CHRISTMAS DAY Dec 25, 2013

CHRISTMAS DAY Dec 25, 2013

 

The calendar tells me that today is the day that we celebrate each year, the day that Jesus came from heaven to earth as a tiny babe in Bethlehem so that we might know what our Creator God looks like. (Heb 1:1-4) NLT. "Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days, He has spoken to us through the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son He, God promised everything as an inheritance, and through the Son He created the universe. The Son radiates God's own glory and expresses the very character of God, and He sustains everything by the mighty power of His command. When He had cleansed us from our sins, He sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the God in heaven. This shows that the Son is far greater than the angels, just as the Name God gave Him is greater than their names". To realize the true significance of why Jesus came, we must add to the "cradle" in the hay filled manger, "the Cross on mount Calvary", plus the "empty tomb" in which He spent three days, in order to understand the full meaning of our "salvation" that is ours, who are "born again" members of the "body of Christ" on earth today!!

 

Most of the people in our world who have never been exposed to the "Gospel of the Kingdom", unfortunately don't have a clue about the real meaning of this special day that we followers of Jesus celebrate as a "Holy Day". And especially in our Western World we have allowed "materialism" and the desire for "things", to be the focus of this day and very little, if indeed any thought, of it being the day to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child, who came to earth to destroy the effects of sin, is even mentioned. I'm sure this must be very displeasing to our loving heavenly Father, who sent His Son down to our sin-cursed earth to "reverse the curse" brought on creation by the sin of our first parents Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. (Gen 3:1-7)

 

What sets the Christmas season this year apart from past years is a rather severe freezing rain storm that affected parts of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces, with heavy ice build up on the trees and power lines, causing wide spread power outages. Toronto was particularly hard hit with a lot of damage, and our part of NB where we have a lot of trees scattered among our housing developments. Our power was off for most of two days, with just a few minutes return periodically which caused much confusion to many households. I happened to be in SJRH rehab, recovering from another stroke, and managed to get home shortly after 5:00 PM the day before Christmas, when our power returned. So this year will go down in our memories as the year of the "Christmas Ice Storm", but thank the Lord for His grace to our family!!

Sincerely submitted.

Dave Jamer                                        25/12/13                                                                                      

GENESIS THREE VERSES 20-24

GENESIS THREE VERSES 20-24                    

 

After Adam and Eve had listened to the lies on the enemy in (Gen 3:1-7) and ate the fruit from the tree of good and evil that God had forbidden them to do, their eyes were opened to the fact that they were naked, and they felt shame for the first time and tried to hide their nakedness with fig leaves. They also tried to hide from God because of their guilt, which of course is an impossible thing to do. It always amazes me to see what people think they can do that God does not see, when of course He knows not only everything we do, but every thought we have before we think it, the amazing thing to my mind is that He loves us with His Agape love in spite of every sin we are guilty of when we confess and repent, that is truly "amazing love" (1 John 1:8-9). The important thing on our part is to acknowledge our sin and confess it and repent, and not try to hide it. Paul tells very clearly in (Rom 3: 9-31) NLT that everyone is not only born as a sinner because we all inherit the effects of the original sin of our first parents, but as soon as we are responsible for our actions, we sin because we are a sinner. So no matter how much we may try to deny it, we are all sinners who deserve to spend eternity in hell, (Rom 6:23). This is especially hard for religious people to accept because they are taught that if they do enough "good works" they can earn their way to spend eternity in heaven with Jesus, but this is just another lie of our enemy Satan.

 

The "Good News" of the "Gospel of The Kingdom of God" is that the sacrificial death of Jesus, the Lamb of God on that "Old Rugged Cross" on Mount Calvary some 2000 years ago, settled our account of sin. It has been wiped from the record by this act of Jesus, and the record was stamped "Paid in Full", so to speak, and no longer exists. This is the message the world needs to hear, once they confess to being a sinner, and repent of their sinful life style, and put their faith and trust in the finished work of Jesus on the cross, at that moment Father "adopts" them into His family and gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit to abide them forever. That is the simple fact based on the scriptures, and any other so-called gospel that tells that you can get to heaven in any other way is a "false gospel" that Paul warns us about in his second letter to the church in Corinth, (2 Cor 11:1-4) that some false teacher had told them soon after Paul had explained the true gospel to them a few years before, see (1 Cor 15:1-6) for the details. And we have many of them appear in the last few decades, as Jesus and Paul warned us about!!

Sincerely submitted.

Dave Jamer                                        07/11/13