Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Don't Miss the Message from Heaven!

God has sent mankind a clear message of hope and terror. There is coming a time when sorrow will cease, a time of eternal peace, a future Edenic state, but only for those who have obeyed Romans 10:13, "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."

For those who continue to worship the created world instead of the Creator, God warns that they "shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death" (Revelation 21:8).

This is God's message from Heaven. Each of us has a choice. We need to heed His warning and flee to His Refuge, Jesus Christ!


Sign of Design: In the United States alone, it is conservatively estimated that there are upwards of 10,000 professional scientists (the vast majority not officially linked to creation organizations) who believe in biblical creation.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Empire Building

A devotion for today.


Empire Building

Read: Daniel 4:28-37

Those who walk in pride He is able to put down.
DANIEL 4:37

After being warned by Daniel about his pride, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar was struck with insanity. The Lord restored his mind, but only after he spent 7 years in a field thinking he was a wild animal.

Nebuchadnezzar went from boasting, "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for . . . the honor of my majesty?" (Dan. 4:30) to a humble prayer: "I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven" (v.37). He had repented of prideful empire building.

Bible teacher J. Vernon McGee expressed concern about empire building in the church today. He advised Christian leaders, "Don't try to build a little empire of your church. I started out with that viewpoint, and I had never been more unhappy." He encouraged them to "build into the lives of people" and leave the results to God.

When a church devotes undue energy to statistics, buildings, and programs, pride can enter in and the needs of God's people can be forgotten.

Jesus never forgot the importance of individuals. He invested His time in 12 men (Mark 3:14). Paul discipled Timothy who in turn discipled others (2 Tim. 2:2). God's kingdom grows when we invest in people. ~Dennis Fisher

Churches grow when people pray
And pastors preach the Word,
When love for Christ seeks out the lost
To win them to the Lord. —D. De Haan

Poor is the church that values programs above people.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Voyager 1 and 2 Send a Mistaken Message to the Heavens

The Bible tells us that man will accept a lie rather than admit to the truth that God Created all things, that man is a sinner and must bow down and accept his Creator as Lord of his life. To avoid the truth, man has "changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things" (Romans 1:23).

What better way to show how man has done this than to look at the two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and sent barreling towards the outer reaches of the solar system. On each ship is a gold-coated phonograph record, offering a message to extraterrestrial civilizations.

This message includes pictures of the "evolution of man" from molecules, via fish, reptiles, ape-like creatures, to humans. It also presents the "evolution of man" in sound - a series of sounds in an evolutionary progression: music of the spheres, volcanoes, earthquakes, mud pots, wind, rain, crickets, frogs, birds, hyenas, elephants, chimpanzees, wild dogs, footsteps, heartbeats and laughter. There is also the sound of fire and speech, of stone tools, a tame dog, Morse code, ships, a train, the F-111 aircraft and so on.

The Voyager craft also offer greetings from representatives of nations around the world. These messages bring greetings from Earth, calls for help, offers of friendship, pleas for peace and promises that man is thinking about them (the extraterrestrial intelligent beings), calling these supposed beings out there "great ones."

And just to make sure they were communicating, scientists included a greeting from some whales! In the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, by Carl Sagan and others, we read about the "whale greeting":

We listened to it [the whale greeting] many times and always with a feeling of irony that our imagined extraterrestrials of a billion years hence might grasp a message from fellow earthlings that had been incomprehensible to us.

United Nations delegate Wallace R.T. Macaulay of Nigeria made an impassioned plea in his massage carried by Voyager. "To extraterrestrial intelligent beings: We are supposed to inhabit this planet alone but we know this is not quite so. In Africa, we want to believe that we have you and you are all-knowing, and perhaps possess high intelligence and therefore can help us solve the many problems of our world here."

Why don't they listen to the message from God? Psalm 121:2 tells us where to look for solutions: "My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth."


Sign of Design: Consider the incredible improbabilities involved in getting the whole evolutionary scenario started in the first place. People talk as if it were somehow an observed fact - but the fact is that no one really has any sort of scientific explanation for how the complicated, information-bearing molecules required for even the simplest conceivable "first life" could have arisen without outside intelligence. And there are good scientific reasons for believing this to be impossible.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Man Has Rejected the Heavenly Message


Man is crying our for purpose and meaning in life. But he is not listening to God. In fact, he doesn't want to listen. As we read in Ephesians 4:18: "Having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart." In 2 Peter 3:5, the Apostle tells us that man is "willingly ignorant" - he deliberately rejects the truth about creation.

This great, infinite Intelligence - the Lord God of the Bible - sent His prophets, and man stoned them. God sent His Son, and man nailed Him to a cross. God gave us His Word, and man has burned it and its preachers at the stake. Man cries out on one hand for there to be something more, but then shakes his fist at God. Why? Because man really wants to make his own god - he doesn't want to acknowledge that he is in rebellion against his Creator, or that he will have to answer his Creator for the things he has done.

Sign of Design: There are unsolved problems and unanswered questions in the creation model, but the same is true for evolution. Billions of tax dollars are spent each year trying to solve evolution-related questions; a pittance, by comparison, is spent on real creationist research.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Pursuing God's Kingdom

A devotion for today.

Pursuing God's Kingdom

"Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."
MATTHEW 6:33

Thoughts:

Seek - pursue relentlessly - God's Lordship over your life and the righteousness that he demands in your daily life. The other stuff you pursue is all temporary. Only God and his Kingdom remain. In the process of pursuing God's kingdom and his righteousness, you will find that the God who gives you his Kingdom and righteousness, also will bless you with the things in this life that you need.


Prayer:

Holy Lord, only in you do I find what satisfies my soul's desires. The things that have captured my eye are boring after only a short while. The artificial things I have pursued, all of my addictive pursuits, have left me empty and enslaved. I find hope and help only in you. Please be near to love, correct, discipline, lead, and mold me to your glory. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.

Written by: Phil Ware