A Substance

“A Substance”

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped

for, the evidence of things not seen.”

                                             Hebrews 11:1

If, as the writer of the Book of Hebrews asserts, faith is a substance, something tangible and real, then we should be able to visibly identify it in the lives of those who live by it. Here is an attempt, taken from various works, to give an admittedly incomplete description of what faith looks like in the life of a believer:

·         Faith inspires action.
·         Faith endures trials.
·         Faith obeys the Word.
·         Faith stifles complaining.
·         Faith waits patiently.
·         Faith controls the tongue.
·         Faith produces fruit.
·         Faith responds to the promises of God.
·         Faith produces separation from the world.
·         Faith is undeterred by circumstances.
·         Faith is willing to sacrifice.
·         Faith boldly asks.
·         Faith perseveres.
·         Faith believes.
·         Faith gives.
·         Faith works.
·         Faith never gives up.
·         Faith secures the victory.

James uses the natural example of someone looking in a mirror to explain the introspection that studying God’s Word is to cause in our lives. In much the same way, we can look at the characteristics of true faith found in the scriptures and use them to evaluate the quality of faith that we are experiencing in our own lives. To the degree that such self-examination produces real and lasting changes in our conduct and character, we will truly be blessed.

God Bless,
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church

Sustained Passion

Sustained Passion

“Then his disciples remembered this prophecy from the

Scriptures: ‘Passion for God’s house will consume me’.”

                                             John 2:17

Shortly after the miracle at the wedding feast at Cana in which He turned the water into wine, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast. What happened when He entered the temple almost seemed out of character for a God who displayed such incredible love, mercy and acceptance throughout His ministry. John records that in a display of passion, Jesus made a whip out of cords, driving out those selling animals and exchanging money, going so far as to turn over their tables sending the money they were exchanging flying everywhere.

Fast forward three years in Jesus life from the events described in the second chapter of John at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry to Palm Sunday, just a few short days before Jesus was to be crucified. Jesus again entered the temple, again saw things going on that weren’t right in God’s house, again “drove out all who were buying and selling there”, and again overturned the tables of the money changers. It was at that point that Jesus quoted the prophecy of Isaiah, “My house shall be called a house of prayer.”

Sustained passion! Three years of ministry, three years of meeting the needs of hurting people wherever He went had not dampened Jesus’ passion for the honor of His Father’s house. With the cross looming large on the horizon, His vision remained clear and His passion was undiminished – “My Father’s house will be a house of prayer.” Three years later, passion for the honor of His Father continued to be a driving force in the life of Jesus.

Sadly, the kind of sustained passion that Jesus demonstrated is not always seen in the lives of those He died to save. We start out strong and with good intentions but our vision becomes clouded; our priorities slowly change over time with God being relegated to a place of convenience, and our passion for the things of God is lost. But God, in His unfailing love and mercy, is calling His people back to a life of passion and devotion, and most importantly, to a consistency in that passion that honors the Lord over time. Let Jesus’ example of sustained passion move each of us to search our hearts, to look back over the years and, if need be, seek to recover any lost love or passion that filled our hearts at the beginning.

God Bless,
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church

Furnished and Ready

Furnished and Ready

“He will show you a large upper room, furnished

 and ready. Make preparations for us there.”

                                                 Mark 14:15

As we celebrate Easter this year, the completeness of what Jesus accomplished on the cross for you and I has stood out to me like never before. Isaiah tells us that He “bore our iniquities” and that “the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” But Isaiah also tells us about so much more that was accomplished in the sufferings of Christ. An example is the peace that Christ purchased for us at Calvary. In Isaiah 53:5, we are told that “the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him.”We can walk in peace during the most ferocious storms of life because of what Jesus endured as He went to the cross. To the one who feels like they can’t handle one more thing, there is a peace available to you today, a peace that Jesus paid for in full as He was punished for our sins.

We can look to the same verse in Isaiah and read “by His stripes we are healed.” Healing in its many aspects was provided for in Christ as He received those thirty-nine lashes to purchase our healing. And that includes inner healing from emotional pain and suffering as well as physical healing from disease and sickness; by His stripes we are healed! We need to look closely at the work of the cross, with eyes and hearts open, to fully see all that Christ has done for us. And with that discovery, we can approach the throne of God’s grace with a renewed boldness and confidence.

Jesus was “a man of sorrows” who bore our sorrows and pain as He walked from the Garden of Gethsemane where He was arrested to Calvary, the place of His crucifixion. There is no sorrow you will endure, no pain you will experience, no suffering you will face that the Lord did not go through and win the victory over. You will not face a trial that He is unprepared to comfort you in and help you through. Are you lonely? The Bible records that all men forsook Jesus in the hour of His greatest need. Do you feel no one understands? Jesus was despised, a pretty strong word, by the very people He came to save. Are you at the end of your rope? Jesus was crushed, cut off, rejected by men and stricken by God, oppressed and afflicted yet He opened not His mouth in complaint, choosing to trust the plan of His Father. And at the end of the day, that will of the Father prospered in the life of Jesus as it will in your life by God’s grace.

It is as if a table is furnished and ready for you and I, the table of the Lord, filled with the fruits of the cross for all those with eyes open to see and hearts open to receive this Easter.

God Bless,
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church

Turning Over The Keys

Turning Over the Keys

“For as many as are led by the Spirit

of God, these are the sons of God.”

                           Romans 8:14

In his popular book “tuesdays with Morrie”, Mitch Albom tells of the day when the main character, a college professor named Morrie battling the debilitating effects of ALS, turned over his car keys. No sooner had I read the words than my mind returned to my own parents and how vast;u different turning over the car keys was for each of them. On the one hand, you had my mother who one day, at the age of 94, made a decision that driving her car was no longer a good idea and not only handed over the keys but her car as well. My father was a whole different story. I can still remember him using a walker, having to be helped up and down steps and in so many other ways, yet in total seriousness asking me to take him to renew his drivers’ license. Needless to say his keys had to be taken away while he slept one night.

Turning over the keys can be likened to turning over control of our lives to the Lord. Some people quite easily find the faith to let go and trust God with their lives while others struggle, stuck in that place with head knowledge that God can be trusted but never actually able to give God complete control. Pastor Jim Cymbala said it this way, “Sadly, there are too many believers today who profess faith in Christ but who haven’t surrendered themselves to the control of the Spirit.” Surrendering control to God is a “not my will but yours be done Lord” mentality. Turning over control means admitting that only God knows what is truly best for our lives and includes our humbly acknowledging that if left to ourselves, we would make a mess of our lives.

Maybe another analogy from one of our two junk drawers would help. This particular one contains the spares sets of keys to each of our cars. Most of us reading this have given God some measure of control over our lives; we have certain areas of our lives that are yielded to Him, areas of behavior and speech limited by the constraints of right and wrong imprinted on our hearts by the Lord. But, then again, there is always that spare set of keys, the ones we pull out of the drawer when we want to do something that is selfish, that God would say no to if we dared to ask, and that are outside the boundaries of a committed, devoted, holy Christian life.

In encouraging each of us to turn over both sets of keys to the Lord, I do it with the certainty that our very best efforts to live a good life are as nothing compared  to the abundant life we can experience through a life fully surrendered to the Lord. It will take faith and trust greater than we have ever known but the result will be joy, peace, and contentment beyond our imagination.

God Bless
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church

The Unwritten Chapters

The Unwritten Chapters

“Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a

good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

                                                 Philippians 1:6

The short little story, tucked away in the gospel of Luke, tells of a fig tree that had not borne fruit for three years. The man who owned the tree, frustrated at the lack of fruit, wanted the tree cut down but his gardener talked him out of it. With a plan of breaking up the soil around the tree and heavily fertilizing it, the owner agreed to give the tree one last chance; either the tree bore fruit or it was going to be cut down.

The story is actually quite encouraging, helping us to realize that despite our mistakes and failures, God continues to give grace and opportunity for each of us to make the changes He has long wanted to see in our lives. And those changes relate to character, to personal holiness, to a committed relationship to Jesus Christ, and to bearing fruit in the kingdom of God. The owner not giving up on that tree is a message of hope, the words written in red, but a message of hope that comes with a warning that the grace given should not be taken lightly.

The story has something missing though; it has no ending. We don’t know if that tree began to bear fruit and lived “happily ever after” or if it was cut down twelve months later and replaced by the landowner. The story of that tree is left open-ended, the outcome unknown, just like the story of our lives. The last chapters in the story of our lives are still unwritten, their message still to be determined, hope still alive for an ending that gives glory to the Lord.

The question then is what do you want those unwritten chapters of your life to say? And how do you go about bringing that ending to pass? It will certainly take courage, determination, and a deeper relationship with the Lord for the unwritten chapters of your life to tell a tale of a man or woman of God who overcame, who wouldn’t give up, who pressed in to accomplish all that God desired for their lives, leaving behind a legacy of integrity, of a genuine love for both God and man, and of being able to discover what really matters in life.

What a joy to know that on this Saturday in March of 2012, the story of our lives is still open-ended, still has bright hope and promise, and is still being written. Let’s make sure that the story of our lives being written is one we’ll be glad to have others read.

God Bless
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church

Even Though

Even Though

“Therefore, let him who thinks he

stands, take heed lest he fall.”

                   I Corinthians 10:12

Teaching the Book of Luke in the Philippines was an eye-opener for many reasons as many of the parables and stories that I’ve taught many times before seemed to have a new freshness. One challenging thought follows below. Consider this man:

• He took part in handing out the loaves and the fish, seeing five thousand and later four thousand miraculously fed by the power of God. When they were done, he also helped to gather the many basketfuls of fragments that were left over.

• As he was entering the city of Nain along with a crowd of people, he saw Jesus, moved with compassion, stop a funeral procession and raise a grieving widow’s only son back to life.

• He experienced the fear of being in a boat during a storm and seeing it filling with water, only to have Jesus get up, rebuke the wind and the raging waves, and calm the storm.

• He looked on as demons were cast out of the man with a “legion” of spirits, sent into a herd of swine, only to see the swine rush down an embankment and all drown. And if that wasn’t enough, the man out of whom the spirits were cast out became a new person right before him, sitting at Jesus’ feet and in his right mind.

• He was one of the twelve sent out by Jesus to preach the good news and to heal the sick, and experienced being used by God and having the power of God flow through him as he ministered in city after city.

• He heard the truth preached for a three and a half year period, sermons, parables, and stories that were so anointed that no one could speak a word after Jesus had finished sharing them.

• He looked on as Lazarus was raised from the dead, as a woman crippled for eighteen years was healed, as the blind received their sight back, as the deaf had their hearing restored, and so much more.

You would think that with all those experiences, with getting to be a part of so much that God was doing through Jesus, with seeing what he saw and hearing what he heard, that this man’s life would have been perfectly on track. And you would be wrong. This man’s name was Judas – the Judas who betrayed the Lord, in part because he never let the Lord deal with the covetousness in his heart.

With that in mind, let’s each walk humbly before the Lord, allowing Him to speak to our hearts, being open to change, sometimes radical change in the way we are serving the Lord and, most importantly, not thinking more highly of ourselves than is wise.

God Bless
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church

The Changing Face of Virtue

The Changing Face of Virtue

“Giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to

 virtue knowledge, to knowledge self control…”

                               I Peter 1:5-6

The difficulty in defining virtue is that it represents the values and principles considered admirable and ethical in a given society. The definitions found in the dictionary include the following thoughts:

Conformity of one’s life and conduct to moral and ethical principles
A good or admirable quality, property, feature or trait
A particular moral excellence or strength

The problem becomes clear when we look at examples of what was once considered virtuous. In Russia during the Communist reign, turning in family members for religious activities was considered virtuous; in some Moslem nations, honor killings of daughters who dishonor their family is seen as acceptable and admirable behavior, and Germany considered involvement in the purging of Jews and other inferior races from their society as a desirable trait.

The title, The Changing Face of Virtue, reflects the not so subtle changes that have taken place in our society in recent years. Where once honesty, loyalty, integrity and kindness topped the list of values included under virtue, we have now seen success, comfort, convenience and acceptance take their place as qualities to be desired. Sadly, those values and virtues have opened the door to society accepting abortion, to a staggering divorce rate, to an acceptance and sanctioning of lifestyles contrary to God’s Word, and far more.

And the church has not been unaffected as the virtues God commends, faithfulness, commitment, a surrendered life and sacrificial living have taken a backseat in recent years to the same virtues the world embraces, comfort, convenience and “what’s best for me.” But the good news is that virtue can be reclaimed. We don’t have to be caught up in the downward spiral of values and character seen everywhere. We can decide to take a stand for true virtue, for integrity, honesty and hard work, loyalty in relationships and faithfulness in all areas of life. And in so doing, we can have a part in not only seeing Godly virtue restored to our nations, families and churches but in seeing hope restored for our future.

God Bless,
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church