Sweet peace

My big Christmas present this year from my mom was an old-fashioned Crosley turntable and speakers in a wooden box. I had been without a working record player since I moved to Alabama and found my expensive Sony system broken inside the 12 ft. Budget truck I had rented.

The first record I wanted to hear upon setting the new machine up on top of my kitchen table was not what I thought I would when I opened the gift on Christmas morning at my mom’s house.

I thought I wanted to hear this bootleg Paul Simon LP I have from when he performed live in L.A. in the late ’70s and did all this incredible guitar and piano instrumental stuff with the live audience in the background.

What I ended up yearning to play most were some of my dad’s old records that I inherited when he died. What got me was looking at the old vinyls and seeing his little stickers he had put on the labels with his handwriting in this red ink pen he bought by the dozens and used on everything from prescriptions to greeting cards.

Seeing the word “ALL” in all caps and underlined made me cry. That was meant for me, as his cassette-tape maker for his doctor’s office, to know I was to use any of the songs on that side of the record for my compilations.

Playing these songs was SO important to him. He was compelled to make them part of the psyche of his children as well as every single patient who spent any time at all in his waiting room or on the examining table, etc.

They were such an integral part of his lifeblood as a family doctor that, before he caught on to making cassette tapes from the music, he would personally stop what he was doing to flip the side over when it was time!

By chance, the first record I picked to break-in my new record player was one by Tennessee Ernie Ford, entitled, “Nearer the Cross.” I lifted my brand-new record arm for the first time and the first song on the A-side was, “Sweet Peace the Gift of God’s Love.”

The lyrics began with, “There comes to my heart one sweet strain,

A glad and a joyous refrain,

I sing it again and again,

Sweet peace, the gift of God's love. The hymn ended with, “In Jesus for peace I abide, And as I keep close to His side,

There's nothing but peace doth betide.

Sweet peace, the gift of God's love

*****

Jordan said in a recent study based on Romans 12, “The ultimate hope of our heart is not simply forgiveness, or simply justification or even heaven, but it’s really the glory of God. You and I, in Christ, are meant to savor and to experience God’s glory. That’s the ultimate thing that will wipe away every tear, rectify every wrong. That’s the ultimate thing that in the end will let you sing that song, ‘It was worth it all.’

He went on, “We sing that song, ‘It will be worth it all when we see Jesus.’ Because it’s the glory of God that makes that possible.

“II Cor. 4: 17. There’s that affliction. There’s the patience in tribulation. You see, the hope that sustained Paul’s joy in the afflictions--He said, ‘I’m rejoicing in hope; that makes me be patient in tribulation. I can endure because these afflictions are not meaningless. They’re not absurd. They’re not cruel. They’re not pointless. No, it’s working for me an experience of the glory of God that will outweigh every moment in every degree of suffering in this life. They work for me a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’

“Patience is something that sustains you; keeps you there. Paul doesn’t just tolerate tribulation. He says, ‘God takes this tribulation and makes it serve you.’

“That passage in Romans 8 is right down to the level of the things you suffer because He left you here and didn’t take you to be with Him the moment He saved you. Some of that is bodily suffering. Some of it is the calamities of life. Some of it is the assaults of others. Some of it is your own stupidity.

“But what the hope in Christ does is He says He can take even that and, as He promised Israel, ‘give beauty for ashes.’ I can look out there and say, ‘My ace in the hole is in the end it’s just glory!’ And I can rejoice in that hope. Then I can abound, and when you’re abounding, you don’t think so much about hoping. You think, ‘I already got it, man!’

*****

“I once asked a guy in the airport if he knew where he was going to spend eternity and he answered, ‘I’m having too much trouble getting through today to worry about eternity.’ But that’s a mistake of thinking that that kind of future orientation, that future thinking process, limits the present usefulness in reality of life.

“Listen, understanding that you rejoice in hope, liberates you right now! If your future is glorious, if your future is sure because of Christ, you don’t have to live for money. You don’t have to live for power. You don’t have to live for fame. You don’t have to grasp and stash and chase for pleasure and for excitements that just slip through your fingers. You’re free to live for others. You’re free to serve the Lord by serving others. You’re free to let your love be genuine, let it be radical and sacrificial because of the joy that you have in Him. To let it sustain you, and it’s our prayers that allow us to see and savor the greatness and the preciousness of our hope.”

Being a living epistle

“Many years ago I discovered that when I was in need of guidance and instruction about what to do in areas of life, I could sit down and read Romans 12, Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3 and find specific instructions that were specific to the point and to the issue I was dealing with,” says Jordan.

“Romans 12 is always enough. I can’t think of an issue that I’ve faced in my memory that I didn’t find the clear instructions about attitudes and actions that I should take in this specific arena that I didn’t find in Romans 12.

“Romans 12 is Paul’s gathering together of the issue of, ‘Here’s the description of what the impact of God’s grace is designed to look like in the lives of Believers,’ and if you wanted to have a profile of what it is that the ministry of grace is seeking to produce in the lives of people . . . not just in doctrinal statements but what is it supposed to look like, it’s in Romans 12.

“Romans 12:12 (‘Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer’) is really, in a lot of ways, one of those encapsulized statements, right in the middle of a passage, that sort of gathers together a description of the Christian life.

“The details of your service for Christ don’t really begin until you come to Chapter 12. It’s the idea of, ‘Okay, let’s get busy being who we are in the details of life.’

“Verse 12 is in the context of how we relate to other Believers. Verse 9 says, ‘Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.’ In other words, the focus in our relationship with others is going to be on love. Let love be the real thing. Don’t ‘diss’ somebody when it comes to love. Be genuine.

“I John 4 is very clear: ‘If God so loved us we ought to love one another.’ Your love for others HAS to be based upon an understanding of God’s love for you. The reason the world can never love their fellow man . . . you see the world thinks if they can get rid of the differences between people you can get rid of conflicts. Consequently, you have an egalitarian society where everything’s equal. We call it ‘multi-culturalism’ and all that kind of stuff.

“The only way you get rid of conflict is to get rid of sin. The only way you deal with the sin issue is the Cross. The world thinks the Cross is foolishness so they reject the only answer that’s really there.

“That’s why I’ve said to you for years that you can’t abandon the world that you live in. If you want to have some impact and influence in the culture you live in, go out and preach the gospel, the truth of God’s grace, get them saved and then they’ll know and understand how to love people. Otherwise they never will.

“Abhorring evil and cleaving to that which is good is essential to love. Love doesn’t mean you just think everybody and everything’s the same. Love takes divine viewpoint and says, ‘This is good and that’s evil.’ God told Israel, ‘Woe to them that call good evil and evil good.’

“You come to verse 12 and you’ve got this dominant theme now in love just kind of echoing in your mind when you get there. That’s why it’s essential, by the way, that you go back to verse 2 and ‘be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’

“Verse 12, under that banner of love, Paul says, ‘Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing instant in prayer.’ So while I’m serving my brother and brethren, while I’m not being slothful in business, my attitude in it is I’m going to be rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation and I’m going to be instant in prayer.

“I’m going to be continually, constantly in prayer, all for the sake of loving others, loving our enemies as we ought. This is how Christ is designed to become visible and more real, and frankly more convincing to those who about us. His life becomes a tangible reality.

“II Corinthians talks about that living epistle. The epistle of Christ written in your heart and that life of Christ living out through you.

“You see, grace isn’t just a theology and what he’s saying here is, ‘This is the way you think through . . . that renewed mind thinks through how to deal with the issues of life.’

“Romans 5 says, ‘And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience;
[4] And patience, experience; and experience, hope:
[5] And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.’

“Our joy, hope, patience--they’re not found in freedom from trouble; they’re found in the midst of the difficulties.

“Tribulation works patience. So the tribulation has done its work. It’s taught you that there’s no other place to go but the truth of God’s Word. Patience is something that sustains you; keeps you there.

“Paul doesn’t just tolerate tribulation; he says God takes this tribulation and makes it serve you. First, you’re rejoicing in hope. It’s important to understand what the hope is. The verse is telling you your hope is based in hope. Hope is the rock in which joy is rooted. It’s the soil out of which the rejoicing comes. The ground of our hope and the goal of our hope are all in Christ.”

Farther along

I drove home to Akron for the holiday Friday with “acute lower back pain” (the diagnosis my primary doctor put on a Workman’s Comp form two days before after I injured my back carrying into the elderly house plastic totes from Whole Foods filled with bottled mineral water and cranberry juice). Worse yet, I ran into a snowstorm I never expected on the Ohio toll road. Talk about nerve-wracking!

Leaning forward and firmly clutching the steering wheel, I sweated out the last 50-60 miles to my mom’s that absolutely CRAWLED by. There were cars and even a couple of semis that had slid off into the median or ditch.

As I write I’m watching the Weather Channel detail a “Blizzard Watch” now in effect for northeastern Ohio tomorrow, the same day I’m supposed to drive back in order to return to work Thursday. “C’mon blizzard!” I say.

I would love a good reason not to have to slink my ailing back back into the bucket seat of my low-to-the-ground Honda Civic Si that is suffering a wide variety of maladies (including a cracked head, faulty fuel pump, anti-freeze leak, blown-out exhaust system and failing heater). It’s always such a long, lonely journey even when there are NO road conditions!

*****

On the trip up from Dayton for my brother and his family, they killed some driving time by pondering quotes from famous leaders that my brother had purposely printed out (from a personal list he compiled) for his two sons to read aloud in the car and expound on.

I asked my brother if I could see his list and was impressed by the variety of advice. One from Winston Churchill I especially liked was, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” This sure does apply to the history outlined by God in His Book!

Then there was this unexpected quote from James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise: “You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there’s no such thing as the unknown—only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”  

Earlier today I was thinking, “There is always ‘new’ Bible truth that has yet to be tapped by any human.” It is an endless journey of learning, expressly designed by God to be just that.

No matter how Godless and anti-biblical the world becomes there will always be people interested in things newly uncovered. 

Which way to go . . .

“One of the most startling, collective doctrinal statements in New Testament Scripture for the study of prophecy is what the angel tells Mary, and if you’ve got that straight, you can straighten out about 98 percent of the heresy in Roman Catholic and Protestant theology,” says Jordan.

“The Hebrew form of the name Mary is Miriam. As you know Miriam was Moses’ sister and it’s the same name.

“Luke 1: 28 says, ‘And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” When Gabriel says, ‘Hail,’ he doesn’t fall down to worship her, you notice. The next verse says, ‘And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.’

“Notice Dr. Luke, as a good physician, his evaluation of the condition of Mary when Gabriel came was that she was a virgin. Verse 34 says, ‘Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’

“Now the Revised Standard Version says, ‘How shall this be seeing I have no husband?’ Then it wouldn’t surprise you when you go Back to Isaiah 7:14 that the prophecy that the RSV and those kind of Bibles translate is that, it’s not a ‘virgin,’ but ‘young women, young maiden’ and that kind of thing.

“But there’s 12- 14 year-old kids not a half a mile from here having babies and they don’t have husbands. That isn’t what the verse said. She said, ‘How can I be pregnant with a child when I’ve never had sexual relationships with a man? I know not a man,’ with ‘know’ being in a biblical sense. Pretty straightforward.

“Dr. Luke, in his evaluation, said Mary is a virgin. The reason that’s important is come back to Matthew 1. There’s a great controversy about that, of course, because that’s a basic miracle. Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word ‘virgin’ there is the word ‘alma’ and sometimes that word is used to describe a virgin.

“Genesis 24:42. A word in Hebrew that means the same as our English virgin. Then there’s the word ‘alma’ that sometimes refers to a virgin and sometimes maybe doesn’t. But as it’s used in the Bible, it always does.

“In order to find where it doesn’t refer to a virgin you have to go out into other kind of literature. Talking about Rebekah. Eliazar is describing how he found the wife for Isaac. Notice what he calls her—a virgin. Now that’s that word ‘alma.’ But look back in verse 16.

“When the Hebrew word allowing some leeway in it. By the way, you hear about ‘alma mater.’ That’s the Latin word for mother. Alma mater means virgin mother.

“But all of that is moot when you come to Matthew 1:23. This is why I say to you all the time, if you study the Bible, compare verse with verse. The Bible contains its own definition, its own system of understanding.

“And while it may be wonderful to know what Josephus said about something, or what Will Durant said about Roman history, or what somebody says the word is used in the secular culture of that day, the key is what does God mean when He used it in His Book!

“So if I’m trying to figure out what Isaiah 7:14 is talking about, and it’s quoted in Matthew 1, I get some help. Matthew 1:22-23: 22] Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying,
[23] Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.’

“Now that word translated ‘virgin’ there, the Greek word means nothing other than exactly what our English word means, so if there’s the possibility of two different definitions in Isaiah, Matthew 1:23 tells you which definition to use.

“So the RSV and the J.B. Philips and the New English Bible, and the Jerusalem Bible, and all these versions that say ‘young woman’ and ‘maiden’ back there, and all the preachers and teachers and commentaries that do the same, are wrong because Matthew 1:23 doesn’t allow two definitions. It only has one definition. And so it picks for you . . . you see, if you can translate it one of two ways, which way do you choose? Well Matthew 1:23 tells you which way to go.

“Now, I know YOU don’t have a question about that but you’re going to hear people when you get out there in the marketplace constantly tell you, ‘Well, that word virgin didn’t mean a virgin.’

“When I was coming up through school back in the ’60s I was raised as a lad in a modernist denomination. We actually finally had a pastor who stood in the pulpit and said that he did not believe in the virgin birth of Christ! Fortunate for me, I had believing parents and that was the last time we went to that church.

“There was a guy, Neil Sorey?, a very famous theologian 60 years ago, who propagated the idea that Jesus Christ was the illegitimate son of a blond-haired, blue-eyed German soldier who was down in Palestine from Rome (one of the Roman soldiers who came out of Europe down into Palestine and was there ruling) and that he had a relationship with Mary and that’s where who the father of the Jesus Christ was.

“Now, Neil Sorey didn’t invent that idea. That idea’s been around for 2,000 years. He just popularized it. I remember hearing that and I remember later on learning that that idea was as old as two millenniums ago and I got real mad, thinking, ‘Here’s a guy that wrote a book, made a name for himself, going around propagating this like it was all brand new and he discovered it and it had been around for almost two thousand years!’

“There are people, you hear it at Easter time, who talk about, ‘Jesus didn’t really die, he just passed out and they put him in a tomb and because the tomb was cool he had just swooned and he was revived.’

“That idea is as ancient as the hills! You just need to know about some of these things. There’s the idea that Isaiah didn’t write all of Isaiah that it was written by Deutero-Isaiah. Two Isaiahs. Then there’s the Graf-Wellhausen theory that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch and that was really written by JPED and R.

“All that stuff has been debunked and proven wrong but you’ll hear it repeated. So what you have in Luke 1 is an historic account written by a good historian who happened to be a medical doctor. He makes a medical evaluation and says that the virgin was ‘espoused.’

“In Old Testament terminology an espousal is equivalent to marriage prior to the couple living together as husband and wife. They’d been committed to one another but they hadn’t taken up the relationship of living together as husband and wife as yet.

“So Luke is making a very defined medical declaration here in Luke 1:27.

“When it says ‘hail,’ he doesn’t worship her, he just greets her. Notice it doesn’t say blessed art thou ABOVE women or blessed art thou OVER women. It just says blessed thou art AMONG women. She’s viewed just like any other woman but she’s especially BLESSED.

“That word ‘favor’ means to have grace shown unto you. When you favor somebody, you give them a special gift of attention.

“In Psalm 116:16 the Messiah identifies Himself as ‘the son of the handmaiden of the Lord.’ What Mary’s doing is she’s saying, ‘Okay, I believe that this Scripture is being fulfilled.’ Mary’s heart and mind was filled with the Word of God.

“She didn’t do what Zacharias did. It says he was troubled and fear fell on him and he said, ‘Well, beh, uh, heh, uh!’ Mary said, ‘Here’s this message,’ and she starts thinking in her mind and what’s in her mind?! The Word of God.

“Listen, folks, the way you respond to things that happen, you begin to think about them, if you’ve got the Word of God filling your heart and mind and dominating your thinking processes, and you begin to think about what’s happening in life, in what context, what’s the frame of reference that you’re thinking about them in? The Word of God.

“Psalm 116:16. When the Messiah comes that’s going to be His profession. Mary says, ‘Okay, if I’m going to be the one through whom the Messiah’s going to be born, behold here I am. Do exactly what the Word of God says; I’m ready. I’m here.’

“Now you talk about the reverence that’s due to Mary--there it is! You talk about an example of ‘present your body a living sacrifice,’ a completely, totally dedicated vessel for the purpose of God, there it is.

“There may be her equal in Scripture, but there’s not her superior when it comes to this issue. The reason she was highly favored, given much grace, is because she BELIEVED God’s Word. She had an intelligent understanding of God’s Word, and when the angel Gabriel came to break the silence, she knew it was going to be broken.

“There are people there in expectancy waiting for Him to come. They knew the time schedule and when Gabriel came and appeared to her, she knew she got a message from God; she believed it.

“Luke 1:48 says, ‘For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.’

“Come with me to Malachi and notice why she said that. Malachi 3. I have to tell you I run in to a bit of a conundrum when I get to passages like this because we can take almost every line of these verses about what Gabriel says to Mary, and what Mary’s going to say here, and we could spend the next year, because almost every line in it is a reference to an Old Testament passage that begins a chain of passages through the Old Testament that’s a whole doctrinal chain of categorical information.

“So connected into the Word of God was Mary that everything she says just hooks into verses that hook into another verse. If we got involved in it, we’d never get through with the Book of Luke.

“Malachi 3:12. The point is Mary knows that there’s more than just her getting a blessing here. She knows that she’s just a representative of her whole nation and what’s going to be said of the nation is said of her because she’s going to be the one through whom the Messiah, the Savior of the nation, is going to come.”

Handmaiden intelligence

“It’s amazing when you go through the first chapter of Luke and see what John the Baptist’s mother and dad, Zacharias and Elisabeth, and what Mary, and obviously Joseph along with her, knew about the Bible,” says Jordan.

“Sometime you get the idea that people back in Bible times were a bunch of illiterate rubes who didn’t know what was going on and boy, you can’t read through this passage and believe that! In fact, you’ll see later on the little comments that John makes when, for example, Zacharias needs to tell him what John’s name is going to be. He takes a writing pad and writes on it. These are not unintelligent, uninformed, incapable people as generally they are said to be.

“Have you ever seen that stand-up show ‘Defending the Caveman’? I heard the guy on the radio and he said a caveman has no idea what his wife is about, what she needs, what she says. There’s the ad where he says, ‘If a woman says I’ll call you, she means tonight I’ll call you, and if a man says I’ll call you, he means sometime between now and the time he dies. The caveman idea is he never catches on; he doesn’t know, he’s illiterate, blah, blah, blah.

“That’s part of the evolutionary mentality of about how we used to be dumb, dark cave dwellers –you know ‘Oooh, oooh, oooh!’ kind of stuff—and now we’re enlightened, 21^st century real brains. We got it all figured out. Of course, if you look around you, and you figure, ‘If this is gotten it figured out, we’re in trouble!’

“You go back through history, especially you go back through the Scriptures, and you see people 6,000 years ago and they weren’t cave dwellers. In the time between Adam and Noah, the technological advances that existed on the planet during that period of time were in some areas farther along than where we are in our day.

“In Genesis 4 you see the sciences and the arts developed. Everything from metallurgy and transportation and so forth. These people didn’t walk out just dummies. Mankind has had a tremendous amount of understanding, and you read books about the 1st Century and you’re sort of like everybody was illiterate and nobody could read or write and that kind of thing. That just wasn’t true.

“Here Mary is, just simple—she calls herself the ‘handmaiden of the Lord.’ Just a simple lady who was educated and. by the way, she was a LADY who was educated. In some places in the world that isn’t a common thing, like if you go into, for example, Persia.

“Everywhere the Bible ever went, whether it was in Israel or whether it was through the two centuries of Christianity, everywhere the Bible goes, literacy goes. Why would that be? We’re people of a Book. Israel was the people of a Book.

“Here’s a little lady in the 1^st Century . . .  Rome runs Palestine and yet she, Elisabeth, Zacharias, John and a whole host of others, are not only able to read and write, they are extremely intelligized about what the Bible has to say. They are schooled in their Bible.

“These are not dumb, illiterate people, and you need to kind of make a mental shift out of that kind of thinking when you think about these people. They weren’t just wide-eyed ignoramuses sitting around just being fooled by something they thought was a vision. These are people who are cool, calculating, thoughtful people who evaluated what was going on by the objective standard of God’s Word, just like you and I should do. They’re not a whit behind us in those regards.

“So when Gabriel comes and says these things to Mary, it’s fascinating how everything he says is so deeply rooted in what the Old Testament prophecy is all about, and when we’re going down through you see when Zacharias and Mary talk, everything they say they just almost quote out of the Old Testament.

“So if Gabriel was kind of shining her on here she would have caught him. There’s a tremendous amount of doctrinal content in these statements and in the communication that’s being made. You could compare that, by the way, with what is generally assumed to be communication from God today."

The people who LOVE love

Here’s a great outtake from a recent study Jordan gave in his series on the Book of John:

“How do you know who God the Father is? How are you going to have God revealed to you? It’s going to be by God the Son.

“By the way, when he says ‘No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.’ (John 1:18)

“That means every time God appeared in the Old Testament, what we call ‘theophane,’ who was it? It wasn’t the Father, it was the Son because nobody’s ever seen the Father, but there are times in the Old Testament when people did see God. Moses, for example. But who was he seeing? He was seeing God the Son. Why? Because God the Son is the revealer. He’s the Word. He’s the one who communicates to us from the godhead.

“Someone has said the Lord Jesus Christ is the one who brings God out from behind the curtain. That’s what that word ‘exigy’ (???) means. It means you take it out from obscurity and put them on stage and put the light on them. And that’s what the Lord Jesus Christ does.

“There’s not any religion on the face of the earth that does or ever has had anybody like the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s not a philosophy, or a religion, or a system of economics, or politics, or academia, that has anything like Him. No religion.

“One of the fascinating things about these things is people talk about, ‘How do you know something is true?’ There are a lot of evidences that are not just direct evidences but just common-sense evidences that come along.

“I was reading a book where the guy made the point, ‘Where’s anybody that ever sang, ‘Oh, how I love Buddha, O how I love Buddha’?’ Nobody sings, “Allah paid it all. All to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain; Allah washed it white as snow.’

“You know there are thousands of songs written about one person, the Lord Jesus Christ. Love songs. You know, that’s the kind of songs people write. I mean, hillbilly songs, rock songs, contemporary songs—people write love songs. They write about what they love, they value, they esteem, what captures their heart.

“John 20 says, ‘Many other signs did Jesus.’ Last thing in John he says, ‘If all the books could be written about the things that Jesus Christ did, the world couldn’t hold them.’ So the songwriter says, ‘Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.’

“How in the world do you explain the fact that no religion in the world has anybody writing love songs about their religion, how much it’s done for them, and along her comes the Lord Jesus Christ?! . . . Psalm 69 says ‘He’s going to be the song of drunkards.’ Even drunks write songs about Him!

“You get out into world . . . You remember the lyrics, ‘Chicago, Chicago, the only town Billy Sunday could not shut down.’ You know that line? Why? They’re bragging about the fact Billy Sunday went all over America preaching the gospel and getting people saved . . .

“You know, in northwest Alabama there’s a little town called Reform. The Billy Sunday of the South was a man named Sam Jones. He went all over the southern part of the U.S. doing what Billy Sunday did in the Midwest and Northeast. He went into that town, and they were a mecca of gambling and the liquor trade and Jones went into that little town and preached the gospel for about three months and people got saved left and right, and the newspaper accounts of it are that by the time he got through with that revival meeting, if you wanted to cuss, you did it under your breath. All the liquor establishments were closed down. All the bars were closed down. All the gambling houses were closed down and the city council voted to change the name of the town to Reform!

“What is that? That’s the power of a person, the Lord Jesus Christ. Acts 20:28 says, ‘Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.’

“Who was it on the Cross shedding His blood? The Lord Jesus Christ. But whose blood was that? Who really was that on the Cross? It was God. God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. And it was God’s blood that flowed through Emmanuel’s veins ‘and sinners plunged beneath the flood lose all their guilty stain.’

“You just keep on and on . . . you know just about everything you can think of you can think of a gospel song or hymn that takes that experience in life and relates it to a love affair with the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s the one who brings God into every aspect and facet and experience of our life.

“By the way, He does it because of the Cross. I John 4:7 is a fascinating verse of Scripture: ‘Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.’

“If you’re going to love people, you’re going to have to know God. And if you don’t know God, you’re not going to know how to love people.

“Now you go out into the world we live in and the world--I mean listen to the newscast today and the world is filled with strife, envy, hatred, violence, crime. I mean the big thing on the news yesterday was the dude in Manhattan who got pushed out in front of the subway . . . ”

She caught it

Luke 1:30 (And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God) is filled with doctrinal content although it’s really a simple statement by the angel Gabriel to young Mary as he describes to her the mission God has for her.

Luke  writes in Luke 1:28-29, "And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
[29] And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be."

Jordan explains, “God is going to give Mary a very special privilege. That word ‘favored’ there is the idea of finding grace—finding a very special place of service with God.

“Luke 31 says, ‘And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.’ That’s a very clear purpose statement about what Mary is going to be involved in. There was never any question in Mary’s mind about the child she was going to have—who he was or what his purpose in life was going to be.

“ ‘Thou shalt have a son’ (there’s the humanity and the humility of the Messiah). ‘Thou shalt call his name Jesus’ (there’s His deity as well as His humanity as well as His mission). The name Jesus means Jehovah Savior. That’s a tremendous statement about who he is.

“In Isaiah, Jehovah says, ‘I am the Savior. Beside me there’s none other.’ He’s going to be Jehovah who’s going to be Israel’s savior. That’s a statement about His deity and a statement about His mission.

“ ‘He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest.’ That’s going to identify Him as when He’s the son of the highest. ‘and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David.’ He’s going to have the title to the throne of David.

“ ‘And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’ This thing is going to last forever--and the universality and the eternality of His kingdom. When He accomplishes what He’s come to accomplish, there will never be an end to it. If you notice in verse 31 you can see all four of the gospel accounts.

“Each of those ‘behold’ statements to Israel about their Messiah matches one of the four gospel accounts. That’s why there’s four gospels. All of that’s wrapped up here. ‘Bring forth a son.’ There’s His humanity. Then it’s ‘behold the man.’ There’s Luke. ‘Thou shalt call his name Jesus.’ He’s going to be the servant of the Lord who comes to save His people. There’s Mark. ‘He shall be great and called the son of the highest.’ He’s God. There’s John. Verse 33: ‘And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’ There’s ‘behold your king.’ There’s Matthew.

“Everything that the Messiah’s going to be, Mary has it laid out for her to start with. When you read that, you see the whole compass of the prophetic program all gathered together in just a few short statements given to Mary.

“I have to say to you there are theologians of our day that don’t get this. Mary understood something about the Bible that all the rest—the great theologians of our day—don’t get.

“The issue of right division and studying the Bible dispensationally has fallen into disrepute today as you would expect it to. But the only way you can understand what the angel said to Mary, and the only way that Mary could have understood, or would have had any expectation to understand what’s here, is if she were a dispensational Bible student.

“Verse 31. That’s the first coming of Christ. Verse 32. That’s the second coming of Christ. One talks about His first coming and the other talks about His Second coming. One talks about what He’s going to be as He comes in His humanity, born of Mary. The other talks about what He’s going to be when He comes back as Messiah to reign.

“If you’re left at the mercy of the theologians, they will tell you that that latter (the reigning) . . . I’ll never forget going to a retreat of a bunch of preacher guys my first year in Mobile College in Mobile, Ala. He was the best professor I ever had in school--bar-none in anywhere I’ve ever been: W.C. Dobbs.

“Dr. Dobbs, the first night, was speaking and he ran down through this passage. And he said, ‘Well, we know that Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary and born to a virgin and that he was going to be great and called the son of the highest, but when it says in verse 33 that He shall reign over the house of Jacob, we know that that was just spiritually speaking. It’s not literal; it isn’t real; God is through with Israel and has replaced Israel with us.’ And he was an Amillennialist. He picked up my Scofield Reference Bible once and said, ‘Son, that book has done more damage to Christendom than any other book written in the 21^st Century.’

“And I remember thinking, ‘How can I believe that verse 31 is literal if verse 33 isn’t literal?! If what he said in verse 32 and 33 aren’t real and literal, then how come you think verse 31 is literal?! How can he be saying something literal and then all of a sudden it isn’t literal anymore; it’s all figurative?! Either it’s literal or it isn’t literal. Either he meant what he said or he didn’t mean what he said! Either the house of Jacob is the house of Jacob, and the throne of David is the throne of David, and His reign is going to be forever or it isn’t! And if that’s figurative then, for heaven’s sake, why is the virgin birth not figurative?!’

“Makes no sense! You’re left at the mercy of theologians to tell you what it means. You’re left in a situation that endorses the apostate and where you don’t know whether God can say what He means or mean what He says because whatever He said He didn’t mean, and what He meant He didn’t say because it isn’t there.

“Well, Mary had none of those problems. When Mary heard that she said in verse 34: ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
[35] And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.’

 “She caught it; she knew it was real! She knew this wasn’t some spiritually understood and designed idea of things that didn’t have anything to do with reality. She understood what the angel said and the only way that she could have understood it was obviously the way she was intended to understand it, and nobody has a right to change or even to doubt the words and their natural meaning.

“So what you have here is another one of these passages in the Bible that establishes for you without any question and forever ends the debate about whether you have to study the Bible dispensationally or not; whether the premillennial dispensational approach to studying the Bible is right or not. And if you’re going to believe what’s in the text that’s where you have to be.

“Now when you do believe what’s there and that’s where you are, 99.5 percent of all of Christendom is not going to agree with you. Did you expect them to?”

Constant and sure

The mental health experts say if you can solve one psychological problem completely—no matter what it is—you can easily resolve all other psychological problems, because they are all related to one another.

In my mind this is what Paul is talking about when he advises to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Specifically, he writes in Romans 12:2: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

Jordan says, “That renewing of my mind—what am I doing? I’m doing the will of God. Reasonable service. Service to God is to be based on your reasoning upon the logical outcome of who God has made you in Christ. He made you a living sacrifice.

“The kids at camp have this t-shirt, “Wanted Dead and Alive.’ That’s what a living sacrifice is. It’s somebody who’s come to understand what Romans 6:6 says: ‘Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.’

“I’ve been given a new identity. The Cross cut me off from who I used to be in Adam and the resurrection life makes me a new creature in Jesus Christ. And that’s who I am now.

"I love Romans 6 where Paul says, ‘Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.’

“He didn’t say, ‘Make sure it doesn’t.’ He said, ‘Let!’ Allow who you are just to be who you are! Let it happen because God already made it so! Present yourself!

“We studied that in Ephesians 1. He sanctified us. He set us apart into Christ, acceptable to God; accepted in the Beloved. See all those wonderful things?

“When you realize who you are, is there anything any more logical or reasonable than just to say, ‘Here, Lord, here I am!’?Send me! Here I am, Lord! Just let who you’ve already made me in Christ do it!

“The first time I was in the Philippines I heard a song Filipinos sing. Very seldom do people sing a hymn that I haven’t heard the words. I never heard this one:  ‘The mercies of God, what a theme for my song. Oh I never could number them more. They’re more than the stars in the heavenly dome or the sand of the wave-beaten shore. For mercies so great what return can I make? For mercies so constant and sure, I’ll love Him, l’ll serve Him with all that I have as long as my life shall endure.’

“What other response could you have when you really see His love for you in Christ? We love Him because He first loved us. Not because He said, ‘If you don’t, I’ll damn you!’ We love Him because He made it possible for us to love Him by transforming us and making us His!”

Luke's there

It’s in Acts 16 that Luke joins Paul’s ministry. He writes in Acts 16:10, “And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.”

Jordan explains, “This is going to be the first foray Paul makes into the European scene. Notice how the author of the book has now joined the Apostle Paul, and he didn’t join him as a neophyte; he joined him as a fellow preacher of the gospel--someone who’s already involved in the work of the ministry.

“Acts 16: 3-4 says, ‘Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for they knew all that his father was a Greek.
And as they went through the cities, they delivered them the decrees for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem.’

“This is where Timothy comes on the scene here at Derbe and Listra. Paul is adding some significant people to his ministry entourage at this point. When they get around to Troas, he meets Luke. Now the general assumption is in I Timothy, when he calls Timothy ‘my son in the faith,’ that Timothy got saved through Paul’s ministry.

“It’s a logical conclusion that Luke got saved through Paul’s ministry also because when he comes to Troas, there’s no report of any ministry there in that area outside of what Paul’s doing. The Jerusalem church wasn’t ministering there, and when Paul goes to Troas and meets some brothers already doing the work of the ministry, Luke joins him.

“You say, ‘Well, how could it happen in such few verses?’ You don’t read everything that’s happening in the Book of Luke. When you go to Acts 17 in Thessalonica, Paul is there for three Sabbath days. That’s two weeks.

“If you read I Thessalonians, it’s quite obvious he’s there much longer than two weeks. In fact, in Philippians 4 Paul says, ‘When I was at Thessalonica, you Philippians sent to me once and again.’ That’s at least two offerings. You get a map out and figure out how far it is between Philippi and Thessalonica and you can see immediately it took more than two weeks to send one offering.

“First they had to find out that he was there. They had to know where he was to send the offering. You sent that stuff by pony express and snail mail back then, not with electronic transfer like we do today. So it took some time. So there’s obviously an expanded period of time he’s there. You don’t read that in Acts because that’s not the purpose of the Book of Acts.

“When Paul goes through this great shipwreck in Acts 27 Luke is with him. And frankly, a lot of times when I think about Acts 27 and these events, when I think of him standing before Agrippa or Felix and these people, I don’t think of Luke being there, but as you read through Acts he is. And he goes with Paul going back to Rome.

“You come down through chapter 28 and he’s still there. Verse 7 says, ‘In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and lodged us three days courteously.’ Luke continues to go on with Paul, verse 16, ‘when we came to Rome.’ Luke’s with him!

“So this whole section from verses 20 to 28, and even on after that in II Timothy in Paul’s second imprisonment, Luke is there.

“In the Book of Acts, Paul wrote the book of Galatians (Acts 16), the two books to the Thessalonians (Acts 18), the two books of Corinthians (Acts 19 and 20) and the book of Romans (Acts 20). These are what are called the Acts Epistles. He wrote those epistles during this time period.

“When Luke was not with Paul, Paul is writing Scripture. When Luke is with him, Paul isn’t writing scripture during the Acts period. Think about the fact Luke is going to write the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts, and Paul’s going to write the Acts Epistles, and they’re not writing their books while they’re together.

“You say, ‘Well, what was Luke doing during this time period?’ I don’t know but maybe this is the time period when he went back and did the research for the Book of Luke.

*****

“Colossians 4:10 says, ‘Aristarchus my fellowprisoner saluteth you, and Marcus, sister's son to Barnabas, (touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him;)

“If you take that verse literally, what does that tell you the relationship is between Barnabas and Paul was? That means Barnabas was Paul’s brother-in-law.

"Now, the new bibles say ‘cousin,’ but then they say that about Jesus’ brothers and sisters, so we don’t put much stock in that kind of malarkey. Can you imagine what kind of Thanksgiving dinners they had before Saul got saved?! Barnabas is a Believer and he’s going to go over to his sister’s house and have Passover with them and there’s Saul. Can you imagine the witnessing that would have gone on?!

“You look at Paul in Acts 7-8, and that fury and anger and hatred that he had against Christ and His followers . . . people don’t get that kind of irrational, unreasonable conduct without a reason. When he writes in II Thessalonians to pray he would be ‘delivered from wicked and unreasonable men,’ I think Paul knew what it was to be an unreasonable person. When people are unreasonable, it’s because there’s something that’s sticking them; something bothering them; something’s got them irritated.”