“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”

— John 14:3

Have you ever felt deeply homesick, wishing with all your heart to return to home and family? Well, as Christians, we are far away from our true home—Heaven—and we should feel “homesick” for it, anxiously waiting for the time that Christ will take us there.

Advent is upon us, and this time of year is a little bit about feeling homesick for Heaven. At this time of year, we celebrate Christ’s first coming and eagerly anticipate His return to take us to our true home. Advent means “to come,” taken from the Latin “ad venio.” At the first Advent, Christ came with much humility. He laid aside His robes of glory and came to earth in a humble stable, in a manger, as a baby, seen only by a few people: the shepherds, the Magi, and His immediate family. But when Christ comes again, every eye will see Him. We wait fervently for that day when Christ will come in glory with all of His angels and ten thousand times ten thousand of His saints, to receive His own to Himself and to destroy all wickedness and evil forever. For Christians, Christ’s second coming brings the greatest excitement and joy. We lift our heads and pray the final prayer of the Bible: “‘Surely I am coming quickly.’ Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20).

As Christmas works its annual enchantment around us and the songs of the kingdom float on the airwaves, the Christian longs for even more. “I’ll be home for Christmas” sounds so right. It sounds like belonging and peace. For a child of God, the most wonderful Christmas will not take place on this earth. Our climactic Christmas is the one we shall celebrate anew, home in Heaven … when we will forever be truly home for Christmas. Today dwell on that truth, and pray that the Lord will quickly come.

“I do not think that in the last forty years I
have lived one conscious hour that was not
influenced by the thought of our Lord’s return.”
Lord Shaftesbury

“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”

— Ephesians 4:30

Did you know that the Holy Spirit is a person? The Bible makes it very clear that the Holy Spirit is not just a force, like electricity. Rather, He is a person who knows, loves, speaks, leads, guides, intercedes, teaches, cries, testifies, and approves or disapproves of what we do. And when we love a person very much, we don’t want to do anything that will make him or her sad. In the same way, we need to know that we can grieve the Holy Spirit, just as we can grieve any other person whom we care about.

The Holy Spirit lives in our hearts. When God calls us as Christians, He sends the Spirit to live inside us. This indwelling is called “being sealed” by the Holy Spirit. (John 6:27 tells us that Christ was also sealed by the Holy Spirit: “God the Father has set His seal on Him.”) Being sealed by the Holy Spirit brings us many blessings. It indicates that God has accepted us and that we’re precious in His sight. It testifies to a finished transaction: Jesus has paid for all our sins. It verifies our security: God has sealed our sins in a bag and buried them in the depths of the sea. It attests to ownership: We are His, and He is ours. It indicates authority: Anyone who tries to break the seal will incur God’s wrath. It verifies that we have a personal destiny: Heaven will be our home—the Holy Spirit has sealed us for the day of redemption.

Because the Spirit lives in us and loves us so much, how we live becomes much more than whether we obey certain laws. We must act in ways so as not to grieve Him. We grieve the Holy Spirit when we do not listen to His voice or seek His guidance, or when, having heard His guidance, we choose to disobey.

Do you listen for the Holy Spirit’s guidance? Do you willingly follow His directions? Or have you done something that would grieve Him? The Holy Spirit wants to guide you, to show you the way you should live your life. And He’ll forgive you when you confess going down your own sinful path. Ask Him to show you how you can live to please Him and bring Him joy, not grief, through your life.

“A Christian is a person who is led by the Spirit of God.”

“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none who does good.”

— Psalm 14:1

Do you get into conversations with people who don’t believe in God? If so, then you’ve probably encountered one or two people who give no credence to your own personal experience or to the truth of Scripture. These people want hard and fast proof that God exists.

Such proof does exist. Let me give you a few bits of information I use when people want proof of God’s existence. First of all, I ask these people to consider the universe. (This is called the cosmological argument. Cosmology means “the study of the universe.”) I point out that the universe is the biggest thing there is, and it had to come from somewhere (every effect has a cause). The universe could not have created itself, because according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, you cannot create nothing out of nothing. Therefore, Someone eternal must have created it. And those are the Bible’s first words: “In the beginning God.” The second proof is the presence of life itself. Life could not have come from non-life, nor could it have happened by chance. It also had to be created. Who else could have created it but God, who is life? The third proof comes from examining the intricate design of the universe. (This is called the teleological argument. “Teleo” means “end” or “design.”) Because the universe is so intricately designed, Someone all-knowing must have designed it. The fourth proof is God’s loving care. If the earth orbited ten percent closer to the sun, we would burn up. If it orbited ten percent farther away, we would freeze and die. Instead, the earth orbits around the sun at just the right distance to sustain life. The fifth proof is the soul’s transformation. This happens so mysteriously that no one can explain it. We know only that Someone changed Paul from a killer of Christians into the world’s greatest missionary, and this Someone has changed our hearts as well.

God is the One who touches people’s lives and brings them into fellowship with Him. But He can use you to accomplish that purpose. So as you speak with those who challenge God’s existence, ask Him to show you when to present any or all of the information I’ve shared with you. And pray that God will ultimately reveal Himself to them.

“The beauty, order, and harmony of the universe is
an expression of the will of God; the structure of the
universe is the work of a great intelligence.”
Aristotle

“Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come.”

— 1 Corinthians 10:11

Out in his yard, a minister was building a trellis to support a vine that he was going to plant. As he worked, the minister noticed a young boy, about twelve years old, standing nearby watching him. The minister nodded at the young lad as he continued to work, thinking the boy would go away. After a while, however, he noticed that the boy still stood there. Finally, the minister asked the lad, “Getting a lesson in horticulture?” “No,” came the response, “I just wanted to hear what a preacher said when he hit his thumb with a hammer.”

Do you realize that non-believers often study your life, watching to see if your actions and reactions corroborate what you profess? They not only watch preachers; they watch all Christians. Some of them watch hopefully, wanting confirmation of the life-changing potential of Christianity. Others watch hatefully, looking for an opportunity to blaspheme God. In either case, the world is watching.

While we all want to serve as good examples, as humans we can’t help failing. Yet, as humbling as it is for us, God can still use our mistakes as opportunities to show His greatness. Note the candor of Scripture concerning the sins of those who professed faith in the living God. Even the greatest saints have their portraits drawn with all warts present. Consider Abraham and his lie about his wife. Or Moses and his anger and disobedience to God. Remember David’s adultery and his attempt to cover it up with murder. As we turn to the New Testament, let’s not forget the cowardly denials of Peter or the failure of Mark, who turned tail and ran during his first missionary trip. Yet despite their failures, God used these people to accomplish mighty things.

The next time you make a mistake, especially if you know someone has observed it, ask God to forgive you and to use you despite your sinfulness. And today pray that God will enable you to be a good example for the cause of Jesus Christ.

“You may be the only Bible that some people ever read.”
Anonymous

“So he told her everything …”

— Judges 16:17, niv

Have you ever relied on your own abilities to accomplish something, only to fall flat on your face? One of the dangers of self-reliance is our tendency to flirt with temptation. Samson’s trouble began this way. Samson was the strongest man who ever lived, but as he trusted in his own strength, he was weak when it came to resisting temptation.

One day Samson was in enemy territory, a place he should not have gone, when he met Delilah, the woman who caused his downfall. When the Philistine lords realized that Samson loved Delilah, they asked Delilah to lure Samson into telling her the secret of his strength. The Philistines wanted this secret so that they might subdue Samson. So she pursued his secret. On three separate occasions, Delilah tried to extract from Samson his secret, and each time he revealed a secret, she had the Philistines act on it. But he had deceived her each time, and the Philistines couldn’t overwhelm him. After the third attempt, Delilah was very upset, and she said to him, “You have mocked me these three times.” At length, because of her persistence, Samson told her the truth: “If I am shaven, then my strength will leave me.” So as he slept, the Philistines cut off his hair, and Samson awoke weak and helpless. The Philistines gouged out his eyes and forced him to do the work of a beast of burden. His life, which began with great promise, had come to tragedy. However, God answered one more prayer for him. Samson’s hair grew back, and he gained enough strength to destroy the Philistine temple and all the lords within it. He died in this last heroic act, but in his death he killed more Philistines, who had oppressed Israel, than he had in his entire life up to that point.

We see that in spite of his great strength, Samson lacked moral discernment. He had never shown strong moral character. He fell into a trap that even a schoolboy might have enough sense to avoid. When we have faith in ourselves, we lean against a broken reed. But when we trust in the Lord and flee temptation, we won’t be an easy target for Satan, as Samson was.

Are you leaning on faith in yourself for anything? If so, give it to God. Trust in His strength alone to help you resist temptation and to achieve all He has designed you to accomplish.

“Character is destiny.”
Henry Luce

“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.”

— Psalm 9:17

Until about fifty years ago, legislators tried to create laws based on Biblical principles. Nowadays, whenever someone proposes legislation that might defend a Christian cause, naysayers often oppose it, arguing that no one can impose his or her values on others. Yet every time our legislators pass a law, they impose somebody’s morality on someone else. And these days, legislators often allow secular humanism to be that morality. By its own definition, as stated in the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, secular humanism is a “religion,” and people who believe in it want to make it the religion of the future, replacing all others. Secular humanism denies that God exists and that any being, other than ourselves, can save us. It replaces God’s Ten Commandments with human ideas of ethics and morality. To achieve its agenda, secular humanism has declared a full-scale war on Christianity, its battleground being the schools, the legislatures, and the courts of our land.

Secular humanists would have us believe that our founding fathers did not form America on Christian principles. But our founding fathers gave their lives to establish a Christian government, and we should do our best to keep it so. In 1828, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote his opinion of the First Amendment. He said its intent was not to approve or advance Mohammedanism or Judaism or unbelief, but to prevent the government from establishing one Christian denomination as more important than others. We need to do what we can to keep our nation on its original path by voting for Christian leaders and making sure they pass legislation based on Biblical principles.

Do you keep up with critical issues in our society? Have you registered to vote, and do you regularly hit the polls on election days, casting your votes based on Biblical truths? As you do these things, you can make a difference in our country. And today please pray for all those in leadership positions: our president, congressmen and congresswomen, governors, and state and local officials. Ask God to give them wisdom as they create laws for us to live by.

“It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their
dependence upon the overruling power of God.”
Abraham Lincoln

“Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.”

— 1 Peter 2:11

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday. Its origins, of course, go back to the Pilgrims. But who exactly were they? The Pilgrims were a group of Christians who secretly formed in 1606 in Scrooby, England, at a time when it was forbidden to read the Bible in public. When the Pilgrims formed their secret church, they made a covenant with each other. Fourteen years later, in 1620, that spiritual covenant was echoed in a political covenant, the Mayflower Compact. Historians, believers and non-believers alike, agree that the Mayflower Compact was a very important step in the formation of our constitutional republic and that it served as the cornerstone of our Constitution. This charter for selfgovernment was essentially the first compact between people and God to form a nation in three thousand years, since the Israelites demanded a king. In the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims declared their purpose: “… having undertaken a voyage for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith …” The Christian origins of this nation clearly shine through when we brush away the cobwebs of revisionist history.

During their first years in America, the Pilgrims struggled to survive, in great part because of their communistic economy. About half of them died; the rest neared starvation. Later, as the Pilgrims turned to a system of free enterprise, God blessed them with a tremendous bounty. On the thanksgiving days in their bountiful times, the Pilgrims put five grains of corn on their plates to remind them of the time five kernels of corn was each person’s daily ration. But in both good times and in bad, the Pilgrims celebrated days of thanksgiving.

Let us, too, give thanks to the Lord, in good times and in bad, for He is good. What blessings can you thank God for today?

“By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God
gave them plenty and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing
of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God…so as any general
want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.”
Governor William Bradford

“And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”

— Jeremiah 29:13

Felix Mendelssohn was one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time. (If you’ve ever attended a wedding, you’re probably familiar with his famous “Wedding March.”) Mendelssohn was born in 1809 to a wealthy family, unlike most other composers of his time. He was happy, although one blotch marred the perfect picture of his life. Because they were Jewish, the Mendelssohns often received unfair treatment and were denied basic rights by those around them. It is shameful that everything the Mendelssohns owned could be snatched up at a moment’s notice. To avoid mockery and persecution, Felix’s father, Abraham, took his children to the Lutheran state church and had them baptized. The Mendelssohns put on the cloak of state respectability and became “Christians” … at least in name.

Though Felix was outwardly a Christian, his heart was empty. He sought to fill this vacuum until his grandmother shared with him a manuscript that was written by an obscure composer who had died seventy-five years earlier. The composer was Johann Sebastian Bach, and the manuscript was St. Matthew’s Passion. The music moved Mendelssohn, but the words captivated him. As Mendelssohn considered the meaning of these words in St. Matthew’s Passion—“He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows … God hath made Him to be sin for us”—he came to realize that indeed a Savior had come into the world and His name was Jesus. Mendelssohn discovered that being a Christian was not about religion, but about a relationship with Jesus Christ. This discovery changed his life.

Because of his exposure to Bach’s work, Mendelssohn made a great contribution to music, reviving interest in Bach’s work, which had fallen into neglect. Later Mendelssohn, like Bach, wrote music that glorified the Lord. In doing so, Mendelssohn shared with the world the treasure he had found—the Gospel of Christ—a musical testimony that continues to affect people’s lives.

“Music is one of the fairest and
most glorious gifts of God.”
Martin Luther

“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.”

— 3 John 4

Today many people try to live as if no absolute truths govern their existence. They say, “Truth is relative.” But imagine if these people declared that the law of gravity was not “their truth.” If they jumped from the top of a skyscraper, they’d soon discover the error of their philosophy. Gravity, like all other absolutes, exists whether or not we choose to believe in it.

Relativism may seem like a wonderful philosophy, but life without absolutes is meaningless. The philosopher Nietzsche promoted moral relativism, and he exerted a strong influence in the lives of Hitler and others, but we can sum up Nietzsche’s life in two graffiti messages once found on a building. The first message: “God is dead.—Nietzsche.” The second message: “Nietzsche is dead.—God.” Whatever “truth” humans profess, God’s truth always prevails in the end. (By the way, Nietzsche was insane during the last several years of his life.)

Jesus proclaimed the existence of absolute truth, and we learn of it through God’s Word, our source for defining absolute rights and wrongs. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Jesus didn’t say, “You will know a truth.” He didn’t say, “You will know your truth.” He said, “You shall know the truth.” God’s truth stands for everyone. We cannot reject God’s truth as just “somebody else’s truth, but not mine.” Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). Jesus is not a truth, part of the truth, or somebody else’s truth. He is the truth. How ironic that Jesus, the incarnation of absolute truth, had to stand trial before Pilate, a coward whose truth changed to please the crowd, and to hear Pilate sneer, “What is truth?”

God’s absolute truths give us joyful purpose in this relativistic age. How wonderful to know that our faith is built on truth. I’m a Christian not because I need to be or because it feels right (although both are true). I’m a Christian because Christ is the truth.

“In regard to this great book [the Bible], I have but to say,
it is the best gift God has given to men. All the good the
Savior gave to the world was communicated through this
book. But for it we could not know right from wrong.”
Abraham Lincoln

“And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.”

— Matthew 5:41

How do you deal with people who “do you dirty?” We all have people in our lives who stab us in the back, say cruel things about us, or do mean things to us. But the Bible has a secret, one we often overlook, for dealing with those who mistreat us. It’s the secret of “the second mile.” To understand it, we need a quick history lesson.

The Medes and the Persians, and later the Romans, had a law that stated that a government official could, at any time, force a citizen to carry any burden for one mile. When Jesus told His followers to walk the second mile, he referred to this law. Jesus wanted people to return good for evil—to, out of their free will, go far beyond what others expected of them.

Christ’s urging is like a timid flower within the Sermon on the Mount, but the fragrance it gives can transform your whole life and work wonders of reconciliation with those who anger you. People who fail in relationships and in business are often those who, when asked to go a mile, try to make it a half-mile. The mediocre people are those who go the one mile, doing what people expect of them but not an inch more. But when you look at a successful person, you’ll find someone who has gone the second and the third mile a thousand times over. A person who habitually does more than expected, who finds ways to please, will succeed.

So how does this work? It’s simple. If someone does you wrong, you do them right. I’ll be the first to agree that this goes against human nature as does much of applied Christianity. But the second mile allows us to transform any slight or injury into a blessing, and it gives us a tool to knock down barriers in school, in business, in our marriages, and in our homes. See today if you can’t find some opportunity to go the second mile for someone in your life.

“Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet
sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
Mark Twain