We Are God's Work

Dear Weekly Readers! I am traveling throughout the United States visiting different churches here and sharing about how God is working around the world. I will also be attending our annual Foreign Mission Board meeting at the end of this week. Therefore, I’m still away from the office and may not be able to reply to your emails. Please enjoy this week's article by Jay Weidner! May God Bless your week!  John "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." (Ephesians 2:8-10)   We are God's work. It can't be us who works to gain our salvation because it is He as the sole worker. He is the One who has worked it in us. It is not works, because we are His workmanship. That's one of the most comforting things in all of the Scripture. We can't yet see it or understand it. We look at ourselves in the mirror, and we see so often that we have not done everything that we should. We see so many things we've done that we wish we hadn't. We look at ourselves and examine ourselves, and we grow more frail and weak. We seek and hope and long for improvement, and we don't see any. But we don't realize we aren't our own workmanship. Paul offers this comfort: "It isn't of our works. It's entirely by God's grace." He has wrought us. He has made us anew. If we could see right, and we looked in a mirror, and we had a mirror that could reveal the work of God, when we looked in that mirror all we would see is what God sees—the finished work of His Son. Then we would really understand, "By grace are ye saved." By grace.   Pastor Jay Weidner

Dear Weekly Readers,

Please pray for safe travels as the entire Foreign Mission board of the ALCA and I travel to western USA for our yearly Foreign Mission planning meeting.  This year we are also having services in conjunction with the meetings.  Pray that God’s Word would be proclaimed and revealed by the power of the Holy Spirit.  

May God Bless your week, and enjoy the following article.   John R.

Removing the Veil

G OD IS SO VASTLY WONDERFUL, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. Such worship (of God) can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge of God. Hearts that are "fit to break" with love for the Godhead are those who have been in the Presence and have looked with opened eye upon the majesty of Deity.

Men of the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known to or understood by common men. They habitually spoke with spiritual authority. They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what they saw there. The Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.

With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and never enter at all to look upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, "Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely." We sense that the call is for us, but still we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in the outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us?

T HE ANSWER USUALLY GIVEN, simply that we are "cold," will not explain all the facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its existence. What is it? What but the presence of a veil in our hearts? a veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close-woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil, nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may

be, but there nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress.

This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we commonly care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are determined to follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the way leads temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God within them will assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the facts however unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before them. So I am bold to name the threads out of which this inner veil is woven. It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power. Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.

As well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.

L ET US REMEMBER: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified. But we must be careful to distinguish lazy "acceptance" from the real work of God. We must insist upon the work being done. We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep and the oxen.  Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. The cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies.

After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the Presence of the living God. ~

A.W. Tozer

Dear Weekly Readers! 

We pray you are having a blessed week!  Please enjoy this article written by Pastor Ron Holmgren.

 

Spirit and Truth

God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship
him in spirit and in truth. (John 4:24)

THROUGHOUT THE AGES MAN HAS performed acts of worship. He has built temples and altars to his god or gods. He has offered sacrifices and tried to worship correctly. It is no different today. All around the world there are acts of worship being performed at all hours of the day.

Jesus is in conversation with a Samaritan woman in the text we have before us. She was not like Him or "His people" in her acts of worship. She challenged Him with the history of her people and His and where they worshiped. So the two places were to be examined as to which was the correct one for worship. Jesus tells her plainly,

Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews. (John 4:22)

There was no question as to who was correct when it came to the challenge set before Him. The Jew! The ones who had the promises and the temple and the altar, etc.

 

But now Jesus turns her thoughts away from the past and points to a future that was to come and was in fact dawning now in Him. Things were to change dramatically, and in the coming time worship would take on a completely different form. The temple would be destroyed and Jew would worship alongside Gentile as one. They would worship the Father in the same way even though the outward acts might look different.

T HE TRUE WORSHIP Jesus was talking about was, in fact, the same as it had always been. Although the Jews had all the things outwardly correct, it was not enough. They would only truly worship if they did so "in spirit and truth."

The two nouns are joined and cannot stand alone. Spirit and truth! There is such a thing as genuine worship and it centers in the one who worships in spirit. As Paul writes in Romans 1:9: For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son… And also he tells us in the 8^th chapter, verse 14: For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. So we do worship in spirit!

But that is not to be the only thing we look for in our worship, for to do so is to be deceived. And so Jesus says worship in spirit and truth! We should not try to explain this away as some special kind of revelation beyond the limits of our minds. Jesus is speaking to an ordinary woman. And she would receive His words in the plainest way. It is simple truth as the Word (the Bible) presents it. The great chapter in Corinthians about love confirms this when it says that charity rejoices in the truth! (1 Corinthians 13:6)

If we are not in spirit our worship becomes formalism and ritual. And likewise, without the truth of the doctrine of our Lord, our worship becomes an abomination of our own fanciful imaginations. God protect us from this and lead us in the way of righteousness for His name's sake. ~

God So Loved the World

Dear Weekly Readers!

The children are back in school here in the USA after having over 2 months off for the summer vacation.  I have decided to share the verse that is perhaps the most popular verse in the Bible, maybe a very simple verse that children can understand, but a verse that is so very meaningful and powerful that this short article or even a full sermon could not begin to reach in fullness what this verse contains.

May God Bless your Week!   John R.

 

John 3:16:    “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  Martin Luther has described this verse as “The Bible in Miniature.”  There are so many heavenly truths contained in this verse.

Here are just a few of these.

“For God”   By this statement we see a definite declaration of The DIVINE!  FOR GOD.  This is just a factual matter, no room for debate.  The Bible never tries to prove the existence of God.  The Bible starts out by saying, “In the beginning God….”  When reading the Bible, man is brought face to face with the declaration that God exists.  Man must either accept or reject that fact.  The God the Bible speaks about is the one True God.  Ever present, all powerful, sovereign, all knowing, the God of Love, the God who has Grace, Mercy, and Wrath. God who is Righteous, Supreme, Immutable, and Eternal.   This is of whom the FOR GOD statement is referring.

These first two words leave no room for doubt of the meaning of the following words because God Said them.

“so loved the world”  How much did He love the world?  SO very much that He gave His only begotten Son.   This is the supreme demonstration of divine love.   What an amazing act of Love.   God gave His Son.  Why?  Because He is God.  No one could have forced Him to give His Son, because no one has power over God.   God gave His Son.  And Jesus gave His life willing for His friends.   For you and me, the sinners, who are part of the world that God Loved so much. 

“that whosoever”  This tells us of the reach of God’s Salvation plan. This is the greatest invitation!  God loves His created beings, and wants them reunited with Him!  God created all, but yet He does not look at us as one great mass of humanity, but rather as individuals that He loves, and who He wants to know personally, and to whom He wants to give every opportunity to be saved.

“believeth in him should not perish”   When a person is humbled, repents and believes the Word of God, the Gospel of Jesus Christ by faith, putting full belief in Him, then one shall have the greatest deliverance.  Only then, because of faith in HIM!   Under no other circumstances can one avoid the fact that all will perish without HIM.  God said it, it is so!

“but have everlasting life.”    The “but” represents the greatest of all possible differences.  Heaven or Hell.   Joy, Peace and Bliss, or damnation and suffering.   The “Have” represents the greatest certainty. The believer will HAVE everlasting life!   What a joy it is to be In Jesus.  To Have everlasting life. Not because of what I have done, but because of Who He is and What He has done!

Lord, allow us to Believe in Him all the days of our lives!  We want to be with Thee in Heaven for ever and ever! 

Amen, 

John Ruotsala