THE ONE YEAR BIBLE CLUB

 WE are a people that look "for signs" and try to base our assumptions on that.  If we have problems with weather and a flat tire on a road trip, only Christians begin to wonder, "should I have taken this road trip?" The unreligious person will just deal with the bad weather, fix the flat tire and move on.  We determine "the will of God" by omens or signs. When everything is out of joint and going wrong, we begin to think, "maybe this isn't the will of God?".  Is the "Will of God" always smooth and everything goes right; nothing goes wrong".  In our text today we read " For when we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn-conflicts on the outside, fears within. "       HOWEVER in the Book of Acts we had read this original story, how Paul describes to us the dream he had in which the Angel was calling him, beckoning him to go to Macedonia. Paul was going to another city, to...

 We have really digressed from Paul's admonition here to "live in such a way that no one will stumble because of us and no one will find fault with our ministry".  Today, starting at the top with Pastors and working our way down, we have totally let this scripture fall by the waste side and our famous line "nobody is perfect, get off my case". Paul admits he's not perfect in Philippians, Paul never claims to be perfect. Being perfect is not the issue. It's about thinking before you act, thinking before "you tweet" thinking before you speak, thinking before you "post". It's about THINKING, thinking of others, thinking of how your actions will cause others to stumble, even though you may receive forgiveness from God....what about the collateral damage? What do you do about that....answer is nothing! Today we have preachers unleashing tirades of profanity on the blogosphere, we have Pastor's divorcing their wives and marrying som...

God asks a very good question, " would you condemn me, to justify yourself " For how many thousands of years have we been doing this already! "I can't believe in a God that would allow children to starve in Africa, sorry!"  Meanwhile, that same person has children he has never cared to father nor provide a $1.00 to the woman he impregnated, to help raise that child and keep that child out of poverty; we have a woman has a child she has aborted because it was convenient, immorality is rampant in our lives, but none of that matters, "because I can't believe in a God who would allow 3000 people to perish in the Twin Towers back in Sept 11, 2001"     " Would you condemn me, to justify yourself? " God is asking YOU that question, today!  It's actually a rhetorical question.  In Job 41:11 God follows up on this thought, " Who has a claim against me, that I must pay? "  The reason these two questions are being posed is for the obvi...

JOB is apparently one of the 1st books written from the Bible. It's really a fascinating book into God's thoughts. "Were you there when I command those proud waves, here you will stop and go no further".  So much in life we take for granted and don't consider, that's now how it always was, until God "made it to be". The storage of rain in clouds, the insight into the mindset of even "a horse". We take it for granted that a horse is so strong, we take it for granted that this animal just races in battle with no fear of the sword. Try getting another animal to do that, but we take if for granted. God says, "I made the horse like that".  We get insight even in to the Ostrich, "not the wisest of animals, doesn't have much sense" but when it runs, it leaves the horse and rider behind. There's no way this insight is coming from Moses or any other man, especially way back then, what did Moses do, line up the horse and O...

 In the Book of Job today we read, "the godless are full of resentment".  It's a vicious cycle isn't it. The more we disobey God and do things our own way, the worse things get for us and the more bitter and resentful we get against God and the further we stray from Him. While the opposite is true for the sincere Christian. Those that obey spend the rest of their years in prosperity and their years in contentment; thence, drawing them closer to God.   We go on to read "For the godless are full of resentment. Even when God punishes them, they refuse to cry out to him for help".  In the book "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis, a fictional account of life for the soul in the netherworld, C.S. Lewis illustrates the truth of this scripture. Lewis shows that in the afterlife, people/souls will only become more resolute in their convictions. The lost person who dies in their sin, full of rebellion and pride against God will only become more resolute; as th...

   ALL men should be both comforted and challenged by Job's statement, in today's reading, "I made a covenant with my eyes not to look with lust at a young woman."  Why did he make such a covenant with his eyes? For the obvious reason that this is what he was doing or being tempted to do. We should be glad that he did not just write, "my eyes look lustfully at young women".   If he had, we would all feel justified in unbridled lust. You think of King David, a man after God's own heart, according to scripture, he had hundreds of women that he had sex with, many wives and concubines.  He found a way to feed his lust for young women by trying to legitimize it by making them wives and concubines.  Many Preachers have joked about this, "it's hard enough to be married to one woman, who would want more than one?" If only that were the case. David was married to these women simply on paper, so to speak. He did not deal with them in the normal sense...