Strengthen Your Faith

Through God's Word

Strengthen Your Faith

Through God's Word

Helping You Find the Answers in the Word of God

People are sincerely looking for answers to basic questions about their lives. We can find all that we have ever longed to know in God's Word.   Come with us as we explore that Word together.

Woman reading the Bible on a dock
Three people holding hands and reading the Bible

Why God is Important

Billy Graham, the legendary evangelist  said, “Just look around you, Life without God is like an unsharpened pencil—it has no point.”

 

We cannot handle tragedy alone. Those who love us can surround us. It is God who enters into us through Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul explains it this way. "For Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong."

2 Corinthians 12:10

Even the Psalmist found personal comfort in God's presence. .

“I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;”
–Psalm 121:1-3

Originally we were created in God's image to live in His glory.  But, for a brief moment, His glory has become eclipsed by our own lust for glory. That fateful event happened when our first parents were told a lie, "You can be like God."

The message we share is that no matter how godlike our human intelligence leads us to believe we are, God alone is truth and life. We cannot attain this through our own resources. God must give us this new life which He has done through Jesus Christ. 

I have been given life. The life I now live in the flesh is toast; it’s ended.   Thus the life I am now living in the flesh is a spiritual life which I live by faith—faith in Christ who is not only my life, but the life of all believers. This is a life we share.    

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Hands holding up smooth rocks with the words “Jesus,” “faith,” “Messiah,” and other related terms

The Invisible God

The reason it is so difficult to see God and His promises is because our vision is limited to our five senses. That’s a problem humans are born with.

That was the problem Paul was addressing when he said the following. “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

Even in early times, the apostle Paul was facing this problem with the Areopagus. The Areopagus refers to the earliest aristocratic council of ancient Athens, perhaps comparable to a group of extremely bright, learned, and accomplished people of today. Paul was trying to have a conversation with these men about God.

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”

–Acts 17:22b-28

This is the God who desires more than anything else that we come to know Him. We meet Him in the story of creation found in the book of Genesis.

When God was done telling universes, stars, moons, winds, and rains to appear, He then breathed life into plants, animals, birds, and a multitude of creatures.

“God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
–Genesis 1:26-28

Then God breathed His likeness into dirt, which God had spoken into existence. And from His breath, human life came into existence.

“[Then] God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
–Genesis 1:26-28

“This was the free and glorious state of mankind before The Fall. Genesis tells us that “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
–Genesis 2:25.

The Hebrew word for naked used here is עָרֹם, pronounced arom, which means a living state of absolute nakedness, (עֵירֹם), a freedom. Note, further, that Genesis 2:25 tells us that they felt no shame, (בָּשְׁנָה), pronounced, boshnah, living as such.

Just as it is impossible to know life as it was before The Fall, it is impossible, on our own, to know God as we now are.

I cannot stress this truth enough: We are beings born who are bound to our own significance. The following verse from Genesis explains this state of being.

“But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He [man] answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’”
–Genesis 3:9-10

That is the drastic change in our state of being, we became dastardly self-conscious.

We live in a state wherein it is impossible to free ourselves from ourselves. This makes it impossible to even have a truthful relationship with anyone else.

The reason for this is that every intention that we have is misdirected. Genesis tells us how this happened. Satan, referred to in the Word of God as crafty, (עָרוּם), pronounced arum, talked Adam and Eve into their becoming significant. I paraphrase, “Listen to me and you can become just like God.” Eve listened to Satan, and Adam listened to Eve, and the result was that we became gods onto ourselves. Living in such a state is to be living in sin.

John Calvin & John Milton on The Fall

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Jesus and the adulterous woman

The Promise of a New Covenant

The dialogue between Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees over a woman who was caught in adultery is a covenant that reveals God's redeeming love to us.

The law the Scribes and Pharisees followed was that she was guilty and should be stoned to death.

As Jesus is kneeling and writing in the sand, He looked up as if to say, “Who has the right to judge her?” When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” –John 8:7

Jesus alone has the right to judge.

Therefore be sure you“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
–Matthew 7:1-2

The Scribes and Pharisees in the Old Testament refused to believe that Jesus had the right to speak with such authority. They were direct descendants of God. That was the cause of Jesus’s anger—He was sent from God. They belonged to another .

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
–John 8:44

This Jesus who stood before them brought the promise of eternal life to them. This was all according to God's plan.

His Father said the following. "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."
–Genesis 3:15

Here is what Martin Luther writes about the old and the new covenant."Under the law of God, we are all condemned sinners. When we “play God” by condemning another, we are living by the old covenant--the covenant Satan bound us to.

“We live bound by one of two laws, one of two covenants. One is to live according to the lie that promised us ‘You can be like God,’ that binds us to eternal death or the new covenant written into the hearts and minds of those who believe in one God. Martin Luther expresses the following thoughts on this new covenant. ‘This light of understanding in the mind, I say, and this flame in the heart is the law of faith, the new law, the law of Christ, the law of the Spirit, the law of grace. It justifies, fulfills everything, and crucifies the lusts of the flesh. Thus St. Augustine says beautifully on this passage: “In a sense the man who with a love of righteousness lives righteously lives the Law itself.”’”
–Luther’s Works, Volume 27

This righteousness is a new state of being. Obviously, we still have the old minds, simply because we use them in order to live. But, these minds are corrupted. Because they cannot prove the existence of heaven, hell, and the God, they deny these truths.

God touches us with truth. It is a gift given to us through faith. Worldviews do not contain any truths that compare to the promises God made to us in the new covenant. Faith is given.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”
–Ephesians 2:8.

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God Will Keep His Promise

Experienced mountain climbers know what to hold onto because falling is costly. Through a far more costly Fall, mankind  lost its relationship with God.

The Good News is that Jesus Christ came into the world and into our lives to rebuild that relationship with God. We rejoice in His coming to Bethlehem but often forget the depths to which He came to lift us up.

"And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."
–John 12:32

That is the promise He came to fulfill. After He had healed diseases, impairments, and the ultimate violence that hatred can produce, He was killed only to overcome the death of deaths for which we were destined to die.

After all His work was done, Christ ascended to His Father. His disciples, those who had walked and worked with Him, were there to witness His return to His Father. They kept straining to see Him as He disappeared into the clouds. Angels came and spoke to them.

“Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
Acts 1:11

So let us sing on. "Some day He's coming back, what Glory that will be, wonderful His love to me."

mountain climber 602

God Came to Dwell in Us

A pair of hands with long nails clasped together in prayer

When you pick up the Word of God and begin reading, God is having a conversation with you. In that conversation He sent you a helper to guide you into knowing Him through the power of the Holy Spirit. That's how strongly God desires that you come to know Him.

You will find that the Holy Spirit will guide you into the truth about who God is and who you are. You will find in God both love and mercy that this world cannot give.

He has revealed this nature  through Jesus Christ. He was born in human flesh, suffering all that each human being suffers. In this human form God becomes personal.  He comes to dwell within us so that we can  live under Him in His Kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.

We hope that you become a diligent student of God's Word, and will trust the promises He has made to you. If we seek His Kingdom first, then all that we need in order to live here on earth will be given to us by faith.

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
–Matthew 6:33

Getting Involved in Seeking the Truth

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
John 14:6.

How does one come to know that life is to be found in Christ?

God's Word reveals to us who Jesus Christ is. He became human in order to guide us into the spiritual way of life. When He tells us He is the "Bread of Life" or the "Water of Life," He is guiding us through things we know in order to help us to know Him better. His words to us help us to understand that by being baptized into Christ, we are given a spiritual life. With His spirit of love He enters into our  physical suffering bodies with the promise that through faith in Him our physical bodies will be transformed into new spiritual bodies like His.

We invite you to celebrate these glorious promises with us.