What a great night! With over 190 people present, 24 wild game dishes featuring at least 11 different creatures, and a solid gospel message from Brother Matt Downs, we’re praising the Lord for another terrific event.

We appreciate everyone who attended our fifth annual Wild Beast Feast, and we greatly appreciate all of the incredible food people brought too. Without both, the event wouldn’t have been what it was.

We’re now enjoying messages from Brother Downs for the next couple days of special services, praying the Lord of the harvest to bring forth fruit from the seeds that were planted, and laying the groundwork for next year!

Proverbs 1:10 “My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.”

Whom you work with and what their goals are matter. A lot. Don’t go along with evil people to do evil. Be careful of the character of those you work with and deal with.

We know that all men are sinners – all have sinned, including us. This verse, however, is talking about people who are characterized by sin and have goals that are sinful. Be alert when people of bad character try to talk you into doing something. If their behavior is bad, it’s likely their actions are bad. Don’t let peer pressure (which affects adults too!) push you into doing something that is wrong with people who are wrong. Use discernment and have courage.

What kind of evil plan might we be drawn into? The next six verses shed light on it. The evil will try to get the righteous to help them take advantage of people for profit. They form an undertaking to catch innocent and unsuspecting people, people who haven’t done anything to deserve being preyed upon, and do things that will hurt or even kill those people in order to profit from it.

We get that this is wrong if you’re forming a gang to go rob a convenience store at gunpoint. But this is warning you not to throw in with them, not just physically, but even financially (verse 14). It’s warning you not just to avoid participating in their specific wicked plot, but to avoid associating yourself with them or imitating them (verse 15).

There are always people who will deliberately take advantage of the innocent and unsuspecting, harming them in order to make a profit. It can be a gang of street thugs, it can be scam telemarketers, human traffickers, people taking advantage of illegal immigrants, and it can be big banks with hidden traps in the fine print of contracts. Humans follow swiftly in the creative footsteps of their father the devil in the number of ways they can devise and justify profit from the pain and loss of others.

I’d like to think that no one in our church, or in the true body of Christ, would ever devise one of these predatory schemes. But the warning here is to stay away from, don’t support, don’t join with, the people who do prey upon others, no matter how great the profit may seem to be. There are many otherwise honorable people who will join financially or politically with people who prey upon others, thinking that the good they will gain is greater than the harm they will participate in.

As Christians, for the sake of the honor of the name of God, and for the sake of wisdom itself, we should be careful about our personal business dealings. If you’re working with people who will take advantage of others for profit, what do you think they’ll do to you? It’s just not wise to join with them. It’s in their character to head toward doing wrong, head toward destruction. They’re in a hurry to shed blood – whether literally violent, or just cold-bloodedly willing to harm others for their own benefit.

When people like this approach you to join with them in a venture that will involve taking advantage of someone, no matter how profitable it looks, don’t go along with them. Stay off the course that they are on. The path of evil men with evil plans leads only to evil – and you don’t want to be with them when they reach the end of that road.

Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

A house without a good foundation is or soon will be just a pile of lumber and brick. The foundation to all knowledge that will matter in eternity is the fear of the Lord. This is where knowledge starts.

What is the fear of the Lord? It’s often defined as something like “reverence for God.” But what does that mean? It’s not simply a quivering, incapacitating terror. It’s far more than just not using His names as swearwords, going to church, or bowing a lot.

We can learn a lot about a thing from its opposite. The fear of man appears in Proverbs as a handy opposite to the fear of God. Since the fear of man appears to be caring more what other people think than what God thinks, then the fear of God must involve caring more what He thinks than what anyone else thinks. Put another way, the fear of man is letting what other people think or might do influence what you do.

So the fear of the Lord would be this: letting what God thinks or might do influence what you do. This is the beginning of knowledge – having our lives be governed by the awareness of God’s identity, power, desires, and actions. If we shrug off what God wants, or don’t care enough what God wants to find it out and follow it, we don’t have the fear of God. But if we care more what God thinks than what anyone else (including ourselves!) thinks, then we have the fear of God. Then we have a foundation to build the knowledge of our lives upon.

Since He is the Creator of all things and made the physical and spiritual rules by which all realities work, it’s sheer folly to begin to build knowledge on any other foundation. Pay attention to God, and your pursuit of knowledge is off to a good start.

Proverbs 1:5 “A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:”

Never graduate!  Well, not literally – I hope you generally finish what you start.  But while we may finish a course, or even finish school, we should never stop learning.  We should never stop studying in life.

How well do you listen and learn? That is one way of measuring your wisdom. The person who won’t listen is the opposite of wise. The know-it-all is a fool.

A wise person, on the other hand, is eager to hear something he hasn’t heard before, so that he can learn something. He’s never content with the level or scope of his knowledge. He’s forever in the pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. A wise person is a good listener. They hear what they are told, and they grasp from it what the person speaking meant to say.

When we stop learning, we have stopped being wise.

So whom will you listen to today, and what will you learn?

Wednesday night, April 25, marked the end of our 2017-2018 AWANA year!

Now we have started our youth and children’s summer program.

Here is a little recap of our last year or so with the young people.

Our ladies would love for you to help with our new project.

We are each picking a Bible verse and writing it on 25 3×5 cards, then decorating the cards with stickers, stamps, etc.

This will give us enough to send a set to each of our missionaries and have a few left over for missionaries who visit us.

Please see the narthex table for a list of verses already used, and write down the verse you want to use. Give cards to Wenonah by Wednesday, November 8^th.

If you’d rather not decorate, you can hand Wenonah your 25 written out cards and the ladies group will decorate them.

Thanks for helping us bless others. 

Why are so many people who have prayed prayers, professed Christ, and thought they were born again still unsure whether they are saved or not?  Many are the people I speak to, who, despite the promises of God’s Word that they can know they have everlasting life (I John 5:13), have no such assurance.  They aren’t living for Christ, and they don’t feel like they belong to or with Christ.  What can be done to help them?  What course should they take?  That all depends on what happened to bring them to this point in life.

I see two possibilities in the Bible.  The first is that they never belonged to Christ in the first place. I John 2:19, warning about some opponents of Christ, says, “They went out from us, but they were not of us: for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.”

There are far too many people who parroted a prayer without understanding the gospel or genuinely believing it.  There are too many who for social, political, or personal reasons claimed to be Christians, but never actually came to Christ in humble faith.  When these turn from Christianity or obviously fail in the Christian life, it isn’t because they lost something – they never had it.

Does this mean that every person who doesn’t feel saved, remember being saved, or act like they are saved was never a Christian in the first place?  Or is there another possibility in the Scriptures?

There is.  Peter describes another situation in which people are not living for Christ, and though they have been saved, they have forgotten their cleansing. II Peter 1:5-9 tells us that people who do not diligently grow in Christlikeness become blind, unable to see what is in the distance, and they forget that they were purged from their old sins.  They were purged – they are saved.  But they forget it.  They forget the knowledge and assurance of their salvation because they do not live in the knowledge and assurance of their salvation.  They don’t live it out, so they lose their confidence within.  We actually find assurance of our standing in the way we walk.  When we walk away from Christ, we can so easily forget that we stand in Him.

So when I encounter someone who had an experience, prayed a prayer, but still doesn’t know whether they are saved or not, I know it can be for two reasons.  They may never have genuinely trusted Christ in the first place.  Or they may have ceased to live in that faith and so lost the confidence of it.

Unfortunately, since I can’t see their heart, I don’t know which condition applies to which person.  Fortunately, God does.  And if they want to know where they stand with Him, I believe He will show them.  The Holy Spirit reproves the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8); the Holy Spirit bears witness within believers that they are the children of God (Romans 8:16).  He can bring the lost to faith, and He can bring the saved to faithfulness – if they are willing to hear Him.

When asked the question, “Do you know for sure where you will go when you die?” the most common answer I get seems to be,

“I don’t know.”  Its common companion is, “I don’t think you can really know for sure.”  It’s perhaps the most important question to answer in this life – and most people know they don’t know.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Many churches, denominations, and teachers proclaim that a person might become unsaved after being saved, or might not be able to be saved because they aren’t part of the elect.  Many seem to think that faith is a good starting place, but we need to do some kind of works in order to complete or keep our salvation.  Other major religions I know of leave the question of eternal destiny to be decided at or after death.  This thinking usually makes a person’s works the ultimate determiner of eternal destiny, because doing the wrong works, or not doing enough of the right ones, can negate other good works, or even faith.  Certainty in this life is impossible, because we don’t really know what we will do or how we might fail in the future.

However, this is one of the beautiful differences between biblical Christianity and other faiths.  We believe in a God who is truth and loves truth; He works by faith and knowledge, not by doubt and fear.  We may not know how we might mess up in the future – but He knows the future, so when He redeems us, He does so knowing the full cost of that redemption.  It’s a redemption that was accomplished with an atonement that paid for all sin – past, present, and future.

So He tells us in I John 5:3, “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.”  This is consistent with the themes throughout Scripture of God’s truthfulness and faithfulness, and of His call to us to respond with reckoning, confidence, and trust.

When we simply take God at His Word, having answered the call of His Word to faith, we can know.

What if I mess up too badly or for too long?  Can I lose my salvation?  Many believers who take an honest look at the mistakes they make after they profess Christ ask questions like this.  Many who look at the disturbing warning passages in the New Testament come away with the same questions.  And that’s before we even consider our more judgmental moments looking at other people who claim to be God’s, but live like the devil’s.

But maybe, “Can I lose my salvation?” isn’t quite the right question.  I think we might be focusing on the wrong transaction when we ask the question that way.  I think the question may only even get asked because of the way we think about being saved.

If I went fishing on vacation without a life jacket and fell out of the boat because I wouldn’t let go of my fishing rod, I might need to be saved from drowning. 

Maybe after being saved that first time, I would learn my lesson and always wear my lifejacket and care more about safety than my fishing gear.  But anyone who knows me is probably already rolling their eyes at the likelihood of me always making the smart decision when it comes to fishing.  It’s quite possible that having been saved from the water on Monday, I might fall back in on Thursday and need to be saved again.  If we just see sin or hell as a peril that we need to be rescued from because of our behavior, then it’s easy to think that the same decisions that got us in trouble last time could put us right back in trouble again.  Then we might “lose our salvation,” because we’d need to be saved again.

However, salvation is not the only thing that happens when we trust Jesus Christ.  That glorious transaction is also described as redemption, justification, sanctification, sealing, indwelling, glorification, quickening, and more.

The Bible passages that talk about this moment are almost too numerous to go through in a single simple blog post.  One of my favorites, though, is John 5:24.  There Jesus says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”

Grammar isn’t many people’s favorite.

Verb tenses matter, though.  John 5:24 doesn’t say that the person who comes to faith through the Scriptures “will have everlasting life” – it says “hath everlasting life.”  That is, it’s not a future possibility, it’s a current reality.  The moment we trust Jesus Christ, we pass from death into a life that can never end.  (And don’t even get me started on the implications of that Greek perfect tense there!)  If we could “lose our salvation” (to mix the other picture back in), that life wouldn’t be so everlasting, would it?

And then there are the verses that say we are justified – declared righteous by God Himself.  Would God go back on His word, change His mind, and declare unjust what He has already declared just?  (Remember that when He declared us righteous, He knew every sin of the future and declared us just anyhow.)  Of course, He can declare us righteous, because He has actually made us righteous – sanctified, and even glorified.  (I Corinthians 6:11; Romans 8:30)  We are already seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:6) – shall we be torn from the hands and body of Jesus and cast out of heaven, when we have already been made righteous in Him?

And that’s before we get to the work of the Holy Spirit, which seals us “unto the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30) and is the down payment on the blessings we have in Christ (Ephesians 1:14).  Will God go back on a deal He has already made the down payment on?

Then there’s the declaration that God will not fail in us.  Philippians 1:6 says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”  Once saved, it is our destiny to become like Jesus Christ.  (Romans 8:29)  Even though WE fail in that in this life, GOD will not fail in that throughout eternal life.

I think we fear losing our salvation because we think too small about salvation.  It’s not just a rescue from peril; it’s not just a change of forwarding address for the soul.  It’s a birth – and birth can’t be undone (and death can’t happen after this birth).  It’s a sealing with a seal that can’t be broken.  It’s a contract with a being who can’t go back on His Word.  It’s a relocation.  It’s a transformation.  It’s a change of nature and destiny.  None of that can be lost, or it never happened in the first place.

It’s not just “once saved, always saved” – it’s “born again, never dies.”