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Is it possible to live in this present world the way God created us to live? Did God forgive our sin when we were born again just so we could “go to heaven when we die”? Did Jesus come to earth to live as God’s Son, or as the Son of Man? He most definitely was God’s Son—and yet He was unmistakably a man. He had to eat, rest, and sleep 
just like all other men. He laughed and wept just as all humans have since the dawn of creation. He had to manage money and relate to relatives. Yet the peace and confidence with which He did it all was amazing. It was as if He wasn’t weighted down as others were. He talked about His Father and His Spirit in such a familiar way that They seemed close, not far off in an unreachable heaven. His followers would later come to recognize this uniqueness as the very fulfillment of what God intended man to be all along. In short, they would come to know they had seen God’s presence living in a human body (2 Corinthians 5:19).
But as Jesus brought God near to man He revealed differences in our thinking and God’s thinking. Though He taught a great deal about money, it never seemed to occupy the center of His thoughts the way it does most human beings. At times Continue reading
At this time each year we celebrate Memorial Day: A time when we visit the graves of departed loved ones. Where did this tradition begin? Why was this day established as a national holiday?
The unveiling of this centerpiece of “His Story” begins in an obscure village in Palestine called Nazareth. An unknown young maiden is startled one day by a visit from an angel who identifies himself as being no less than Gabriel himself. He tells Mary (for that was her name) that she will have a child and that this child will be called “the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32). It was further revealed to her perplexed fiancé, Joseph, that, “She shall bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Mary is shocked! She? Bear the long-awaited “Anointed One”? She was to give birth to the One Who would pay man’s debt to God? She was to bring into this world the One Who would fix what we had messed up in the Garden of Eden? This seemed incredible! Yet, the credibility of this mighty angel standing before her is hardly debatable.
By miracles, He brings Abraham’s children to the desert mountain known as Sinai. In an awesome display of thunder, lightning, and the quaking of this huge mountain, God shows these “children of Israel” that He is the God who created them and is worthy of their utmost respect. To begin this mind-altering process in man, God calls Moses up on the mountain, and, with His torch-like Hand, begins to engrave letters into the rock. Moses watches in awe as ten commands are burned into the side of Sinai. God then with His finger cuts the outline of two tablets separating them from the rest of the rock bed. Moses, watching the smoking tablets, begins to read them: “You shall have no other gods before Me…” (Exodus 20: 3). Ten such commands reveal how God thinks about Himself, about man, and how He expects us to treat Him and those He has created. God tells Moses to take them to the people at the foot of the mountain. He wants men to know how He thinks, and, because He wants them not to forget it, He’s written it down.
So what now?
Besides the Tree of Life, there was another Tree in that Paradise: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree represented the opposite way of life. This way of living would be motivated by what happened outside of man. Instead of being inspired by the moving of the Life of God deep within him, if he chose to eat of this tree man would be rejecting God’s offer to come inside him and be his life. He would be choosing a way in which he would make his own decisions, instead of allowing the flowing will of God to come through him.
The clause “It is finished”, in the Greek language in which Jesus spoke it, means to reach a goal. It also means to pay a debt in full, so that the books balance. Jesus had reached His goal of paying our debt. But to understand the “debt” Jesus was paying, we must revisit the scene in the Garden of Eden: When God begins to work with a pile of dust. He carefully shapes it into the form of a man. Once this human body is finished to perfection, God “blows” His own breath into the nostrils of this pile of clay. All of a sudden, the form moves! Light comes to its eyes! It gets up and stands erect like God. I can see Father God turning to the rest of His creation and saying, 
It is such an amazing story! Patrick, a young, former slave in Ireland, was called by God in the 400’s to go share the Gospel of Christ with those same Irish people who had enslaved him just a few years before! Yet, without fear, he boldly entered again into that realm and became the agent of liberty to those who had once been his agents of slavery.
“If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
In 1857-58 God came in revival in this nation in a remarkable way. A businessman named Jeremiah Lanphier started a noonday prayer meeting in New York City. Within a month, hundreds were praying at noon and it began to spread across the region. Some prayer meetings at noon sprang up without knowing of the New York prayer meetings. God began to move across the nation bringing hope to many who had become hopeless. The church had become so weak it couldn’t even decide if slavery was right or wrong. And whenever the Church leaves the Scripture as its standard society always goes downhill. We can always tell the strength of the Church by how much its influence controls the institutions of education, business, and civil government. Jesus said,