Be Used Where You Are!

I want to rejoice exuberantly that here at Suburban (and wherever you may be) there are some men and women like Elisha......you are diligent out on your farms, busy in your fields & faithful to the ordinary unnoticed life. Some of you are people who just always put yourselves...

• into the menial things...
• the ordinary things,
• the things which men would not call specifically spiritual service....

 .....it may not be that you are called to be a prophet...
but, it is that you are called to be faithful in His service and ultimately His purpose....

Whatever that it is that you are doing here....it is where you are right now - let God use you there!!

Elisha’s ministry, when the mantle fell from heaven on him, was to be a mighty Prophet, and when the mantle fell from heaven on you your ministry is what you are now doing for God and His church, God’s people, and His purposes through you here at ‘the SUB’ (or wherever you are) and you will continue to be used in the way God is using you till He takes you home or until the Lord says, “That is enough.”

 

God raised Jesus from the dead

{KJV}John 11:25 “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

Jesus’ resurrection is often used as an argument for the existence of God. And there is good reason. Jesus called himself the ‘Son of God.’ So if Jesus is the ‘Son of God’ then we could believe that there must be a ‘God’.  But some skeptics object that Jesus’ resurrection does not prove God’s existence at all. The atheist might say that, even if Jesus rose from the dead, this doesn’t prove that God exists. After all, a very powerful being  may have raised Jesus from the dead and it’s possible that something which we can’t explain scientifically took place and brought Jesus back to life......

So we could all ask the question........Are there any strong reasons to believe that someone other than God raised Jesus’ bloodless, suffocated, ripped to within an inch of death by 39 lashes body back from the dead?
First note that there is no one on the streets of history that has made the claim to have done it, and there is no evidence that someone else did do it.

Yet we do have Jesus’ very own claim that his resurrection would be evidence that he had divine authority (Mt 12:38, 16:4; Jn 2:18-21). 
On top of that we have the claim of alleged eyewitnesses who were taught by the risen Jesus and claimed that God raised him (Acts 2:24, 3:15; 1 Cor. 6:14 & 15:15).

These people, and especially Jesus, were certainly in the best possible position to identify the cause of his resurrection.  Unless the skeptic can produce stronger evidence in support of another way in which Jesus came back to life, the most sound thought or line of reasoning would be that God.......Jesus’ Father, breathed new life into His lifeless body......

On account of Jesus’ own teachings, his listeners concluded that his resurrection was an act that only God was capable of performing....

Jesus performed miracles and predicted future events, at times he read peoples’ thoughts....He lived an exemplary life. On top of that, we can read into his words that this sign; i.e. his resurrection, would be proof that He was sent by God from heaven and that God endorsed His entire life and message. Since dead men have no such capacity to act, it would certainly be reasonable to conclude that God, just like Jesus said, raised His lifeless body from the dead. And if Jesus rose, and all history proves he did in fact rise, then there is a God....and it can therefore be said of the atheists, Psalms 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.”

Athiesm pt 2

{KJV}Ps 53:1 “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”

There are a lot of people who don’t like God...if He could be sued, the courts would have a backlog of people who wished to stand against Him before a judge.....lol, but true!
Today there is a very aggressive and hostile form of Atheism...it is called “militant atheism” and these people are very excited. One of the great ironies, at least to me, is that they spend so much time fighting a God that they themselves say doesn’t exist. If there is no God, then why in the world don’t you just move on with it? 
One problem that I have seen in my life is the “One World Religion” movement...where all religions are put together. You’ve probably even heard it said there is one God but he has revealed himself differently to different people and religions...there’s even a sticker with all the symbols on it. Well, so many times, Christianity and Islam are linked together and the atheists write their books blurring the distinction between the two...so what you hear is these atheistic writers griping about the horrible atrocities done in the name of religion (mostly Islamic extremists) and they argue that the problem is with religion in general. Then you get this complaint that Christianity throughout history has caused the death of many people...that thousands were killed in the crusades...but they fail to tell people (and people have not learned) that the crusades fought by the Christians were to get back Jerusalem, the Holy City, from the Muslims, who had conquered and plundered it earlier. Gee, if the Hindus came into Saudi Arabia today and took the city of Mecca away from the Muslims, would there be an outcry if the Muslims armed themselves and attempted to take it back?

On top of that, Darwinism along with people like Friedrich Nietzsche (who coined the phrase ‘God is dead’), Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, are all high priests of Atheism....ask the world how many people they have killed with their teachings?! Out of the twentieth century ‘the century of Atheism’ came Hitler and the killing of over 50 million people, Stalin and Mao Zedong killed over 150 million.......Atheism not only makes life cheap but robs it if of any meaning or significance....Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, professor at Harvard was an evolutionist and communist and he declared that human beings were nothing more than ‘twigs,’ like ones you find in your backyard...not a living branch cut off from the tree, and not a part of the beautiful tree, but just a dried-up laying around twig, good for nothing but to be put in a shredder or cast in the fire. Wow, that’s inspirational isn’t it...

Part 3 of 4 in a few days....

Athiesm? pt 1

We’re hearing that the founder of Facebook, who many thought was an atheist, has had his heart opened to the fact that there is a God and returned to his roots as a Jew...What a wonderful revelation it must have been to him these many years from his blindness. We can only continue to pray that he and so many like him seek deeper and grow as they find the true source of life, joy, peace, truth, etc…..Jesus!

On atheists, Dr. D.James Kennedy, the mighty minister of God at Coral Ridge Ministries, once wrote in his book, ‘The Presence of a Hidden God’ pg.24, something about atheism that is interesting...I will pass it along somewhat condensed. “Quite a few years ago I was invited to debate an atheist on the radio. The first thing I asked this doctor was, “Are you an atheist?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Do you deny the existence of God?” He said, “Oh absolutely.” I said, “Wonderful. I suppose you understand that atheism is irrational.” He said, “What do you mean? Of course not.”

Dr. Kennedy then said, “Atheism, of course, is a universal negative. Atheism says there is no God.” Everyone who has studied logic knows what my friend on the radio didn’t know: it is impossible to prove a universal negative.  If you say there’s no such thing in the entire universe as little green men, let me assure you, you can’t possibly prove it. Should you travel to every planet and every star and through every galaxy in the entire universe and come back and tell me you didn’t see one, I would simply say to you, “well, you missed him.  While you were going that way, he was zigging this way.”  You would have to examine every single part of the universe at the same time.  I’ll say it again: it is impossible, according to the laws of logic, to prove any universal negative.

A universal negative is when you say, “There’s no such thing in the universe as....” –as little green men, angels, or God. Therefore, atheism is a logical contradiction, and to affirm a logical contradiction is irrational.

A thought: If we could wrap our minds around the infinite God, we would be greater than He is.....Part 1of 4