowing those who have a different belief to not be restricted in this area, instead now faith groups are going to be restricted unless they teach what the government says is ok.  This sounds really scary.  

Not only is this a poor precedent but this particular issue is of great importance.  The teaching of the sanctity of life and the precious gift of children is deeply rooted in the Bible.  Yet our society has decided that human life is not very important, it can be thrown away like trash.  Yet we have groups that seek to preserve and conserve the eggs of birds and their nests, we have scientists that look for signs of life in strange places and even on other planets, they would see the smallest microbe and proclaim life, yet a child that has not yet been born does not rate as life.  This is a sad state and a matter of great concern.

Our politicians went out on a limb to attempt to re-open this discussion and I applaud them.  Yet many groups claimed they did not respect women due to wanting to make sure life is properly defined.  But what about the unborn female?  Currently there is no protection for the unborn female in Canada.  A family with a background that puts greater value on male children can elect to have a female child aborted.  This is a horrible situation, that we would allow gender selection in our country is so very scary.

We need to be a people who really think these things through, the decisions of that past did not see the big picture and now we are in a situation that should give us Great Concern!

Preacherman

Control?

I recently engaged in a short discussion about a statement that was made about how "No one is in control and that is cooler anyway" (Adam Savage).  Today's post is in response to this idea that a foundational concept for one to be an Atheist is that there is "no one in control".  There are significant issues with this type of thinking which I will attempt to expose here.

The first big issue we find with this line of thinking is one of basic logic.  Do we understand what it means to "be in control"?  Some words that might help us understand "being in control" would be: authority, power, ability, role and responsibility.  For someone to have "control" they first need to have the role, responsibility and authority to exercise such control.  I cannot just decide that I am in control of a business that I walk into.  I cannot just decide to hire and fire the employees or change the prices of product and services.  I do not own the business and therefore would lack the role, responsibility and authority to wield such power.

In the same way we must realize that if no one is in control then no one has authority or power to make decisions and change things.  If we embrace such thinking then we have no purpose for life and no ability to make the world a better place.  As soon as you make a choice, you are taking the authority, responsibility and the power to make that choice.  At that point someone has to be in control.  Either you believe you are in control and are making your own choices or you believe God is in control and are following His directives.  But whichever it is, someone must be in control in order to make something happen.

I am at work today either because I decided I wanted to go to work or because my boss told me to go to work.  Either way you want to look at it, if I am at work today it is because a decision was made and had some authority behind it.  If I am not at work today then it is because with the same level of authority a decision was made for me to stay home.  If no one was in control then it would not matter, work or home, me or my boss, who cares, it is meaningless.

But with God, and He is in control, things have meaning and hope.  We are not here just putting in pointless time.  Rather we are here to live our lives with purpose and meaning, you were created for a great purpose and you can find it by getting to know the One who made you.  The answer to the meaning of life can only be found in knowing the One who gives life and purpose to all things.  Is this God of creation in control?  Yes He is.  But not in a way that you may think.  He does not make us as "robots" but rather He is powerful enough to make us with the ability to make choices and even come up with crazy ideas that forget Him.  The fact that there are Atheists that believe no god exists, is no surprise to the true God.  He is patient and wants you to recognize your selfish condition, we call it sin.  Sin is everything we do that is not in obedience to God.  Sometimes it is easy to see because our sinful behavior hurts others or destroys our life.

Jesus, being God, came to earth in the form of a human and lived without sin, then He died, giving up His life freely for us, to pay the penalty for our sin.  Now we need to repent of our sinfulness and accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior.  This is how we are to get to know the Creator.  Through Jesus, the Son of God.  This is where purpose and hope are found, this is Christianity.  Christians are not afraid of or opposed to science, rather we believe that science must be understood with proper logic and not with pre-disposed thinking that has been bound by those who fear the idea of God.  If you want to know a little bit about how so many have been mis-led even in institutions of higher learning, just watch Ben Stein's movie Expelled.  It is a very revealing look at how closed our institutions are to open discussions about Truth and letting science be properly defined and defended and not limited by fear.

God has no fear of science, Christians should have no fear of science but modern science seems to be afraid of Christians and the idea of God.  Twisted isn't it.

Preacherman