​An Introduction to Spiritual Warfare

Ephesians 6
12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
13 Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.
14 Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness,
15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
16 in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.
17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

This is for those who have come over to God by power of Christ from a world fallen in Adam. Adam was given stewardship over the world but He fell for the lies of Satan and in eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, he received to himself and for all his posterity a standard of righteousness which was separate from God because from there he turned from serving God to serving himself. There was no longer any truth in Adam after that because he died in spirit and from his posterity came various religions, which fabricated every kind of god, to satisfy the peoples rebellion against the righteousness of God. Everything from human sacrifice, to people scarring themselves in worship, roaming nude and sexual perversion is what has defined religion for billions of people over the ages. As for the atheist they do all these things too but for different reasons because their spiritual disposition is no different.

Prov 8:36
34 “Blessed is the man who listens to me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at my doorposts.
35 “For he who finds me finds life And obtains favor from the LORD.
36 “But he who sins against me injures himself; All those who hate me love death.”

The first lesson in spiritual warfare is knowing God’s Law because in that is the real standard of righteousness by which we are to live. Now this can only happen if God has initiated a spiritual rebirth in you and the only way you can be know this, is if your life witnesses in itself a perseverance in seeking the Lord Jesus Christ through every trial and joyous moment (Jn3:3,16). Unlike other religions, Christianity is not about how you dress and what you eat, it is about how you think and act, just as I have cited below. As Jesus has said in Mat 22:36-40 the Moral Law hangs on two commandments, that we are to love God above all and second love our neighbour just as we love ourselves.

Exo 20:14
“You shall not commit adultery.

Job 31:1
I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.


Mat 5
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’;
28 but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Spiritual Warfare is such a thing that it requires you to know the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ and that is something you can only receive from the Holy Spirit because only God can help you receive the truth about Jesus in your heart by drowning out the world’s nasty lies about Him, even when those hypocrites claim to be coming from a disposition of meaning well. The fact of the matter remains that if you don’t know the truth about Jesus (Jn14:6), you really don’t know right from wrong.

Mat 16
15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
17 And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.


John 6
43 Jesus answered and said to them, “Do not grumble among yourselves.
44 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.

For most people right and wrong concerning what you can do and what you cannot do is dependent on the masses. If everybody is into piracy, then piracy is ok because everybody is doing it. If everybody supports a woman’s choice to murder the baby in her womb, then it is ok to support abortion but today a woman wants to kill her own baby because responsibility is not fun. It is an established fact that life begins at conception because if conception does not happen, the life of the egg/sperm ceases by itself. If a person dies as a foetus that person dies for real and none of us would exist today if we died as unborn babies. Tomorrow somebody might want to kill you, would you support that too, after all it is that person’s choice. Such is the ludicrous nature of the righteousness the world knows and the best thing is they take pride in this horse shit. Take the manner in which the media covers gay pride and gay parades in the US, they receive 70% of media coverage, when they are only about 3% of that nation’s population. Do you know why this is, it is because the world in sick and this is what we are up against, people who want to reduce civil society to absolute anarchy because their appetites are destructive from Adam.

Isaiah 64
5 You meet him who rejoices in doing righteousness, Who remembers You in Your ways. Behold, You were angry, for we sinned, We continued in them a long time; And shall we be saved?
6 For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

An eminent theologian A. W. Pink has said, the world is not governed by faith but by its senses because they all live to please themselves. Unfortunately, thought has nothing to do with pleasing the senses, so even by their own standard of righteousness what the world knows to be right is very different from what they feel like doing. Such is their plight in their broken communion with God.

Jeremiah 17
5 Thus says the LORD, “Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind And makes flesh his strength, And whose heart turns away from the LORD.
6 “For he will be like a bush in the desert And will not see when prosperity comes, But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, A land of salt without inhabitant.
7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD And whose trust is the LORD.
8 “For he will be like a tree planted by the water, That extends its roots by a stream And will not fear when the heat comes; But its leaves will be green, And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor cease to yield fruit.
9 “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?
10 “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds.

We live in a world that hates responsibility but we who are in Christ should understand that Adam was given stewardship over the world (Gen1:28), which he failed at when he fell to disobedience. We need to look at the world from the perspective of people living on rent (Mark 12:1-12), the unbelievers are nothing but defaulters who want the world for themselves while remaining ungrateful to God. They are nothing but a bunch of squatters who hate taking responsibility for their environment. We cannot respect them for their humanity because if these are out to destroy themselves, must they also take the earth with them? Must we respect their feelings when they have no capacity to care for what is right in the sight of God? Please do not misunderstand me, I am in no way advocating any sort of ethnic cleansing because unlike Islam (Saudi flag), Christianity is not propagated under the edge of the sword. Our sword is the Word of God (absolute truth), which pierces the hearts of men (Heb 4:12).

Gen 1
27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Rom 5
17 For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.

If you are uncomfortable with all this am saying, please know I am not spewing hatred. I am merely telling you things as they are. Have you ever wondered why the world finds the truth in general to be bitter? This by itself should tell you that there is no truth is most people’s religion, even if they take immense pride in it. It is as the Apostle Paul says we are not to be ashamed of the Gospel for the sake of the people because we cannot compromise the truth about God just to make people feel comfortable. To them a living righteous God does not exist but that mind-set need not prevail in us who know God.

Romans 1
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”

Romans 3
3 What then? If some did not believe, their unbelief will not nullify the faithfulness of God, will it?
4 May it never be! Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar, as it is written, “That You may be justified in Your words, And prevail when You are judged.”
5 But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is He? (I am speaking in human terms.)
6 May it never be! For otherwise, how will God judge the world?

Spiritual Warfare is therefore resisting people in their unrighteousness (Ps1:1), which may involve not participating in their religious lies or robbery or bearing false witness against another or using a false measure to make a pay out or sexual immorality. You see, unbelievers have no capacity to trust God, they can at best trust in numbers (people), so what pricks them most when we resist them in their unrighteousness is a sense that awakens them to the existence of God, to whom they suddenly find themselves morally accountable, which they absolutely hate and since these have never practiced living in the truth, they never get the point until they stop living for themselves and start living for God. It is only when they turn to God that they really wake up and smell the coffee.

John 12
23 And Jesus answered them, saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
24 “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
25 “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.
26 “If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.

The side you are on in this spiritual warfare depends on who your life is accountable to. If you more concerned about what the people think of you then you are on the losing side but if you live your life in faith believing that your life is accountable to Jesus Christ, then though you may be knocked down many a times (2Cor4:6-9), you will never be knocked out (Ps37:23-24) because the salvation the Lord Jesus has purchased for you by His blood is unlosable (Eph 6:17).

Romans 10
8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”–that is, the word of faith which we are preaching,
9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;
10 for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.

To conclude, for as long as people deny God His rightful place (first) in their lives, these people will only see their neighbour as the means to serve themselves in their lawlessness (covetousness, adultery, robbery and bearing false witness from vested interest). Contrary to what the world is inclined to believe, the goal of spiritual warfare is peace and this can only be found in Christ (Is 9:6). Have you ever wondered how a world filled 7 billion people, who are only out for themselves, how does such a world not collapse to anarchy? It is by the power of God, who restrains people from actioning their evil desires. Yet these will not escape judgment for their evil motives (Prov 16:2) because as much as there is hope for the godly, the wicked will not escape God’s justice (Heb 1:8-13).

How to Ask in Prayer!

Quite often, I have come across regular Church going people say, that religion is nothing but what society has developed, so that people would listen to what is good. Now there is a negligible fraction of truth to that statement but for a regular church goer to say that, is nothing but hypocrisy. Hypocrites are precisely what people are naturally from Adam because they believe religion should do nothing more than appeal to their good nature but when religion does that they rarely take notice. However, if you speak the truth about them to their face, they will take notice but hate you for it and so it is that people are naturally hypocrites from Adam because nothing is more bitter to these fools than the truth about themselves.

Proverbs 9
8 Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you, Reprove a wise man and he will love you.
9 Give instruction to a wise man and he will be still wiser, Teach a righteous man and he will increase his learning.
10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

It is for this reason people at their best can only believe in humanity because under such a belief system they can do as they please from their unbelief and make victims of those who cannot fight back. Take Abortion for instance, those liberals fools feel secure in ascertaining that those unborn babies cannot fight back but do you think God is going to sit quiet as millions of helpless babies are murdered? This is the very nature of unbelief among those who claim to believe in humanity as over the truth about God and Christ.

Prov 15
28 The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, But the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things. 29The LORD is far from the wicked, But He hears the prayer of the righteous.

Today people think that the wicked are those who are rotting in prison for murder, rape, robbery and fraud. Then there are those who think that you can continue doing what you are doing until you get caught and then when society brands you as wicked, then you are wicked. However, this is far from the truth because the spirit of the anti-Christ has worked in men ever since the fall of Adam (Gen 3:1-6). These demonic spirits work in the hearts of all people because of Original Sin. So a wicked person is not necessarily a person who is on the police records but any and every man whose life is not in communion with God through Jesus Christ.

Romans 3
22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

27 Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith.

You see the reason people feel they are praying but their prayers are not heard is because their hearts aren’t set straight with God and they are implicitly asking God to serve their own rebellious nature. The Bible teaches God looks at our motives when we pray and though we may claim our prayer to be most philanthropic, our motives might be really messed up but no hypocrite will admit that. You see being hypocrites by nature, people are generally given to pray from a motive, which is not genuine but detestable in God’s sight (Mat7:3-5) and God will not listen such prayer because He cannot be mocked without damning repercussions. So, if you are really looking for your prayers to be answered, you’ve got to know God and His purpose.

Prov 8
34 “Blessed is the man who listens to me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at my doorposts.
35 “For he who finds me finds life And obtains favour from the LORD.
36 “But he who sins against me injures himself; All those who hate me love death.”

James 4
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

Against much of what the world’s heretics would like you to believe, God hasn’t left this world orphaned and neither does He play a non-interfering role with humanity. The issue is, when people see things in the world not going as they please, they think God is up to no good because they believe that God exists to serve humanity. You see, this stems from the very same lies these hypocrites fool themselves with, because from the very reason they have fooled themselves to believe that society created God so people may listen to what is good, from that very same reason they undoubtedly feel God exists to serve humanity. Such is the blasphemy they breed about God in their minds and then wonder why God does not answer their prayer. Why should God answer their prayer when these fools believe that God is an invention of society? Should God answer their prayer because He exists to serve Humanity? I hope you are able to see the damning unbelief we are dealing with here because this by itself defines wickedness.

John 6
43 Jesus answered and said to them, “Do not grumble among yourselves.
44 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
45 “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.
46 “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father.
47 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.

You see, in order for you to pray, it requires you to know God, which is only possible through Jesus Christ because Jesus is the Son of God who came some 2000 years ago (Lk1:28-35), taking upon Himself the complete nature of man by being born of a virgin and thus having no part in inheriting the sin of Adam. This Jesus was the sacrifice God offered on behalf of us men who had no capacity for God’s righteousness and as the Bible teaches that life is in the blood, so it is with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ that we have forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God. It is for this reason that the Bible refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God!

1 John3
21 Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God;
22 and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.

John 1
17 For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.
18 No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

I may not know where you stand in your relationship with God but this I can say for sure that intimacy with God grows richer only with brushing shoulders with the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. His Might rubs-off on you as you learn the righteousness God requires of you as a person. It is a high unlike any other and one which only keeps you asking for more of Jesus because when you know Jesus, you want nothing more than what God wants and that greatly pleases God. It’s like a child asking for or doing something that makes his father proud.

Psalms 37
4 Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.
5 Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
6 He will bring forth your righteousness as the light And your judgment as the noonday.

Unlike the Christianity, our famous TV evangelist and the popular Charismatic movement is bearing witness to, asking in prayer is not about asking God as you please so as to satisfy your own appetite but it is asking from the knowledge of knowing God’s will because the true Christian’s strength is in exercising the joy of the Lord and not in satisfying his or her own appetite. I have come across and admonished many so called Bible believing Charismatics whose reason for praising God in the midst of their congregation was: I was praying for an iPhone and God answered my prayer or I was praying for a car and God blessed me with one.

Mat 6
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

I pity the senseless direction of the Charismatic school of thought because when these people testify in the midst of their congregation about God satisfying their appetite for material things (as though it was the crux of their religion), their congregation replies by quoting scripture like Ps2:8 saying you must ask for big things, without knowing that the big things we need to ask for are concerning that which please God and not in serving our own appetite. Such is the plight of the Charismatic movement that their religion is not to stand on Jesus’ righteousness and ask for that which pleases God but to ask in prayer for that which satisfies their own appetite since they subconsciously perceive that it pleases God to serve them. This then is no different from unbelief and so it is that these Charismatics are only fooling themselves in saying they are living for God when their religion is more about satisfying themselves.

Mat 6
31 “Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’
32 “For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
33 “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Though I shall admit that there are many Charismatics who love God, the real problem is that only a small fraction of these have read their Bibles from cover to cover (Hosea4:6). With such an appalling rate of Biblical illiteracy and sloth, their congregations are left with nothing, but to do only what their pastors/leaders say. The average Charismatic therefore is very much unlike the Bereans of Acts 17:11 and though these may be given to say that they are Bible believing Christians, that is far from the truth. The reason I am citing the Charismatics in this post, as I have done in many others, is because asking in prayer is the punchline of the Prosperity Gospel, which is something I need to caution you against because money was never and shall never be the motive for true faith in God.

John 15
5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
6 “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.
7 “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

To conclude, we understand from Romans 5:17 that we are reconciled to God in the Lord Jesus Christ. In this manner our stewardship which was lost in Adam is restored to us in the Lord Jesus Christ because the image of God in which we were made (Gen 1:26) sought to reflect the God’s nature and will, in living out our Christian/Godly stewardship over the earth. So it is in prayer that we who are made in His image can only truly ask with proper purpose, when we ask for not what we want for ourselves but what we want according to God’s own righteousness.

The Standard of Human Morality

Romans 7
7 What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.”

People believe that they don’t need religion to teach them on human morality but this is far from the truth. It is as Paul says above, that he would not know covetousness is sin had the law not taught against covetousness. Now, I have been born and brought up in Mumbai and the Roman Catholic society I was brought up in, were not among the Bible believing/practicing Christians I know today. Having sited this, I must say that one of the reasons the West is so morally sophisticated compared to the general populace of my country and among others in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is because western culture was shaped by the Gospel (Biblical Law).

The West however has been backsliding terribly for quite some time now and the apostasy is appalling. The general mind-set is that we don’t need religion to teach us on morality but I beg to differ on that because growing up I have known what it is to be a namesake Christian like others in my society, and I have grown seeing people who lived according to the Bible be morally superior to me and any other, whom I have known from any religion. I had not seen this moral superiority in either Hindus, Muslims or Buddhist, sure they were religious… didn’t eat pork/beef, nor touched alcohol, said their prayers but they enjoyed doing crap just as much as I did, having little value for their/our neighbour.

Mat 22
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And Jesus said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 “This is the great and foremost commandment.
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Today if a person says that he/she does not need religion to teach them on morality, they are implicitly also saying that Jesus is not the only way to live in communion with God (Jn14:6). In this manner they disregard the sacrifice of Christ because it makes no difference to them in their so called search for spirituality (self-appeasement). However, if you were to draw close and take a good look at their demeanour, you would notice these ungodly religious pretenders viz. Osho, Sadguru, Asaram Bapu and Sri Ravi Shankar, are no different from any other person in the world. These pseudo-religious hoodlums have made religion their business while in their hearts they remain adulterers, coveters, thieves, murderers and false witness bearers because in truth they serve themselves, not God.

Take the average person today, if he/she is asked why don’t you hang out with a particular person, the general response is: why should I hang out with him/her, what has he/she got that I would want? That my dear friend is covetousness for you because generally a person will only hangout with another for what he/she has got… a pretty girlfriend or lots of money or a really nice villa or a fancy car or political clout. The reason I have to spell this all out for you is because you did not know it to this extent and the fact of the matter remains that you need religion to teach you morality.

Today, people are totally ok with sexually checking another person out. Fornication is a status symbol in today’s society and abortion is a right. Such is the warped sense of morality people have, outside Biblically defined morality. When the Bible says that you ought to wear the Law on your forehead and right hand, it means practicing the law of God is not merely an action but something you originates in thought. Now for those of you who are outside Christ, this may seem impossible but for us, whose sinful nature the Lord Jesus has propitiated unto the righteousness of God, this is made possible for us by the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf (Eph 1:4, 7). Wherein we are credited by grace His righteousness while the justice we deserved for our hostility towards God was paid by Jesus for us on the cross.

Mt 19
23 And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
24 “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
25 When the disciples heard this, they were very astonished and said, “Then who can be saved?”
26 And looking at them Jesus said to them, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

You see it says so in the Ten Commandments that you shall not commit adultery and Jesus says that if you were to even ogle at a woman, you would guilty of committing adultery in your heart. So just as the godly as given a moral capacity to think and act according to the Law of God, the ungodly in a similar manner wear the mark of the beast on their forehead and right hand. So you see morality is merely thought materializing into action because you need to think it to do it. However, out of the shame of admitting your own incapacity for true morality you might refer to God’s Law as impractical but then I must point out that the reason you detest those who are blessed with the capacity to exercise the Law of God by the power of Christ, is because you know in the back of your mind somewhere, that living as you please is not morality but immorality, and the reason you oppose Biblical morality is because it defines a morality that opposes your immorality, which you might not care to admit.

Deut 6
6 “These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.
7 “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.
8 “You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.

Rev 13
15 And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast would even speak and cause as many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
16 And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead,
17 and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.

If all the religions were truly the same, teaching everybody good things, the Christian sense of morality, which is according to the Law of God would not come under such spiteful attack. The truth is, people want to live as their please, which has been naturally passed to them from fallen Adam but when the real standard of righteousness presents itself, the dark side of all these heathen fools suddenly surfaces because that is what Adam has passed to all his posterity, a counterfeit standard of righteousness. So how does a counterfeit feel when the real thing shows up and proves the counterfeit to be a counterfeit? He or she feels terrible with a sense of absolute helplessness which they are too ashamed to admit because they also happen to be liars by nature (Jn8:44) but such is the implication of Adam eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil (Gen3:1-6), thereby receiving to himself and passing to his posterity a righteousness of the antiChrist, which is contrary to the righteousness of God.

Col 2 (Identifying false outward religiosity)
20 If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as,
21 “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!”
22 (which all refer to things destined to perish with use)–in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?
23 These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

James 1 (The mark of true religion)
25 But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does.
26 If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless.
27 Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Morality has lost so much ground today that people who claim to be ministers in the Church are immoral because these fools are on the other extreme thinking that morality has nothing to do with religion. They believe their requirement to be religious is absent of any required morality but sadly it is as Hosea 4:6 says that the House of God is destroyed because they are ignorant on what God requires of his people.

Hosea 4
6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Take Benny Hinn for instance, he claims his ministry is genuine simply because his ministry’s miracles speak for themselves… so he says. However, unlike the apostolic age, prophesies, tongues and healings today do not mark a body as the Church. In the apostolic age, these miracles were given the Church to bear witness to those unto whom the Gospel was preached, that that body was God’s Church but after the Bible was compiled in 325AD, what marks a body as God’s Church is not the miracles or tongues or revelation but in that body being faithful/lawful to the teachings of God in the Bible, which is sufficient for any person who desires to know God. I say this because the Bible’s infallibility/perfection (Ps19:7) is to the extent that nothing can be added to it nor taken away from it (Rev22:18-19).

Mat 7
22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’
23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

To conclude, morality is rooted in religion and for those who disagree, it is only because they desire to live as they please and not according to the good pleasure of God. These fools are poor stewards of the earth (Gen 1:28) and all they desire to do is crash and burn, such is the anarchy they are given to but imagine how good God is, which these fools fail to recognize because the very fact they are still alive doing what they do is because God has been patient with them (Rom9:22). Hence these deny morality is grounded in Christ/religion because they would rather have God take off his restraining hand from them so that they may live as they please and die in their self-defined bliss.

The Moral Law – The Christian Standard!

1John 2
4 The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him;
5 but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him:
6 the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.
7 Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard.

Today the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Pentecost, which many believe is the birth of the Church. I pretty much disagree with that because the very first Gospel message of Christ atonement was preached in Gen 3:15, almost immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve. For as long as there have been a people of God, the Church has existed; it is as Rom 3:23-24 says, that all fell in Adam but whoever is saved from their sin, their Salvation is by the merit of Christ alone (Is53:4-5), whether that be an Old Testament Saint or a New Testament Saint.

Mat 5
16 “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.
17 “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.
18 “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
19 “Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Mat 28 (The Great Commission)
18 And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
19 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,
20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

The Law given Moses can be broadly classified into three types:
1. The Moral Law
2. The Ceremonial Law
3. The Judicial Law
The Moral Law was given the individual because it bore the very nature of God, the image of God which was broken in Adam’s disobedience but restored in the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom 5:17). The Ceremonial Law was given Old Testament Israel because these ceremonies pointed to the redemptive works of Jesus Christ (Heb10:1-10). The Judicial Law is what is given the State (not Church) to hedge the Moral Law and protect society from anti-social elements (1Tim1:8-11). Let me give you an example of how the Moral Law functions with the Judicial Law: Jesus says that we are not to lust after a woman even in thought (Mat5:28) because we as believers are accountable to God. Now the State, which deals all people (believers and unbelievers) in society, cannot penalize a person for bad thoughts but if a person were to act on those wicked thoughts, then the State has the power to prosecute that person. This is the difference essentially between the Moral Law and the Judicial Law, which serves to hedge morality in society.

Rom 6

15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be!
16 Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?

The rate of Biblical illiteracy we’re are dealing with today is appalling, among those who consider themselves as Bible believing Christians, only 1 in 5 of these have read their Bible from cover to cover. If I were to consider the Christian community at large, in a survey conducted: 82% of these ascertain that “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible verse, when it’s not. With the Christian community exhibiting such a shameful Biblical literacy rate, it is no wonder that Christians today haven’t the faintest idea that there is a Standard by which they are to live, if Jesus is indeed Lord over their lives.

John 14
15 “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

This standard is the Moral Law, which is the new nature we receive in Christ (2Cor5:17), when we are born from above (Jn3:3). The antinomians believe in a Salvation of lawless grace (Rom 6:15) but these fools forget that the very desire for righteousness that is birthed in the believer when he/she receives Christ, is a desire to live by the Moral Law that is Christ’ Commandments because Salvation is twofold. Not only are the deadly wages of our sin charged to Christ but the very nature of Christ (i.e. His righteousness) is also imputed to us and it is for this reason we are sanctified us each day into the likeness of Jesus (Rom8:29).

Exo 20
12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you.
13 “You shall not murder.
14 “You shall not commit adultery.
15 “You shall not steal.
16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
17 “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbour.”

Mat 22
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And He said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 “This is the great and foremost commandment.
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Today, when many feel that they don’t need the Bible to teach them about God, I am reminded about the Apostle Paul who says in Rom7:7 that he would not know covetousness is sin, if the Law had not taught against covetousness. Then am also reminded of James 2:2-4, which happens in so many churches today, where the pastor’s interests in the poor man who desire to know God, is set aside for the rich man who comes to Church. I hope you can see that these discernments are spiritually ascertained (1Cor2:14) according to the Moral Law, where you ought to love God first as even over yourself (Mat 22:37) and second be considerate towards your neighbour just as you are concerning yourself (Mat 22:39).

Mat 7
22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’
23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

Consider an average person today, he/she basis his/her need for communion with his/her neighbour on the basis of adultery or covetousness. It’s as the ungodly typically say: why should I hang out with that person, what has he/she got that I would make me want to hang out with him or her… such is the fallen mind-set of covetousness, which is sin. It is not that we are supposed to hang out with only poor people but our fellowship with others should allow us to question our motives. We ought to take our cue from 1Cor6:14-15 when it comes to fellowshipping with others. Yes, pray for your enemies and those who persecute you… be courteous to these but as a Christian you ought to remember that you will never be able to share intimate fellowship with an unbeliever because you are regenerated/sanctified each day in the spirit, to delight in God and His righteousness (Gal2:20) while the unbeliever submits each day to his/her own corruption delighting in the worship of their own lusts. This separation exists not from wishful thinking but this is what God has put in place from the very beginning (Gen3:15).

John 15
5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
6 “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.

To conclude: for a Christian who acknowledges Jesus as His Lord and Saviour, it is critical that his/her life keep the Moral Law (Ezek36:26-27) not out of forced compulsion but out of his/her new nature to please God because such is the faith (James2:14-17) that every true believer in blessed with in Christ (2Pet1:1).

What Really is Love?

Love is the very foundation of true religion, yet what this world perceives of love is nothing but lawlessness and wickedness because what our world considers as love is nothing but a love that satisfies their own interests and lusts. The Bible teaches us that God is love but to think of God by the standard of what this world knows as love, is nothing short of heinous and appalling. Take the Moral Law for instance, which teaches the individual to put God first even before self and second to love their neighbour as thoughtfully as oneself. Does the world know any such structure in its love? No, because the individuals of the world are nothing but a law to themselves, still imagine the might of God that he restrains these individual in their wicked nature [1Jn2:2] (who are inclined to serve nothing more than themselves) and allows for such people to live in a structured society hedged by the Civil Law that is given to the state (1Tim1:9). That is how good and great God is!

1John 4
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.

The reason I feel so compelled to write on love is because it is the most abused term in the world today. Today, even fornication passes of as love but what happens when a child is born from it? The apostate State then gives license for murder through abortion. Clearly this is not the love of God because Biblically love covers a multitude of sins (1Pet4:8), never ever serving as a cause to give rise to sin.

John 15
9 “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.
10 “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.
11 “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.
12 “This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.

So what then is love? Love is knowing God because if you don’t know God, you will not live practicing God is first and that you ought to deal with your neighbour (people in your environment) in the same manner you would be like to be dealt with yourself (Mat7:12). The Bible refers to knowing God as loving God because unlike the fallen lusts this world wallows in, God is irresistible to the extent that it will not prove detrimental to your wellbeing but would enrich your life instead (Ps34:8). This knowledge of God is available to you in the Lord Jesus alone, whose Spirit overcomes our sinful nature propitiating us to the righteousness of God. We are thereby given to understand that God is love because He is strongly relational being One in Three Persons, a beloved unity which His people are blessed with in King Jesus Christ (Jn17:11).

Matthew 22
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And He said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 “This is the great and foremost commandment.
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

To the world, love is blind but that is only because they are blind to God. Love is not blind nor shapeless or lawless. Love is an absolute! Just take a look at the anatomy of our own bodies, the design is so complex. Take a look at our DNA and you notice the immensity of details it stores, which even exceeds the storage capacities of the fastest supercomputers today. If God was ever the senseless kind of love the world knows, there would never be such beauty in the details of all creation. So after you consider all of that and realize we are merely creation, we cannot imagine how infinitely awesome the Triune God Almighty is. In other words, if God is indeed love as the Bible teaches, He is not the irrational love the world knows because if you care to look into the Bible, God is absolutely rational, it is this world in its self-serving nature which is senseless and irrational, in being indifferent to the God of the Bible.

John 3
16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
17 “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
18 “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
19 “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.
20 “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

On this topic of love, I would like to touch-up on this popular notion which exists in Christian circles that: “God hates sin but loves the sinner”, which is far from the truth because from the fall of Adam, we all hated God but thanks be to the Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ, His elect are ransomed from all sin by the power of His blood. You see, a person cannot sin unless he/she is a sinner and the reason we all sin is because we all are sinners, and as sinners we hate the truth/light as it exposes our self-righteousness to be lie, which is a horrid feeling. We learn from the Bible that God in His Omniscience knows who are His even before the foundation of the world (Jn10:14/Eph1:3-4). So even though it is impossible for us who love sin to love God because the righteousness of God is contrary to our nature, our Salvation is by no means impossible to God (Mat19:25-26), since Salvation is not by the power of the people but by the power of God (Jn1:12-13).

Romans 5
10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

Mark 2
17 And hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Rom 5:10 is therefore the highlight of God’s grace upon we who are his elect, undeserving sinners. Those who are righteous in their own eyes know nothing of such grace given to the individual in repentance (Lk18:9), on the contrary they are fools who believe that they are right and God is wrong but to the elect God grants repentance (2Tim2:25) that in His time they would see the error of their ways and submit to God in Jesus Christ (1Tim2:5-6).

John 14
15 “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

John 15
5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
6 “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.

I would like to put in a word of caution for those of you who are inclined to follow after the Charismatic Church. The Charismatic Church is not a body Christ has instituted because if you care to look into its history, you would learn that it is nothing but an atrocious spinoff of a retard girl (Margaret McDonald somewhere around the 1830s) from a mental asylum, who is believed to have been gifted with visions by some (I’d say just as in Acts16:16-18). We ought to understand that prophesies and revelation were given in its time to the Apostolic Church [1Cor14:24-25] (i.e. before the Bible was compiled in 325 AD) so that the miracles would bear witness to those to whom the Gospel was preached that the Church was indeed from God. However, after the Bible was compiled, all these healings, prophesies and speaking in tongues ceased (1Cor13:8) as they no longer stood as assurity that that body was a Church. Today, many ministries like that of Benny Hinn claim to be Ministries and Churches of God but with the money laundering and molestation charges that is brought against such leaders, we learn that these are merely bodies who serve themselves in their sin, not God. Today, what determines a body as God’s Church depends on how that body obeys God’s word in the Bible without being dependant on any additional revelation through prophesies or the speaking of tongues (Rev21:18-19) because the Bible by itself is complete/sufficient to edify/nourish the Church (Ps19:7/2Tim3:16-17).

1 Corinthians 13
8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away.

Mat 7
22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’
23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

As Christians, there is a standard by which we are to live, which is the Moral Law (2Jn1:5). The Moral Law defines the very nature of God, revealed to us in scripture and so in our calling to be Christlike, this nature becomes our own (Ezek36:27/Jn3:3,16), owing to our Godly purpose as human beings who are made in the image of God. If you have time, take a look and the study Psalm 119, which is the longest chapter in the whole Bible, as it expounds on the nature of God revealed to the individual in the Moral Law.

1 John 5
16 If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this.
17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.

Before I conclude, there is one more thing I need to caution you against. Please know that the Bible is not merely a set of instructions to the Church but it is a set of instructions to society at large, which means that it instructs both the Church and the State. So just as a parent would kill, if their child’s life depends on it, so too Capital Punishment is a power given to the State (not the Church or the individual) to protect society from deadly antisocial elements. You might find this fascinating that nations in the west like Switzerland and Netherlands who have abolished Capital Punishment because they are so civilised supposedly… have legalised Euthanasia! Can you believe that? It’s like Rev3:16 materializing right before your very eyes (God is indeed sovereign). It’s as though their self-righteousness made them break their fall with their own faces when they abandoned their faith, leaving their religious institutions to be turned into pubs and mosques.

Heb 12 (breaking in the middle of sentence)
5 and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, Nor faint when you are reproved by Him;
6 For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, And He scourges every son whom He receives.”
7 It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?

To conclude, this is something I must leave you with. True love does not start and end with mushy feeling because love bears a character of duty; just like one’s faith is evident in what he/she does (James2:14-20), so too Love goes beyond emotions in practicing Godly duty and neighbourly kindness. We need to remember that true love involves discipline and requires us to mend our ways… straighten us out, so to speak. It is from such “discipline” that we get the word “disciple” because the love we learn in Jesus Christ is not one which allows us to live as we please but to live according to the good pleasure of God. Such love is not merely healthy for our lifestyle but it also promotes a congenial environment for society to blossom in, where the corner stone is Jesus Christ.

1John 3
1 See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.

How to Love your Enemy!

Mat 5 (Jesus says)
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Today, when Christians discuss “how to love your enemy”, it seems common sense and practicality are thrown out of the window for the sake mushy religiosity based on an eisegesis as over an exegesis of scripture. The reason I feel compelled to write on this topic is because there are people out there who desire to do that which pleases God but have spiritual elders who are poorly equipped with scripture and thereby incapable to holistically counsel them in the light of scripture. We ought to remember that a good exegesis is done when scripture is interpreted in the light of scripture, if a verse is interpreted so as to favour the prevailing humanists/liberal mind-set, not only does that not harmonize with the rest of scripture, which stands as its background but it ascertains a teaching which was never Biblically called for, to be the foolishness God supposedly requires of the individual from unholy fear.

Mat22
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

If you were to take a look at the Ten Commandments (Ex20:3-17), you would notice that the first four commandments deal with the Christian’s religious accountability unto God, while the other six deal with the Christians accountability toward his/her neighbour. Now this neighbour could be anybody who exists or whom you can make contact with in your environment, yes even your worst enemy if he/she is around (Lk10:27-37). However, this does not mean that you ought to go hug them as you see them or ask them out for dinner or even smile at them from an out of place feeling. It just means that you should be courteous in your dealings with them and even help them out if they or their property is in danger.

Exodus 23
4 “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. 5 If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it.

As a true Christian, you need to understand that your enemy only hates you because he/she hates the nature of Christ that is burgeoning in you (Jn15:18-19). That hatred between the seed of Satan and the seed of Christ is what God has put in place from the beginning (Gen3:15) because light can have no fellowship with darkness (2Cor6:14). This means the Christian can never be intimately involved with the unbeliever because the glory of God pleases the Christian while a sinful satisfaction of self is what pleases the unbeliever.

Rom 12
18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. 20 On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
    if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Today, what the world knows about love is merely a mushy feeling that pampers the other to do as they please but if you were to read the scripture from Mat22 above, you would notice that love requires us to bear responsibility unto God and neighbour. Love is not merely a wavering emotion but a duty given the Godly to act from the nature of Christ (Phil4:13) because when the individual is born from above, he/she turns to God by the merit of Christ (Jn3:3,16 & 15:4). So you notice that the individual is called to be Godlike in nature, in his/her calling to be Christlike (Ezek36:27), as the moral law of God occupies the person’s heart (Jer31:33), making God’s precepts the individual’s new nature because we are a new creation in Christ (2Cor5:17).

Rom 9
22 What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?

1Cor13
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

From 1Cor 13 we notice that patience is a virtue of love and in Rom 9 we see that God exhibits such love through patience upon the wicked who are merely vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. So in being called to follow after God (Mat10:16,25), we are called to be gentle and live as peaceably/wisely with them as you possibly can (Prov16:7/Rom12:8).

2Tim 2
23 Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. 24 And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, 25 correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, 26 and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

That is to say that scripture does not expect you to make your enemies your close friends or count them among your loved ones because such intimacy is not possible for you who are in Christ to have such communion with those whose communion with God is broken. In other words, the reason you would not be able to share intimate fellowship with your enemy is because what your enemy delights in, will probably make you feel squeamish.

Col1:21
21 And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, 22 yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach— 23 if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister.

To conclude, most of us believers would know how we lived back in the time when we were unbelievers, knowing now how patient God was with us while we never knew the rich intimacy of Christ’ fellowship back then (Col1:21-22). We thereby are not given to determine beforehand whether the patience/curtesy we exhibit unto our enemies, shall be a conduit of God’s mercy allowing for closer/likeminded fellowship with the individual (2Tim2:25) or whether it would merely be leaving room for God’s justice (Rom12:19) because Salvation belongs to God and as Rom 9:15 says God has mercy on whom He has mercy and compassion on whom He has compassion.

What we as His Church should learn from the bombings in Pakistan!

Exodus 1
5 All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. 6 Then Joseph died, and all his brothers and all that generation. 7 But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.

8 Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. 9 And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. 10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” 11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.

In our calling to be Christlike we ought to remember that as much as Jesus is the Lamb of God, He is the Lion of Judah. When I look at the bomb blasts in the two Churches in Lahore – Pakistan, it seems that these Christians are calling for the world to sympathise with their circumstances but as such if a Church (body of believers) is truly from God then the world would hate that Church for bearing the righteousness of God, as over supporting and empathising with it.

John 15
19 If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. 20 Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also.

Today the circumstances are such that if we eliminate one threat of terror, many more arise, which is as though these favour God’s justice upon a world which has turned slothful in its faith in Christ. Take a look at the record of Exodus 1:5-12 and you will know that such multiplication of people is given by God, to meet His purpose (Prov16:4). Now we can either glorify God’s grace and mercy through genuine faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (Jn14:1) or we can glorify God’s justice and wrath from heretic notions concerning God, which never defined true Christianity.

What Christians mostly perceive about God today is nothing but heresy, which for most part is because these do not know their Bibles from cover to cover. The plight of the Christian Church is such that if Christians were to go through the list of predefined heresies, they would realise that they do ascribe to some of them concerning what Christianity teaches, when in truth Christianity teaches none of these. Such is the spiritual sloth the Church is dealing with today. The truth is people are not bored about God, they are merely fed-up with the same old repetitive lies they fabricate concerning God. After all unlike the truth, lies cannot be enjoyed like they were an original.

Concerning the two blast in Lahore, which targeted Christians on Easter (Resurrection Sunday), I am sceptical about how many from these masses who were targeted, were living their lives for Jesus Christ as over merely living for themselves. In most cases of Christian heresy I have observed that these so called Christians are spineless and compromise their Christian lifestyle from unholy fear of godless fools. Yes, I know of Pakistan’s blasphemy law and it reminds me of how Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego defied the State in its apostasy by refusing to pay homage in any form to the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan3:1-18), which was initiated by political mischief.

For most part people are ashamed of the Gospel only because they are ashamed of the truth. It’s true that it takes an individual a whole lot of courage to speak out against the masses who err with great passion. Some of the famous passive thought trains among humanists are:
· if you can’t beat them, join them
· when in Rome, do as the Romans do

This is merely because people comprise on the reverence for God out of fear of the people. It happens even here in India that Christians receive/eat the sweets offered to Idols out of fear of the people but such fear estimates that these people are the ever present standard to these Christians as over God, whose good pleasure is set aside because these Christians fear the people as over fearing God.

Rom 13
Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. 3 For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behaviour, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; 4 for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil.

To conclude, if the Christians in Pakistan start living out their Christianity as over cowering under the lies of Islam, while still trying to appease people around them, then they shall inherit the blessing of Ex1:12 by grace as over being made subject of God’s justice. The Christian code is a moral code and though the Pakistani government may ascribe to Islam, its function is to maintain Law and Order in the country, which is impossible under Islam because Islam lacks the idea of what defines a society, while its teachings promote anarchy and disestablishment of a nation. So if Christians were to exercise their faith in their nation, Pakistan will not only become more tolerant to the Gospel but would also flourish as a nation.

Ezek 36 (God’s promise to His elect)
26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them. 28 Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be My people, and I will be your God. 29 I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. I will call for the grain and multiply it, and bring no famine upon you. 30 And I will multiply the fruit of your trees and the increase of your fields, so that you need never again bear the reproach of famine among the nations.

Almighty God doesn’t need your kryptonite in His religion!

Yesterday I was watching “Batman Vs Superman – Dawn of Justice” and something struck me. You see, for our entertainment, we have created this character Superman who is invincible and almost as though we want to give him something for us to feel sorry for him, we give him this weakness coming from kryptonite.

This is what people from their fallen nature in Adam, desire to do with religion as well, which worships Almighty God. Not that God is a fictitious character but people want to judge God as it helps them feel in control while having their own vacillating sorry feelings (mercy) imposed as the standard of being religious. Such a disposition has no capacity to truly look upon God Almighty with unconditional awe/reverence. Instead of seeing His Love, His Justice and His Mercy as being absolute, they want to look at His perfect attributes from a manner that cripples God’s Mighty nature. Such a humanist form of religion doesn’t quite view the crucifixion of Christ as an spotless sacrifice God put in place to be the atonement for all sin, rather people want to naturally look at “Christ’ passion” from a feeling of being sorry for Jesus, as over being sorry for their own sins. This is even after knowing it was a sacrifice that appeased God’s Justice to its absolute satisfaction.

Luke 23
27 And following Him was a large crowd of the people, and of women who were [a]mourning and lamenting Him. 28 But Jesus turning to them said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

You see Biblical Hebrew often uses picturesque expressions to detail God’s nature to us, so when God is angry, His nostrils are said to be flared with smoke (Ps18:8) and when his wrath is appeased He is said to long of nose (translated as longsuffering in Ex34:6) from breathing in the sweet atoning sacrifice (Eph5:2). The sacrificial requirement in the Old Testament pointed to Christ atonement for all sin. So Jesus did not die on the cross that we may feel sorry for Him and therefore like Him, on the contrary Jesus substituted God’s people in death to serve as an instrument of God’s Mercy unto us sinners.

Luke 12
57 “And why do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right?

But why doesn’t this appeal to our world. It seems they are a bunch of hypocrites who say they want to experience everything in life except… and this is implicit… the truth about God in the Bible, to which they are indifferent and often treat with contempt. Ideally God should be first, even before the individual but thanks to fallen Adam, the world is filled with gods, doing as they please and believing only what appeals to their fallen appetites, having put themselves before God!

Prov 21
4 An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin.

The very fabric of the world’s nature says they do not trust God and so it turns out that most of what they do is from a mind-set of godless unbelief, which is sin (Rom14:23). So it is that, people are given to more humanist forms of religion, so they can have mercy (take pity) on God and do what is right from the righteousness they received from Adam’s disobedience but the justice of the people is not true justice because they inherently from Adam awe evil as being all-powerful and true justice is merely their opportunity to show compassion. This is something we notice in the movies we make as well, where horror has no mitigating factor being all-powerful because that is how the world expects evil to be from their ignorance of God. However, the Mighty nature of God is such that people deceive only because they have been deceived!

Gen 3 (The Fall)
2 The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; 3 but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” 4 The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! 5 For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.

Ezek 36 (The Promise)
26 Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

John 3 (fulfilled in Jesus)
3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
…
16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

Such are the fools Satan has made of Adam’s offspring, that until these are adopted into the family of God through Jesus Christ by giving them a new Spirit, they remain deceived as sons of Satan (Jn8:44), believing evil is awesome while looking upon God’s attributes of love, justice, mercy and wrath as factors which only cripple the reason people ought to worship God in Spirit and truth. Such is the world’s self-righteousness that they have foolishly made themselves judge over God!

Implicitly the condition which these liars state as a general requirement to believe in God, is if religion will lower its standard just enough to help these exercise their fallen emotions including feeling sorry for God Almighty as being helpless in the world. So their point of view is: God Almighty in truth is quite boring but if these could introduce some kryptonite in God Almighty then that would make religion appeal to their appetites because then these would get to play god and dictate what religion requires to exist as proper religion but the truth is with God… Jesus is the truth (Jn14:6), and though liars may claim to know the truth from vested interest, God shall merely convict these for unbelief and He doesn’t quite have to wrestle these pigs in the mud to prove He is God over all.

Take the TULIP for instance, which showcases God’s absolute Sovereignty in Salvation. This TULIP has been under massive attack from inside and outside the Church but mostly by people whose lives barely walk the talk, these in most cases are hypocrites who desire to introduce some humanist kryptonite into good solid religion which awes God in Salvation.

What we ought to learn from the Brussels Attack!

Though very few may know of the fall of Adam that is inherent in people from Original Sin, surely everyone has noticed that people by nature are interested in everything except the truth about God in the Bible. Today people from the convenience of their plush homes talk about the atrocities that happened during the Christian Crusades but few have the courage to talk about the atrocities which took place on the Islamic side, which occurred under no provocation, except for their craving for power. The truth is that people by nature hate truth and love lies for such is the sweet poison of unbelief that prevails in the fallen sons of Adam until these come to Christ (Rom5:17).

Though the Crusades involved many unjust murders (not mere killings), its motive was good… to protect Christian civilizations like the Byzantine Empire in the Middle-East from destruction. Today scores of Christians are being murdered and sold as slaves in the Middle-East especially in Syria and Iraq. Many blacks often hate the Christian culture for the slave trade, which their forefathers were unwillingly subject to decades/centuries ago but these same people forget that it was the Arabs who sold the namesake Christians their slaves. This trade still exists today, it’s just that the Arabs have only found themselves different customers but do the blacks in America and Europe complain of this?… No, because whom they consider as brothers today are only those who are as morally perverse as they are. If you have watched the movie Amazing Grace which is based on a true story, you will know that it was the true Christians who initiated and ended slave trade in the West.

Am I calling for a Crusade? Well, I certainly don’t want the unjust killing of Christians and Jews that happened during the Crusades happening now but I would like every measure taken to safeguard the lives and livelihood of Christians in the Middle East because if we are going to be people who only take action when our heads go under the guillotine then the same bland “worldwide condemnation of the attack” that the Christians in Syria & Iraq got from an unbelieving world, is what the Brussels and the Paris attack are also going to get.

Luke 6
38 “Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure–pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return.”

If you would like to know what is my stand on the Brussels Attack, I would say: read Isaiah 10:5-20 and please know that the only reason you may not agree with me here is if your life does not bear witness from holy fear that God exists. Wake up Europe, wake up and smell the coffee! The world leaders who merely condemn the attack are going to do nothing for you outside their own safety/interest because they are terrified of the truth and can’t ever say the words “Islamic Terrorism”. However, if you turn for your unbelief to God in repentance, He shall secure you in Jesus’s love.

Exodus21
12 “He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.
13 “But if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand, then I will appoint you a place to which he may flee.
14 “If, however, a man acts presumptuously toward his neighbor, so as to kill him craftily, you are to take him even from My altar, that he may die.

You know the funny thing is people don’t know what truly is Grace and Law. The opposite of Law is not Grace but lawlessness, which is sin (Mat7:23 [NASB]). The Bible teaches that God has put in place three institutions, which are the Family, Church and State. The State is only in charge of Law and Order, while the Church is given charge to care for and nourish society through ministries that deal with education, medicine and infrastructure; but where does that happen today? Today, the State is playing Church through government run schools, medical facilities and infrastructure; hence, instead to exercising justice on convicts whose sins are deserving of death (Deut19:4-6/1Jn5:17), the State is messed up and confused, exercising grace instead on murderous anti-social elements who deserve to be executed only because treason is defined here as coming from vested interest and not as being one nation under God. Now if Brussels were operating under a theocracy, this Salah Abdeslam would have been executed the same day he was caught. Such should have also been so with Yakub Menon and Ajmal Kasab in India, and it is from such disobedience we ought to take a look that the unholy fear a nation succumbs to, when the State forgets it is given to exercise justice under God.

To conclude, with prayer being removed from schools and government institutions and with Churches turning to Mosques and Pubs throughout Europe, out of pure lack of religious interests, it can safely be ascertained that the West has turned slothful in its faith in Christ. So, if one’s comforts are to surpass a lifestyle of Godliness so as to define the people’s liberty then I must say that God is not going to let that happen, simply to let us know that He exists and will not be ignored by people who consider their lifestyles as being more important than God, while taking for granted the common grace they enjoy as a nation formed after Biblical principles.

An Approach to Prayer!

In this day and age, the ignorance of God is great all over the world. It is said that the Westminster Smaller Catechism was taught to Sunday school children during the days of the Protestant Reformation but today it is taught to adults in Seminary. I have so often heard people say that God is not hearing their prayer, which to me sounds like “we are asking but God is not giving us what we want”. Very often I feel people discreetly fear saying “God willing”, it’s as though people are insecure of submitting their lives to the will of God. The truth is, all our lives are subject to the will of God but it is our faith in Christ that establishes our eternal security in God, who is good.

James 4
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”
14 Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.
15 Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”

Though many may claim to believe in God and Jesus Christ (Jn14:1), the very fact that they are insecure of God’s Sovereign will over their own lives, dictating every event, says that these do not truly trust/believe in God. The consequences of unbelief is death but faith is a gift of God; having said that, faith is not measure of how strongly you expect what you ask for from God, rather faith is measure of whether you trust God enough to surrender your life to Him in any particular situation, while your heart seeks the Lord Jesus to sustain you through that fiery trial, as He did with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Dan3:8-18). For such is the will of God in sanctifying His people into His image, which was tarnished in the fall of Adam.

Romans 8
28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren;
30 and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.

The problem with people who pray fruitlessly is that true religion has no bearing in their lives (James1:26-27), they are unrepentant in their dealings with their neighbour out of covetousness, adultery, thievery, bearing false witness or murder. The only reason they are capable of this is because God is not first in their lives. These people have simply put themselves first, such is the natural implication from the fall of Adam. Take a look at the Ten Commandments (Ex20:3-17) where the first four commandments are man’s moral duty unto God, while the next six are man’s moral duty unto his neighbour. The Satanic counterfeit of these commandments from the fall of Adam is therefore where the individual’s first onus is unto himself, which then influences his relationship with his neighbour from vested self-interest. Such a person, in truth does not believe God exists and that is how he/she goes about their lives. Hence it is that people’s prayer are not answered because such petitions are made from absolute unbelief and for most times bear the audacity of testing the Lord God Almighty (Mat4:7).

Matthew 22
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And He said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 “This is the great and foremost commandment.
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Imagine if you were to walk into the Office of the Commissioner of Police, what would be your demeanour. I have often heard of Charismatics who have said that they have fought with God in prayer over their life’s circumstances and what comes to my mind are the Israelites who grumbled and murmured against Moses and God, wanting to go back to Egypt and slavery. If we are truly born from above and believe in Jesus Christ (Jn3:3,16), then we ought to realize the price Jesus paid, that we may have access to the throne of grace with confidence (2Cor5:21) in prayer unto the God Almighty in all His Majesty and Holiness. This confidence in prayer we have is in knowing that whatever particular situation we are in, is what God has set for us in that time from His Omniscience and Omnipotence, such is the faith He requires of the believer in prayer.

Hebrews 4
14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.
15 For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
16 Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

If you believe you don’t have such faith, then you ought to consistently seek the Lord Jesus in prayer and ask him to bless you with such a saving faith (Jn6:37). It is very important when you pray that you honestly acknowledge your own moral disposition before God (Luke18:9-14), do not leverage the good person you consider yourself to be, as the reason for which God should hear your prayer because your self-righteousness before God is no better than being clothed in rags before his Majesty (Is64:6). Yes, God does hear the prayer of the righteous, a righteousness which is defined in God not of those who are righteous in their own eyes (Is5:20-23).

1Peter3
10 For,
“Whoever would love life
    and see good days
must keep their tongue from evil
    and their lips from deceitful speech.
11 They must turn from evil and do good;
    they must seek peace and pursue it.
12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous
    and his ears are attentive to their prayer,
but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

The above once seemed absolutely impossible to me but God blessed me with the desire to seek the Lord Jesus in my trials and the impossible became possible (Lk18:27), thanks be to God. If you have such a calling from God then such a capacity will be given to you too in the Lord Jesus Christ because the demeanour of your heart unto God matters most when you prayer. Now let us take a look at the manner in which Jesus taught us to pray.

Mat 6
9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

One of the privileges of the Christian is that he bears the name of God (1Pet4:14) and is conformed each day into the image (moral character) of God. So when we pray to God, who is in heaven, we must ask God to help us lead holy lives in being conformed to his image, for such is the will of God that we ought to be holy as He is holy (1Pet1:15-16). It is very important that our prayer fall in line with His will for us because in prayer when we ask, it’s important that we ask from the right motive (James4:2-3).

When we say “thy kingdom come”, we are praying for God’s righteousness to reign in on the earth through the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom5:17-21), who propitiates the sins of men from self-righteousness unto the righteousness of God (1Jn2:2). You see it is not that God’s will is not done on earth, it’s just that unlike in heaven, here on earth people either glorify God’s mercy offered in Jesus Christ or they glorify His justice from unbelief (Jn3:18), while in heaven God’s will is carried out holistically unto God’s good pleasure but here on earth God doesn’t delight in the punishment of wicked (Ezek18:23).

In asking God for our daily bread, we acknowledge God’s providence in our lives that it is he who sustains us, despite being sinners by nature and poor stewards over this world, which we are to subdue in Christ. Such is the forgiveness we have from God in Jesus Christ, for our sins were imputed to Him who had no sin and His righteous was credited to us in our helpless/sinful estate (2Cor5:21). Hence we are a new creation in Christ (2Cor5:17), forgiving those who have sinned against us because we realize the immense debt God forgave us of from no deserving nature of our own, for such is the grace of God in the Salvation He offers us in Jesus Christ.

Romans 1
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

In asking God not to lead us into temptation, we are asking God to safeguard us from our fallen nature from Adam that we may humbly acknowledge the truth about ourselves as sinners before God Almighty, and in doing so is our spiritual prostration aka repentance. For in the Lord Jesus is our Salvation (Mat1:21), for all things are of God and from God, for His own glory (Col1:16-20), such is the might of God (Phil4:13).

On studying the “Our Father”, which is what this payer is often called, we realize what Jesus is teaching here is not merely some words to be learned by rote but He is also schooling us on a moral and spiritual mind-set from which we are to pray because the worshipers the Lord seeks are those who worship in Spirit and Truth (Jn4:23-24).

John 15 (Jesus says)
7 If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

To conclude unlike the gamut of religions out there in the world which requires the individual to follow a whole lot of ritualistically outward religiosity for such is their scheme of prayer, the Christian prayer on the other hand requires a genuine spiritual disposition as over anything outward because God looks at the heart (1Sam16:7). So remember the first thing you ought to do in prayer is be intellectually honest concerning where you stand before God and then follow the trail as the Holy Spirit leads you in always seeking the Lord Jesus Christ.