Confirmed Tickets
Sometime when you’re in an airport, observe the difference between passengers who hold confirmed tickets and those who are on standby. The ones with confirmed tickets read newspapers, chat with their friends or sleep. The ones on standby hang around the ticket counter, pace and smoke, smoke and pace.
The difference is caused by the confidence factor. If you knew that in fifteen minutes you would have to stand in judgment before the Holy God and learn your eternal destiny, what would your reaction be? Would you smoke and pace? Would you say to yourself, “I don’t know what God’s going to say--will it be ‘Welcome home, child,’ or will it be ‘Depart from me; I never knew you’'
Basis of Assurance
Rests on the Word of God (John 1:12), the witness of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:16), keeping God’s Word (I John 2:5), walking like Christ (I John 2:6), not loving the world (I John 2:15), purification (I John 3:3), love for the brethren (I John 3:14), true love (I John 3:18-19), answered prayer (I John 3:22), overcoming the world (I John 5:4).
Angel of Light
An elderly man said to H.A. Ironside, “I will not go on unless I know I’m saved, or else know it’s hopeless to seek to be sure of it. I want a definite witness, something I can’t be mistaken about!”
Ironside replied, “Suppose you had a vision of an angel who told you your sins were forgiven. Would that be enough to rest on?”
“Yes, I think it would. An angel should be right.”
Ironside continued, “But suppose on your deathbed Satan came and said, ‘I was that angel, transformed to deceive you.’ What would you say?”
The man was speechless. Ironside then told him that God has given us something more dependable than the voice of an angel. He has given His Son, who died for our sins, and He has testified in His own Word that if we trust Him all our sins are gone. Ironside read I John 5:13, “You may know that you have eternal life.” Then he said, “Is that not enough to rest on? It is a letter from heaven expressly to you.” God’s Spirit used that to bring assurance to the man’s heart.
Three Groups
Regarding salvation and assurance, there are three groups of people:
1. those who are secure but not sure;
2. those who are “sure” but not secure; and
3. those who are secure and sure.
Category one are conscientious believers in Christ who are saved but lack assurance. In category two are professing Christians who say, “Even though I’m living in sin, I’ll make it. After all, ‘once saved, always saved!’“ The third group are born-again believers who enjoy a warm, secure relationship with Christ each day. The objective basis of our salvation is the finished work of God’s Son on the cross. The subjective basis for our assurance is our believing the truth about Christ (I John 2:2,4; 2:15; 5:1), loving the brethren (I John 3:14, 18, 19, 4:7-8), and obeying Christ’s commandments (I John 2:3-5).
New Age
About half of the Americans who are familiar with the New Age movement don’t take its teachings seriously, and a third of them say New Age thought runs counter to Judeo-Christian teaching, says a new poll by the Princeton Religious Research Center.
The poll also shows that the general population’s awareness of the New Age is low, but the number of Americans who adhere to New Age practices is alarmingly high, even among professing Christians. “Many who consider themselves good Christians nonetheless have engaged in practices that seemingly are counter to the teaching of their church,” the pollsters said.
Roughly half of all Americans say they believe in extrasensory perception. Thirty percent of Roman Catholics and 22 percent of Protestants say they believe in clairvoyance, while 48 percent of Roman Catholics and 44 percent of Protestants say they believe in psychic healing, the poll shows. The poll indicates that 25 percent of both groups believe the movement of the stars may help govern the affairs of men and women.
Quotes
- Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God. - Heywood Broun, Gaily the Troubadour, Arthur Guiterman, 1936
- God is not discoverable or demonstrable by purely scientific means, unfortunately for the scientifically minded. But that really proves nothing. It simply means that the wrong instruments are being used for the job. - J.B. Phillips in For This Day
Brezhnev’s Widow
As Vice President, George Bush represented the U.S. at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed: She reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest. There in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life, and that that life was best represented by Jesus who died on the cross, and that the same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband.
Stalin's Daughter
Some years ago, when the news broke out that Joseph Stalin's daughter had defected from Communism and Russia, many people were startled. Her statement given to reporters who met her plane in New York, told why she defected:
"I found it impossible to exist without God in one's heart. I came to that conclusion myself, without anybody's help or preaching. That was a great change because since that moment the main dogmas of Communism lost their significance for me. I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia.'
That woman's struggle was a terrible one. To leave Russia, she had to leave two children in Moscow and realize that it would be, as she said, "Impossible to go back.'
Pascal said there is within every person a "God-shaped vacuum.? He's right. Historians Will and Ariel Durant observed in their summery volume, The Lessons of History, that There never has been a significant example of morality apart from belief in God.?
At Life’s End
Near the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre told Pierre Victor: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.
Protested fellow philosopher and long-time companion Simone de Beauvoir: “How should one explain the senile act of a turncoat?”
Madman
Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lamp in the bright morning and went to the marketplace crying ceaselessly, “I seek God! I seek God!” There were many among those standing there who didn’t believe in God so he made them laugh.
“Is God lost?” one of them said.
“Has he gone astray like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Has he gone on board ship and emigrated?” So they laughed and shouted to one another.
The man sprang into their midst and looked daggers at them. “Where is God?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I We are all his killers! But how have we done this? How could we swallow up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What will we do as the earth is set loose from its sun?” - Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889
Nietzsche’s point was not that God does not exist, but that God has become irrelevant. Men and women may assert that God exists or that He does not, but it makes little difference either way. God is dead not because He doesn’t exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn’t.