Israel

Are the Jews still God's chosen people? Has the Church replaced Israel as His chosen ones? Is there any significance of the nation of Israel being a newly formed country in 1948? Are the Jews already saved or should the gospel be preached to them? Your thoughts.

Revelation

Have you read the last book of the Bible recently? Do you regard Revelation as history, or as symbolical, or as poetry, or as prophecy past or present or both, or as an interesting story about the end of the world? Let me know which view you have.

The Rapture

My posts will be much shorter. I do not know if in spite of the 500+ views of my blog if anyone is really reading them. I know that maybe in the past because of their length or non open ended structure this may have been a hindrance but I would like some communication out there....OK?

I would like to know if my readers(anyone?) believe in a rapture. If so, are you Pre-Trib, Mid-trib, Post-Trib, Pre-wrath, or none of the above and why. Let's have a blog...

Have a blessed day, Ron

"Thou Hast a Name..."

In Revelation, the apostle John writes to the seven churches in Asia Minor. From the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea he can see the coast of what is now called the country of Turkey. It is a well worth study (and  Revelation 1:3 promises a blessing to those that read this letter) to see how the seven churches represent a historical panorama of the church. For a summary, see Dolphin's work:
http://ldolphin.org/cleanpages/rev02.html (copy and paste)
Notice how John through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit refers to the church of Sardis in Revelation 3 as "having a name". Sardis according to the historical timeline of the churches refers to the Reformation church. The Protestants broke from the Roman Catholic church but did not break free of many of the trappings of the RCC unfortunately. As an example, the Lutheran church formed as a result of this split. Today, there are many "Synods" of Lutheranism that have formed. They differ on things such as liturgy, sacraments, and the definition of words used in Lutheranism. They also differ in modern ideologies such as the ordination of women, homosexuality and ecumenism.
    Sardis was built on a mountain and it's high walls overlooked the plain below. No armies were thought to be able to conquer Sardis because of this natural geological deterrent. The inhabitants were confident that Sardis would be safe from attackers. Sardis was confident in their surroundings. They had born in a city that was thought to be a great defense. They were confident in their works as well. Sardis coined the first coins that were made from pure silver and gold. Before this, coins were made from various ores that could not be guaranteed to be of any particular metal. They invented a process of separating the metals out from the ore. They trusted in their temples as well. They were set, so it seemed. Confident in their currency, their trade (the Lydians had the popular purple dye), and their works. They had a name... Well as it turns out, Sardis was invaded many times in their history. Cyrus the Persian, Alexander The Great, The Ptolemies, all successfully scaled their defenses. The Sardians were not known to be great warriors. They depended on the natural defenses and their popularity as a center of commerce and wealth an notoriety.
    As a young man growing up in the Lutheran church, I felt confident of the name.... I was a Lutheran. I was
OK. I was set. I had been baptized, confirmed and was a member of a well known denomination. When confronted by a born again Christian or convicted by a tract that talked about a personal relationship with Jesus, I had the confidence and backing of a name.... Lutheran. Don't be too confident in your church name. Whether it is Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, or whatever...it is a personal relationship with the Head of the true Church, the Lord Jesus Christ is what is life-saving, not a name. Read carefully Revelation 3:1-6 and look what it means to be given a personal name in the Book of Life! Heaven is not sectioned off by denominations. Trust in Jesus and He will give you an everlasting name!

About (Part 7)

Now where to go to church? That was the question before me as a newly saved believer in Christ Jesus.
I looked in the churches section of  the yellow pages (remember them?) and "Evangelical Free Church" seemed to stand out to me. I knew that back in 1985 at least, the word evangelical had the meaning of : a messenger going forth proclaiming the good news of the gospel. I liked the name of that church. Next Sunday I found myself in a small strip mall store space with folding chairs and a makeshift podium and about 30 people ready to worship. No liturgy here, just a few hymns of praise and then the sermon. Afterward I asked the pastor if I could speak to him for a moment.Well that talk must have lasted at least 30 minutes. I just poured out to this young minister all that had happened in my life recently. It was like I just had to speak about my testimony to someone. The man that had cut my hair for the last 10 years gave my wife and I the location of a church that he recommended. He and his wife became very close friends and prayer partners. Little did I know that this man was a believer that had been praying for me over the years. Next Sunday my wife and I attended this church. It was called a "Community Church" and was non-denominational. I liked the idea of non-denominational. I just wanted to be known as a Christian now, not placed into a category or denomination. The pastor preached an incredible sermon. We felt blessed for having come. Unfortunately after the service we found out that that was the last sermon for that pastor at that church. The church's elders had voted in a different pastor! We briefly chatted to this outgoing pastor about where to fellowship and he recommended a nearby Bible Church. God knew that we needed rock-solid biblical teaching and discipleship and He directed us to the right place. Some of the elders and teachers at that Bible Church were quite elderly and they knew the bible backward and forward and were great men and women of God. Some had authored books and commentaries and others had vast experience with missions and the mission field. Learning about missions and talking to missionaries was an eye-opening experience for my wife and I and our children. Never before had we heard of Christians that were currently in the mission fields risking their lives and even dying for being a Christian missionary. We were honored to have a few missionaries stay in our home. We were so blessed by this. That was nearly 30 years ago. That was my testimony. That finally ends "About Me". Your comments are greatly appreciated.

About (Part 6)

The following Sunday I went to church with my family which was the Lutheran church I had attended since my teen years and in which we were married in. In the Lutheran church there is a certain pattern to the service called the Liturgy. Depending on the church seasons, you turn to a certain page in the Lutheran Hymnal and follow the pastor and congregation in reciting certain passages of the scriptures in a singing manner. There is also usually a gospel reading, an epistle reading, a sermon, hymns and lastly a benediction. Now, for the first time, I really was listening to the liturgy with my new spiritual ears. Psalm 51:10-12 was being read/sung as part of the liturgy as it had been on a majority of services going back as far as I can recall. This time, however, it spoke to my heart and I could barely recite the words. This is what had actually happened to me! God had created a "new heart" within me. A new heart with a new spirit...His Spirit, the Holy Spirit. As best as I can recall, I am not sure what the occasion was, but I met with the pastor shortly after this "heart opening" Sunday service and expressed to him that I felt like more emphasis should be placed on the true power of the gospel and how each member of the church should be shown what it meant that Jesus had come as a man and crucified and rose again to save each individual and that it was a personal thing and not a church thing. I told him how the Old Testament prophecies had Jesus all throughout them but how I felt most people did not truly understand the impact of that. Sadly, my words were met by a blank stare that I can only interpret as a lack of understanding of the new birth of which I was trying to put into words. Now here is how the Lord will direct your paths... the following Sunday as I looked around at the congregants, I wondered how many of the Lutherans attending truly were saved, not because they were members of this church or because they were baptized as infants, or because they had their Confirmation in their teens, or because they partook in Communion every month or attended church every Sunday or were involved with charitable activities or even because they simply had the head knowledge that Jesus had died on the cross for the sins of the world...but simply because they personally had accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior having asked God to forgive their sins and accepting Jesus as Lord not as a denomination, congregation or by benediction, but in the only way one can be saved... personally, one on one. Just as I was thinking on these things, I opened my folded bulletin and found inside a light green colored pamphlet. Yes, I even remember the color. It was titled: "but when you get asked...Have You Been Born Again?" It was a Lutheran treatise on what baptism according to Lutheran doctrine was and why a Lutheran should not be concerned or offended when confronted by born again Christians posing that question. I really took this pamphlet as my "pink slip" for leaving the Lutheran church. So now, how was the Lord to direct my next steps and to what church was I to attend? (to be continued...)

About(part 5)

     I know this is getting ridiculously long, but this is the best part if you read this far. The Lord used Cumbey's book to knock me over the head. The next thing was checking out the book's references which included Marilyn Ferguson's book The Aquarian Conspiracy.  Cumbey's book also included many biblical refernces  to the New World Order(NWO) and the end times scenario. But there was this constant urge for me to read the bible. I started by obtaining a copy of Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth. The book suggested I read the bible in a way that I would be reading the Old Testament and the New Testament at the same time. In other words, read a section of Genesis and Matthew in one reading. I cannot stress enough how  powerful this urge was to start to read the bible. I found an easy to read version called The Living Bible  and went to work highlighting verses that I started to see in the OT and NT. I discovered many verses quoted by Jesus in the NT from the OT. I also noted that the prophets were foretelling the same things even though they wrote at different times. In April 1985 I had read through the Gospels and was reading the book of Isaiah. I was at chapter 53 in particular. Isaiah is describing "a man of sorrows" that suffers horribly so that man can be redeemed, This man shed His blood and suffered the worst beatings and disfigurement because of His unconditional love for the lost. Suddenly, as if blinders were lifted off my eyes, I understood that this prophet Isaiah was describing a person that would suffer and die for His people more than 500 years in the future! It all suddenly made sense to me. That the Gospel, the Good News of what Jesus did was for ME. All the prophecies written about Jesus and His first coming back 2000 years ago had ALL been predicted and had all come to pass! Where He was to be born, where He was to live, how he was to be betrayed, how He was to die and even how he was to be buried. When this TRUTH finally was made clear to me, I had many emotions come over me. I wept because I had missed this TRUTH for 30 years of my life. I knew that Jesus had saved me at that moment that He revealed Himself to me through reading the Word of God. I then also knew that God's Word is absolutely TRUE in every sense. I was amazed that I had missed the most important thing in this world for anyone to accept: that Jesus died not only for the sins of the world but for MY sins. The absolutely Holy, sinless God Himself came into this world as a MAN and provided the ONLY WAY OUT of darkness and death. I was amazed that all I did was finally understand this wonderful thing that God had done for ME. I was so grateful that this saving grace was  
was absolutely a free gift. I could not earn it or work for it or ever be good enough to deserve it. In conclusion, I realized that I had been born again. A new creature had been created. (to be continued...)

About (part 4)

     After graduating college in 1980 and starting my career as a pharmacist, things were good. We bought a new car, went on a cruise and bought a house. In 1981 our daughter was born. Our son was born in 1983. By 1985 we were living in a nice house across from a park. We had two children and a dog. Life was good.......and yet...  There was something I felt was missing. I had the feeling that there was still something more in life that I yearned for but I did not know what it was. Even though I had no complaints on the surface, there was a hole in my soul that I could not define. I wonder how many people out there go through this feeling of "something lacking". Many people are drawn close to God in times of personal hardship, turmoil, crisis and sickness. I was drawn to the Lord in a time of "peace and prosperity" relatively speaking. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
       One night at work the assistant manager came back to my area and asked me why I was listening to that awful rock music. Well that was just regular listening pleasure to me at the time. I knew she was a born again Christian and she thought rock music was satanic. I really do not recall why I stopped listening to the music channel after that but I did. I started listening to "Talk Radio" which was very popular at the time. One evening they had on as a guest Constance Cumbey, a Detroit lawyer and recent author of a book called:
 http://archive.org/details/HiddenDangersOfTheRainbow. You could say that the Lord started changing my life after listening to the author then in reading her book. I had always been interested in Bible prophecy and I had read The Late Great Planet Earth  by Hal Lindsey back in high school and knew that the rebirth of Israel and the wars they had fought in the last several decades had prophetic meaning, but this book made me really want to read the bible all the way through. Her book was about the New Age movement, which would culminate in a New World Order and the reign of the Antichrist. This book really opened up my eyes as to how this new age network worked. She backed everything up with scripture. I got a hold of a very simple to read paraphrase of the bible and began to highlight all the verses that she used in her book. I read her book through at least three times and I began to see evidence of this "New Age" everywhere I looked. I'm afraid I was like the Mel Gibson character in "Conspiracy Theory"(the movie) at this point. (To be continued...)

About (part 3)

    In high school I got caught up in the Erich von Danikan books like Chariots of the Gods?. I would read every UFO book I could get my hands on. Trying to explain ancient artifacts, megalithic structures and making it all compatible with the Bible and UFO sightings took up a lot of my reading time. Without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I can see where people will get carried away with these ideas. I believe that UFOs and aliens will play a part in the deception that is coming upon the world. Lying signs and wonders. More about all this is later blogs.
     One summer I was invited to work on my cousin's farm in Wisconsin. I was 17. Communion Sunday came around and I was going to church with my cousins. The Lutheran church we attended was called WELS which stands for Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. This Synod is also considered more conservative than other Lutheran churches like LCMS. Just before the service started I was politely informed by one of my relatives that I could not partake in The Communion portion of the service because I was of a different Lutheran Synod. Well frankly, that bothered me. Where were theses Synod people? I wanted to protest this. I now believe God used that experience to get me thinking.
    Sitting on the steps of the auditorium at my high school one day at lunch period a girl I never met sat down next to me. She asked me if I was saved. I said I was a Christian and went to a Lutheran church. She asked if I was born again. I must have just looked at her with a perturbed look. She asked me if I died today if I knew without a shadow of a doubt if I'd go to heaven. I said I would hope so because I believed in God and the bible and that Jesus was the Savior of the world and because I was a Lutheran. She quoted the place in the bible right before the famous John 3:16 where Jesus tells Nicodemus that in order to be saved and go to heaven one had to be born again. Boy was this girl irritating. She was way overboard in her religious attitude. She ended the conversation by saying that I could be absolutely SURE of my going to heaven when I died. I thought in my mind that she was very conceited in her thinking. I mean, how could you KNOW. You try to be good. You go to church on most Sundays. You take Holy Communion. You belong to the Lutheran church. You were baptized as a baby. It is believed that this infant baptism requires God to impart the little guy with His Spirit which starts going to work in his little life right away. You no longer are a heathen baby. You are no longer on the road to hell. When you are confirmed at puberty this kind of "seals the deal" and means that the baptism "stuck" because you have memorized the Apostle's Creed and the teachings of the Lutheran Church and you are rewarded by being able to partake in Holy Communion with the grownups. It does not matter that the baby is unaware of what is going on. God is pouring out His grace in the Sacrament of baptism according to the infant baptism teachings.
     I married in 1975. My wife was a RCC(Roman Catholic). In fact she had gone to a Catholic school until high school. I didn't think much on our different religions because my grandfather was Catholic while my grandmother was Lutheran. We married in my Lutheran church. We would go to the RCC church for "Midnight Mass" as Christmas and a few other times as a kind of compromise. After college when we had children we needed to discuss things in a little more depth. We agreed that the mother should raise the children in the faith of the mother. When I was little, I thought catholics were going to hell because they believed in purgatory and they were so mean to Martin Luther and his friends. In my college years I looked at the Catholic church as having more rituals, more candles, more stained glass, more robes and drapes and using more languages(Latin) in their services(masses), than.the Lutherans. I really knew very little about the Catholic church at this point. My wife had us go to a Catholic church while I attended college and get married a second time just to make our marriage more "official" in her mind. I went along with it reluctantly. I understood. When our children came into the picture I found out that we more or less signed them over to the Catholic faith when they were baptized Promising to have them grow up in the Catholic faith. I see now that this was God using circumstances in our lives to make us think. I remember in college we lived in married housing which was an efficiency apartment down the road from the campus. Right next door to us were a couple of those pesky born-again Christians. Always inviting us to picnics and bible studies and such while everyone else we knew were going to parties and getting high. But anyway after college and having kids and having gone through the official channels we felt we needed to do concerning the Catholic child raising thing we compromised again. We agreed to go mostly to my  Lutheran church except for Midnight Mass and special occasions. (to be continued)...

About (Part 2)

Born to Lutheran parents in 1955. Baptized while an infant in Cincinnati Ohio. The method which the Lutherans use to baptize is called the "sprinkle" method. Our family were members of the LCMS which stands for Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. A Synod is a group of Lutherans that hold differing views on a few things about the Lutheran denomination. To their credit, the LCMS has always been very steadfast in the belief of the inerrant nature of the Bible. The founder of the denomination, Martin Luther was a Roman Catholic monk and never intended to start a "new Protestant faith". Martin Luther even as he was nailing his 99 theses to the catholic Wittenburg church, had intended to reform the church from within. Before the Reformation, people of faith has to trust the RCC(Roman Catholic Church) or their priest to interpret or understand the scriptures. The Vulgate edition of the Bible which was a Latin rendition was all that the masses had. Many RCC masses even today are spoken in Latin. It mattered what the RCC said or the priest or the pope, not what people could read and understand of the Bible itself. The age before the Reformation was rightly called the Dark Ages. My intent is not to go into a detailed discussion of church history, but just to let you know that I really believe God used Luther and other men before him and after him to bring the Bible back to the hands of people that wanted to read it.

I went to a Lutheran private school in Cincinnati Ohio from Kindergarten to 4th grade. Praying the Lord's Prayer, attending church services and much scripture memorization was included among the standard school lessons in my school. I can remember when I read my first real book in first or second grade (Not including Dr Seuss): Damn Yankees. I can remember reading the Bible as well. It seemed like such a huge book in the hands of a 7 year old, but I remember wanting to know how it ended. The Book of Revelation. Reading that last book through. It was fantastic, horrible, beautiful and mysterious, all at the same time. What a read! Angels and Demons and Monsters and Wars and Mayhem. Today, I truly believe that what the 3rd verse of this book says happened to me: I was blessed by reading Revelation, ("Blessed [is] he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time [is] at hand" ~Rev 1:3).

We moved out further in the suburbs when I was 9 and so I started to attend public schools at this time. I remember around this time a schoolmate named Roger that invited me to his church. Roger was a Baptist. I do not even think that it was a Sunday morning service which was strange. What I will never forget about that day was this: There was an altar call near the end. While all of our heads were bowed, we were asked to raise our hands if we wanted Jesus in our hearts. What? Why? What was this pull I felt to raise my hand? Why was I so compelled? I did not raise my hand and I did not leave my seat although I felt this "pull" to do so. I tell you this because it stands out as a memory. I now know looking back that this was the Holy Spirit convicting me to come to the Lord. At this time, however, all I could think of to get out of it was that I was a Lutheran. I am a member of a Lutheran church and in a couple of years I will be "Confirmed". Confirmation in the Lutheran church means that at about the age of 13 after having studied the Lutheran Catechism which are the teachings that a member of a Lutheran denomination must "confirm" to the church in order to participate in Holy Communion. So that is what glued me to my seat that day in spite of the"pull" I felt. I was a baptized Lutheran, soon to be a full fledged Communion taking Lutheran. I had a name. (to be continued...)