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THE PERSON OF THE BOOK
GENESIS: Promised Seed
EXODUS: Passover Lamb
LEVITICUS: Scapegoat
NUMBERS: Brazen Serpent
DEUTERONOMY: Great Lawgiver
JOSHUA: Prophet, Priest and King
JUDGES: Judge of All the Universe
RUTH: Kinsman Redeemer
SAMUEL: Anointer of Kings
KINGS: King of Kings & Lord of Lords
CHRONICLES: Great Historian
EZRA: Rebuilder of the Temple
NEHEMIAH: Rebuilder of the Wall
ESTHER: Saviour of the Jews
JOB: Friend that Sticketh Closer than a Brother
PSALMS: Song of the Ages
PROVERBS: Truth
ECCLESIASTES: Great Preacher
SONG OF SOLOMON: Wonderful Lover
ISAIAH: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and The
Prince of Peace
JEREMIAH: Weeping Prophet
LAMENTATIONS: Street Preacher
EZEKIEL: Rebuilder of the Kingdom Temple
DANIEL: Stone Cut Out Without Hands That Will Someday Come Back to
Earth and Establish a Kingdom as Supreme Ruler and King
HOSEA: Forgiving Lover
JOEL-MALACHI: One Coming in Bethlehem Judea
MATTHEW: King of Kings
MARK: Suffering Servant
LUKE: Son of Man
JOHN: Son of God
ACTS: Power of the Church
ROMANS: Dynamite of the Gospel
CORINTHIANS: Restorer of the Carnal Nature
GALATIANS: Rent Veil and Overcomer of the Schoolmaster
EPHESIANS: Heavenly One
PHILIPPIANS: Our Sufficiency
COLOSSIANS: The Shadow
THESSALONIANS: The Great Coming Christ
TIMOTHY: Our Great Appearing God
TITUS: Blessed Hope
PHILEMON: Great Master
HEBREWS: Best of All
JAMES: Fulfiller of the Law
PETER: Rock of Ages Cleft For Me, Let Me Hide Myself in Thee
JOHN: Assurance of our Salvation
JUDE: One Able to Keep Us From Falling and Present Us Faultless
Before Christ in Glory
REVELATION: One Saddled on a White Horse Coming Back to Set Up His
Kingdom
HE’S THE PERSON OF THE BOOK!!
Owen Bourgaize
In the hard school of life God’s answer to our problems don’t come in the form of neatly pre-packaged solutions, like strips of shrink-wrapped capsules labelled for each anxiety we have, carrying a certificate of immunity from the hazards of life.
If I may give a personal illustration of this. Some years ago I found myself in a difficulty over employment. I was in my mid-forties, with family responsibilities. I had given in my notice to my employer because of an overwhelming sense of God’s leading in the matter, but didn’t have another position open to me. It was a difficult time of waiting, but I was encouraged by another Christian who told me confidently that "it was going to be exciting to see how God found a solution" - and it was! Perhaps I could have done without the waiting, but God’s timetables are not the same as ours! I heard a sermon on "God our sufficiency" which bolstered my faith and a couple of months later I was offered two secure jobs in the same week! If God leads you into a situation, you can be sure that he will see you through it. He never leaves anyone in the lurch. He guarantees to be with us as we negotiate the dificulties of life.
There’s a guy by the name of Harley whom a Bible teacher had met in a Sunday School class. He realized that what the teacher was sharing was not real for him. He wasn’t experiencing Christ as his life. The reason he realized it was he was an unhappy camper when Lee met him. Harley’s married to a lady we’ll call “sweetie pie.” At the time the teacher met him he was still devastated that his wife had MS. He couldn’t understand why this would happen to someone such as he and his wife. They’d done their best to live the Christian life, they were in church every week, and had given liberally of their resources. Why would God allow her to get MS? You see, MS put a tremendous crimp in their lifestyle because Harley was self-employed and he’d work all day and come home to do his own book work. He’d also have to do a lot around the house and he was pushing her in the wheelchair everywhere they went. Get the chair out, put her in it, get her out at church to sit on a pew, roll chair out, go back and get it etc.
So you can see Harley was bitter, angry, and frustrated with God and with life. He heard the teacher say that many times God will reveal our functional source of life through stress. He began to realize that he, even with God’s help couldn’t live the Christian life. So Harley got on his knees and gave up all rights to “sweetie pie’s” health, as well as his own happiness. He gave up all rights to everything he was hanging on to in order to get his needs met. He announced that he was a failure as a Christian and at living the Christian life with or without God’s help. He gave up on his Self, his own self-sufficiency. He accepted his death with Christ by faith and he invited the Lord Jesus to live His life in him and through him and for him. Today when you meet Harley he never complains about “sweetie pie’s” condition. They recently reaffirmed their wedding vows after twenty-five years, and they’re in love as much as any body.
Now am I saying that God allowed her to get MS to change Harley? No, I’m not saying that. I don’t know that, but I do know this – God allows adversity to come into the Christian’s life and we must not waste our sorrows. The truth is stress plus time will reveal your functional source of life.
[America’s Sin of Self-Sufficiency, Citation: Richard Halverson, "The Question Facing Us," Preaching Today, Tape 46.]
In 1863 President Lincoln designated April 30th as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. Let me read a portion of his proclamation on that occasion:
"It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, who owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by a history that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. The awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as ...
"The ground of faith is not the sufficiency of the visible means for the performance of Gods promises, but rather the all-sufficiency of the invisible God, who will most surely do as He hath said He would."
Centuries ago on the South Coast of China, high up on a hill overlooking the harbor of Macao, Portuguese settlers built an enormous cathedral.
They believed it would weather time, and they placed upon the front wall of this cathedral a massive bronze cross that stood high into the sky.
Not too many years later, a typhoon came and nature’s finger work swept away man’s handiwork. That entire cathedral was pushed down the hill and into the ocean as debris, except the front wall and that bronze cross that stood high.
Centuries later, there was a shipwreck out a little beyond that harbor. Some dies but a few lived. One of the men that was hanging onto wreckage from the ship, moving up and down in the crest of the ocean as the swells were moving, was disoriented, frightened. He didn’t know where land was. As he would come up on the swell, he’d spot that cross, tiny from that distance. His name was Sir John Bowring.
When he made it to land and lived to tell the story, he wrote this hymn:
In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.
The last stanza says:
When the woes of life o’ertake me,
Hopes deceive, and fears annoy,
Never shall the cross forsake me:
Lo! It glows with peace and joy.
John Bowring is telling us that we have a cross, we have an altar. And when all of life seems to crush in on top of us, we need to go back to the Cross and remember the empty tomb. Call to mind the fact that a Man is neither on the cross nor in the tomb, but He lives. He stands ready and able to give us victory through whatever we are going through at the time.
Come by grace to the Cross and say, “That is my sufficiency. That is my only hope.”
--Kenneth Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories.
I read of a remarkable story of God’s providential care. Police in Nepal saved the lives of Christians by arresting them! A musical team from an Indian church travelled to Tikapur, Nepal, to attend a church conference. Hours before they were scheduled to return to India, police arrested the team leader and confiscated their van. Several officers then used the van for a personal trip to a town 150 miles away.
Robbers attacked the van as it travelled through a forest. They had expected the van to be full of Christians and were planning to kill them and take their equipment, but police jumped out of the van and shot at the robbers, forcing them to flee. "Praise be to God who saved our lives," said the leader. When he told the Tikapur police chief that God used his arrest to protect the Christians, the chief agreed that the team was blessed and decided to release them. The pastor was then able to witness to the police chief and other officers at the station and pray with them. God moves in mysterious ways.
Christ is our sufficiency; there can be no life apart from him. He is our contemporary just as he was for Daniel. When circumstances are against us or God visits the ungodly world in judgement, Jesus is our hiding place.
“Walter Cronkite or God?” Joshua 1:1-9 Key verse(s): 5:“No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Why is the world such a fearful place? It seems these days people are afraid of more things than they ever were before. We’re afraid of big things and little things alike. We are filled with fear when we think of that terrorist with a bomb strapped around his middle. While our expanding waste lines keeps us almost as fearful of that bulge around our own middle. We fear that our homes might be broken into; so we invest in expensive alarm systems. We fear that our identity might be stolen so our plastic has become more important to us than gold or silver. It’s ironic that in a land that once presented people with so many fearful prospects in the form of skulking mountain lions, ferocious grizzlies and wolves, not to mention a wide assortment of killing diseases, famine and scalp-hunting indians, we seem more fearful today than were our forefathers who faced so many physical challenges just trying to survive from day to day.
What is it about the very real dangers of the past that gave our forefathers pause but didn’t interrupt their sleep? How were they able to survive with such pluck, maintain their self-sufficiency and guard their personal liberty in the face of nearly overwhelming everyday danger? Today Americans rush into the arms of their government at the slightest hint of a danger or a threat. Willing even to give up our most precious liberties in order to secure the hand of a government over us, we stand weak-kneed and wobbly every time the news is rife with the possibility of something terrible happening even in a land thousands of miles away. Perhaps there is a clue in a poll conducted by The Ladies Home Journal nearly a quarter of a century ago. The magazine asked this simply question: “In whom do you trust?” Of the thousands who responded, two individuals were selected as most trustworthy. 40% listed Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor, and 26% listed the Pope. God came in dead last at 3%. Even the plumber and used car salesmen scored higher than the Almighty Creator of the universe. If you can’t trust God to take care of you, it is little wonder that we are so filled with fear. Doubtless Walter Cronkite could do little to convince a terrorist ready to blow himself to pieces that it might not be a good idea; even on his best journalistic day.
Evangelist James Brown writes. “Some years ago when I was learning to fly, my instructor told me to put the plane into a steep and extended dive. I was totally unprepared for what was about to happen. After a brief time the engine stalled, and the plane began to plunge out-of-control. It soon became evident that the instructor was not going to help me at all. After a few seconds, which seemed like eternity, my mind began to function again. I quickly corrected the situation.
Immediately I turned to the instructor and began to vent my fearful frustrations on him. He very calmly said to me, ‘There is no position you can get this airplane into that I cannot get you out of. If you want to learn to fly, go up there and do it a...
G. Campbell Morgan says this about worship:
"The word "worship" runs through the Bible, and the thought of worship is to be found from beginning to end. The thought of worship is the recognition of divine sufficiency, the recognition of our absolute dependence on the divine sufficiency, the confession that all we need in our lives we find in God. And the spoken answer to that conviction is worship. 2
2 from PEARLS e-mail yahoo group
From Tim Zingale’s Sermon: Sisters
BIBLE BY THE NUMBERS
The number 40 is an important spiritual symbol in the Bible.
Noah’s flood -- 40 days and nights
Moses on the mountain -- 40 days and nights
Elijah in the wilderness headed for Sinai/Horeb to hear the still, small voice -- 40 days
Jesus tempted in the wilderness for 40 days and nights.
4, the number of the created order in gematria
* 4 cardinal directions,
* 4 living creatures around the throne of God (birds, domesticated animals, wild animals and humans --the fish get squeezed out in the vision because of Dagon and Leviathan, I suppose, but biologically, fish and birds are really the same--birds fly in the air and often swim in the water, fish swim in the water and sometimes fly in the air)
* 4 rivers coming out of the Garden of Eden, etc.
10=the number of sufficiency
* 2 hands of 5 digits each and 2 feet of 5 digits each
* the amount of time sufficient for CREATION, the CREATED ORDER to understand that Jesus was ALIVE!
