Therefore if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed.

— John 8:36

For those who repent and believe, Christ removes the guilt of the past, but He can also give us victory over sin in the present and in the future. Christ breaks the shackles of sin; Christ sets the prisoner free. What hope of freedom does the drunkard, the alcoholic, the dope addict, or the immoral person—that individual who is chained to the chariot wheels of some ignoble passion—have, except in Christ?

Christ gives us victory over sin when nothing else can. All the education, all the culture in the world cannot do it. Germany in 1941 was the most highly educated nation in the world. It produced a Goering and a Goebbels; it produced a hell on earth. No, only Christ can give victory over sin.

St. Augustine was one of the most brilliant intellects in the first thousand years of this era. Though he was a rhetorician, a logistician, a philosopher; though he had all the learning of the ancient world, he wrote that before he knew Christ, he envied the simple Christians who had control of their passions. They had the reins of their lives in some unseen hands that he knew not of, whereas, he was a slave to his passions.

Christ can set you free.

Question to ponder:
Are you experiencing victory in Jesus? If not, ask Him now to set you free.

All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.

— Matthew 28:18

All power is given unto Jesus Christ. After His ascension, He sat down at the right hand of God until His enemies be made His footstool (Psalm 110:1 and Hebrews 1:13). Through these last 2,000 years, Jesus Christ has been continually gaining the victory, a victory that began at the time of His death and resurrection, and which continues on through the ages.

In 363 a.d., Julian the Apostate, the emperor of Rome who tried to relight the fires on pagan altars and overthrow the newly established Christian faith, was marching against the Persians. One of his soldiers, a Christian, was being sorely derided and persecuted by some of the heathen soldiers. They mocked him, beat him, threw him to the ground, and said, “Tell us, where is your carpenter now?”

He responded “He is busy constructing a coffin for your emperor.” A few months later, with a mortal wound in his side, Julian the Apostate took his hand and grasped a handful of his own blood, flung it against the sky, and said, “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean.” The Carpenter of Galilee is busy constructing coffins for all the ungodly kings and kingdoms of this earth.

Question to ponder:
All authority—what does it mean?

The heart is more deceitful than all things, and desperately wicked; who can understand it?

— Jeremiah 17:9

The Scriptures clearly teach the sinfulness of man. Many violate their consciences. We know not what we are capable of doing.

At the Academy at Lyon, a thesis was written on the dangers of ambition. Its author was young Napoleon. Nero declared, “Would this hand had never learned to write,” when he signed the first death warrant. And Robespierre, who sent thousands to the bloody guillotine during the reign of terror in Paris, in an earlier day resigned as municipal judge in a small town when he was confronted with the task of signing a death warrant for a guilty criminal.

Sin is a very slippery slope. When we take one step down that slope, God withdraws the restraining power of His Spirit. Then we slide farther down, and again He withdraws His Spirit. Ah, how dangerous a thing is sin! Like the great whirlpool, Charybdis, to be caught in the outer rim of that swirling water is the kiss of death. Soon you are drawn ever closer, ever inward, ever further down until you disappear forever into the watery chasm beneath. What a terrible, dangerous, deceitful, slippery thing is sin.

Thankfully, Jesus Christ came to break the power of sin in our lives.

Question to ponder:
Have you ever violated your conscience? How did it make you feel?

Again, Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

— John 8:12

How do we continue in the communion God has called us to? John says in the first chapter of his first letter, “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another …” (1 John 1:7). So we must continue to walk in the light of God, which means we continue to repent of our sins, continue to seek to walk honestly and purely before the Lord.

If we claim to have fellowship with God and yet walk in the darkness, we lie, John says. We have no fellowship with Him. But if we walk with Jesus Christ, we walk in the light. Just as physical light makes all things visible, so spiritual light makes all things clear and visible in the spiritual realm.

The Lord wants us to keep short accounts with Him. What that means is that when we sin, we should immediately ask for forgiveness. He promises us, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Question to ponder:
Are you keeping short accounts with God?

You know His will, and approve the things that are more excellent …

— Romans 2:18

We serve a most excellent God.

When we realize the greatness, glory, and majesty of our God, we should react with praise. Truly, our hearts should rejoice and the greatness of our God should cause us to sing of His glory and should also move us to reverential awe. When we see how great and glorious God is, when we grasp how His righteousness, holiness, and justice never change, and that He is infinite and eternal, we should be moved to awe. We should be moved to peace and comfort to know that if we have been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, we are in the hands of a Being Who can never fail—One Who can never die.

Lastly, we should also be moved to excellence. Always, we should strive to give God our best: our best in worship, our best in work. It should be our standard as His children for He is most excellent in power and beauty.

That is why I have always tried to employ the best musicians, the best organists, the best pastors and staff. No Christian should be content to imitate in thought, word, or deed what one has called “the Patron Saint of Mediocrity.”

Question to ponder:
How do you offer your best to God?

But they desired a better country, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

— Hebrews 11:16

Today, people seem to think that in some way religion in general and Christianity in particular are inimical to good government and that the purpose of the government is to keep religion away from the civic arena. This is a very different view than that held by George Washington, who said, “True religion offers to government its surest support.”

Why are people so against Christianity? What is it about Christ that they so abhor? They declare, “We will not have this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:14, nkjv). People do not want anybody—especially not Jesus Christ—to have power or control over their lives. Perhaps it gets back to what Jesus said in John 3:19: “light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.“

We Christians have a dual citizenship. We should do all we can to make our country the best it can be. We should seek godly values and vote for men and women of integrity and wisdom. Even as we work to make our country a good place to live, we know that there is a city that God has prepared for us; a country where He rules that is, and always will be, our true homeland.

Question to ponder:
What are your thoughts on our dual citizenship?

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men liberally and without criticism, and it will be given to him.

— James 1:5

In Jesus Christ we find that wisdom has become incarnate. We read that Jesus Christ “has become for us wisdom from God” (1 Corinthians 1:30 NIV). The fear of the Lord can grow into a complete love and adoration of God who now has come to live in our midst.

We need wisdom. Our world is full of the inexplicable, the inscrutable, the unfathomable, the impossible, and the insurmountable. We cannot, in fact, go three steps in any direction without running into the hard wall of mysteries, riddles, paradoxes, profundities and labyrinths—problems that we cannot solve; labyrinths that we cannot make our way out of; hieroglyphics that we cannot decipher; anagrams that we cannot spell out and sphinxes that just will not speak. Life is full of puzzles.

God gave Solomon great wisdom and he has been regarded as the wisest man who ever lived. But Jesus is the one “greater than Solomon” (Matthew 12:42) and in Him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). That wealth of wisdom from God is ours if we simply ask Him for it.

Question to ponder:
With God’s wisdom, what mystery would you like to solve?

The just shall live by faith.

— Romans 1:17

If you asked the average American what October 31 is, the response would be instantaneous: “It’s Halloween.” Yes, but it is also something far more important. It is Reformation Day, the birthday of the Protestant Reformation. It is the day when we celebrate the reclaiming of the Gospel of grace from out of the mist and darkness of the Dark Ages.

Beginning in Germany with Martin Luther, the Reformation transformed many of the nations of Europe, spread over to Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic. The Pilgrims and the Puritans were all followers of John Calvin, who was a follower of Martin Luther. Interestingly, those nations that have accepted the Reformation have been blessed by God, and those that have rejected it have become a part of the backwash of history. It is true not only of every nation, but of every soul as well.

The Reformation was simply a rediscovery of the apostolic message—the truth that we can’t work our way to heaven. Eternal life is a free gift that we are to receive. It is faith alone that saves us, but that faith never stands alone. That faith produces good fruit in our lives.

Question to ponder:
What does it mean in your life that “the just shall live by faith”?

Get wisdom! Get understanding! Do not forget it, nor turn away from the words of my mouth.

— Proverbs 4:5

There is a vast difference between the approach of the Hebrew and the Greek minds toward understanding wisdom. For the Greek, it was entirely a matter of the mind—a matter of putting things together and understanding the way the universe was made. It did not necessarily have much to do with the way one lived. Many renowned pagan writers of antiquity not only practiced, but also taught some of the most heinous of sins. In spite of their vast knowledge in some areas, their knowledge of holy and godly living was deficient, to say the least.

In Proverbs we find the door of wisdom open to everyone. But for the Greeks wisdom was reserved for a very select few. Over the gates to the school of Plato were inscribed the words: “Let no one enter herein who is not a geometrician.” Unless you were an expert in the study of geometry, you were not even invited to school.

Proverbs is quite the contrary. Here are invited the ignorant and simple, the foolish and the young—all are warmly invited to come and learn wisdom. In addition, we are told in Proverbs 1 that the wise will also hear and increase in their learning. We are repeatedly admonished that the wise, indeed, are those who hear the Word of God.

Question to ponder:
How do we become wise?

… without hope and without God in the world.

— Ephesians 2:12

Millions of people have studied Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven,” and yet I doubt that one-half of one percent of them have the faintest idea what it means.

“The Raven” is the personification of the unbelief that plagued Poe’s life. He was terrified by the grisly specter of death. In this poem he is seeking to find some surcease of sorrow for his lost Lenore. As he lost his wife in real life, so in this poem he loses Lenore, a beautiful, radiant maiden who has been snatched from his arms.

He can find no relief for the suffering and the heartache that grips him. He wants what everyone wants: some ease to the pain of this life. He wants to know that there is a balm in Gilead—a biblical phrase for Jesus Christ. In other words, Poe is asking, “Will I see Lenore again?” And unbelief answers, “Nevermore.”

How different is Christ’s answer to this question. On that glorious Easter morn He rose again from the dead and stepped forth into the light saying, “I am He who lives, though I was dead. Look! I am alive forevermore.” (Revelation 1:18).

Unbelief says: “Nevermore.” Faith says: “Forevermore.” He conquered our fears and fulfills our hopes now and forevermore.

Question to ponder:
Do you know people who live in fear of death, without hope and ruled by unbelief?