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The Word of God – Showing us that God is Truthful

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Verses for Today

Ex 20:16 You shall not testify with false testimony against your neighbor.

1 John 1:5 And this is the message which we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.

Fellowship

We have previously pointed out that the 10 commandments reveal to us who and what God is. We want to see that our God is truthful and He is even light itself.

Exodus 20:16 says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” This commandment reveals that God is truthful. To refrain from bearing false witness means that we must speak the truth and not lie….As the truthful God, God is the God of light. We are even told that He Himself is light and that with Him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). This means that with God there is no falsehood….With our God there is both faithfulness and truthfulness. Because He is light, He cannot lie. Light is the source of truth (Life Study of Exodus, p. 600).

Testifying with false testimony against your neighbor means to lie about someone. Such lies inflict harm. Satan, the enemy of God is behind all lies and his aim is to to kill, steal, and destroy (John 10:10). Lies and any form of falsehood are in the realm of darkness. Any time that we lie or any time that we hear a lie, it brings us into darkness. Our God is the real life giver. With Him there is life and peace. The peace and glory we receive from God gets robbed from us whenever there is falsehood. That is Satan’s work and we can all testify, we’ve been there.

The Lord Jesus is the truthful God who became a man. The Jews argued with Him many times and sought to catch something false from the Lord but they never could. Mark 12:13 says, “And they sent to Him some of the Pharisees and Herodians that they might catch Him in His speech.” and Luke 11:53 and 54 say, “And when He went out from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to be very hostile and to provoke Him to speak concerning many things, lying in wait for Him in order to catch something out of His mouth.”

The Lord’s words are full of light and they break through the darkness. We do well to read His word and pray over it. Here are the Lord’s words, from the gospel of John, when He was dealing with the ones who rejected Him and opposed Him.

I know that you are Abraham’s seed; but you seek to kill Me because My word has no place in you. I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; so then, you also do the things which you have heard from your father. (John 8:37-39)

You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks the lie, he speaks it out of his own possessions; for he is a liar and the father of it. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. (John 8:44-45)

Thank the Lord for His word. Thank the Lord for the 10 commandments. Because God is light, His words are full of light. The truthfulness of God is the expression of the God of light. All the 10 commandments, like 10 words, reveal to us who God is. He is light and He is truthful. With Him is no falsehood and no darkness. When we touch the truthful God in His word, we are first enlightened of our real condition and then we are freed. We are freed from sin, falsehood, and darkness. John 8:32 says, “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

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The Word of God – Life to Us and a Revelation of Who God Is

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Verses for Today

Psalm 119:16 I will take delight in Your statutes; / I will not forget Your word.

Psalm 119:140 Your word is very pure, / And Your servant loves it.

Exodus 34:28c And He wrote upon the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

Fellowship

God’s words are contained in the Bible. When we read a verse, we have to realize that it is God’s speaking. God carries everything out by speaking. His creation was by His speaking; God said, and there was. Today, God nourishes His seekers through His word. The Lord Jesus said that man shall not live on bread alone but by every word that proceeds out through the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). Even the 10 commandments can become life-giving to us if we take them as God’s words from out of His mouth.

At least thirty-seven times in Psalm 119 the psalmist refers to the law as God’s word. Instead of simply declaring that he loved God’s law, the psalmist declared that he loved God’s word. This proves that he thought of God’s law as His living word. (Life Study of Exodus, Msg 56, Section 2)

In our Christian life, we start out by receiving the many sweet provisions God has for us. This was also the experience of the children of Israel in the first part of the book of Exodus. They were saved from slavery, separated from Egypt, given water to drink and manna to eat. For us New Testament believers, God gave us His only Begotten Son to die for us and forgive us our sins. We were saved from a life of bondage in which we served sin as slaves. God separated us from the world and gave us living water to quench our thirst and living bread that we might have His eternal life. Our salvation experience matches the salvation experience of the children of Israel coming out of Egypt.  In our experience, we are learning how to come to God’s word for life. We have to turn our heart to the Lord and exercise our spirit to contact Him. We can say, “Thank you Lord Jesus for all you’ve done for me!” May all God’s children enjoy God’s full salvation.

In addition to taking care of all our problems and nourishing us, God’s word functions to reveal to us who God is, and this is most important. Let us now get into this.

Concerning the matter of law, there is an important principle: the kind of law a person makes expresses the kind of person that one is. For example, if criminals could make laws, they would legalize crime. Furthermore, a backward country would have rather barbaric laws, whereas a highly cultured society would have highly cultured laws. This principle applies also to God Himself. God is a Law-giver. In giving the law, He would never legalize crime or sin. He would not legalize theft or adultery, for He is not that kind of God. Only the god of witchcraft would legalize such things. A law is always a revelation of what kind of person has enacted that law.

The first function of the law is…to reveal God to us….I wish to emphasize the point that the primary function of the law is to reveal God to us. After God brought His people into His presence to have fellowship with Him, to serve Him, to contact Him, to worship Him, and even to feast with Him, He made Himself known to them. Prior to this time, God had not revealed to His people what kind of God He is….Only when we come to Exodus 20 do we have a revelation of what kind of God our God is (Life Study of Exodus, pp. 592-593).

We get to know our God in His word. His laws, statutes, ordinances, and all His words are not for us to take as lists of dos and don’ts. Rather, they are there that we might know God. He wants to be known. His laws are often referred to as His testimonies, meaning that they are there because God wants to be known by us. Finally, knowing who God is through His word is not for our mere acknowledgement. When the Bible says that God is love, it conveys God as love into us. By our contacting God in His word to get to know Him, who He is gets infused into us, making us the same as He is. Let us, in a pure way, read God’s word to get to know who He is. This is altogether worthwhile.

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The Word of God – Jehovah Make His Face Shine Upon You

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Verses for Today

Numbers 6:24 Jehovah bless you and keep you;

Numbers 6:25 Jehovah make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you;

Numbers 6:26 Jehovah lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.

Psalm 119:58 I entreated Your favor with my whole heart; / Be gracious to me according to Your word.

Psalm 42:5 Why are you cast down, O my soul? / And why are you disquieted within me? / Hope in God, for I will yet praise Him / For the salvation of His countenance.

Fellowship

God was hidden. No one had ever seen Him. Then one day God became a man just like you and me. The old apostle John spoke of His experience in seeing Jesus as the incarnated God. He said, “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and reality.” God visited man in the person of Jesus Christ. The incarnation was the fulfillment of the blessing in Numbers 6:25, “Jehovah make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you.” Men saw the face of Jesus and He shined upon them.

The loving seekers of God, to whom the word of God is life, seek to have the shining of the face of God.

If we are those who seek the Lord in an intimate way, we shall sense the shining of His face. According to 2 Corinthians 4:6, we can experience this shining: “Because the God who said, Out of darkness light shall shine, is the One who shined in our hearts for the illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” Praise the Lord that we can experience the shining of His face! (Life Study of Exodus, Message 56, Section 2)

When we believed in Jesus Christ, He came into us to live in us forever. Here is good news for all the believers and lovers of Jesus out there. The face of Christ is now in our hearts!  

Many versions of the Bible use the word “favor” in Psalm 119:58 but in Hebrew it is literally “face”. To entreat someone for their face means that you are asking them earnestly and are pleading with them to show you their face. When someone shows you their face, they are giving you their presence. You are no longer alone, but they are there, fully with you. This can be such a cherishing thing to us.

Furthermore, Numbers 6:25 speaks of Jehovah lifting up His countenance upon you. Now that you have His face, what is the expression on that face. Someone may send you a text; did they include an emoji to indicate their inner feeling? God’s countenance is the emoji of God. You get to know His inner feeling. That His countenance is lifted means that God is full of approval in His feeling. This is why Ephesians 4:30 reminds us, “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God.” May we be those loving seekers of God spending time with Him in His word day by day and may we be like the psalmists of old, entreating the Lord to give us His face and His countenance in our time with Him. His shining, smiling, face is our true daily blessing and salvation.

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The Word of God – Seek the Lord While He May Be Found

The-Word-of-God-Seek-the-Lord-while-He-may-be-found

Verses for Today

Psalm 119:2 Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, / Who seek Him with all their heart.

2 Timothy 2:22 But flee youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Fellowship

The kind of person we are determines how we receive God’s words that are in the Bible. For the word of God to be life to us, we need to be God’s seekers. This means that whatever we might do, in that thing, we want to gain God. Whether we read or we pray, we are not interested in anything but seeing, touching, and gaining God Himself.

The writer of Psalm 119 was such a seeker. Many Christians are not familiar with the term “seekers of God,” even though this concept is biblical. According to Psalm 119, seeking God is related to keeping the law. If you try to keep the law without having a heart to seek God, your efforts will be in vain. This was the serious shortcoming of the Judaizers at the time of Paul. Trying to keep the law without seeking God with their whole heart, they failed in their endeavor to fulfill the law’s requirements. If we want to walk according to God’s law, we must seek Him with our whole heart. We can pray, “Lord Jesus, show me what it means to seek you with my whole heart.” (Life Study of Exodus, Msg 56, Section 1)

In 2 Timothy 2:22 Paul charged Timothy to flee youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. This indicates that the Lord’s seekers must be His callers.

We call on the name of the Lord by our spirit, yet it must be out of a pure heart… Our heart must be purified, and the heart includes all these things: motive, intention, purpose, will, decision, sensation, feeling, and thought. The heart must be pure in all of its constituents. Then we can call on the Lord purely.

Second Timothy 2:22 implies that we need to call on the Lord with the Lord’s callers. Sometimes we call on the Lord just by ourselves. This exercises our spirit and we receive more of the Lord, but not as much as when we call with some others. To have a corporate calling on the Lord helps a lot. In order to exercise our spirit, we have to recover the practice of calling on the name of the Lord. We need to exercise our spirit so that we may receive the Lord more. Then we can live a godly life to manifest God. (Basic Lessons on Life, Chapter 18, published by Living Stream Ministry)

Gods seekers love God and call on His name out of a pure heart. Let us open our mouth, full of love for the Lord in our heart, and say, “Lord Jesus!”, “Oh, Lord Jesus”, “dearest Lord Jesus!”. Isaiah 55:6 says, “Seek Jehovah while He may be found; / Call upon Him while He is near.”

A song to help us seek the Lord

Seek the Lord while He may be found,

Call upon Him while He is near:

Let the wicked forsake his way,

And the unrighteous man his thoughts:

And let him return to the Lord,

Unto our God,

And He will abundantly pardon,

He will abundantly pardon you—

Return to the Lord.

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Bible Distribution Day

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We were back at the Petersen Heritage Center giving away the best gift ever – The Word of God.

  • We setup the table on Wednesday December 8, 4:30-6:30 PM.
  • Students were invited to simply take one of these New Testament study Bibles.
  • There were no strings attached, we didn’t require people to pay, to give us there name, or any such thing. 
  • We gave out the Recovery Version. It has footnotes that open up the spiritual meaning of the word. You can still get one free from Bibles for America.

2021-12-08 -Giving-Away-Free-Bibles02While we sat there, we shared portions of the word with one another. When one student came by and was interested in knowing what made this Bible different, we were able to show them a verse we were enjoying. We opened up to Matthew 13:8, where the Lord Jesus tells a parable about a sower who went out to sow. The seeds he sowed fell in different places. The verse says:

But others fell on the good earth and yielded fruit, one a hundredfold, and one sixtyfold, and one thirtyfold.

The other verses in chapter 13 as well as the footnotes in the Recovery Version helped us to understand what the good earth really is. Here’s one of the footnotes for verse 8.

The good earth signifies the good heart that is not hardened by worldly traffic, that is without hidden sins, and that is without the anxiety of the age and the deceitfulness of riches. Such a heart gives every inch of its ground to receive the word that the word may grow, bear fruit, and produce even a hundredfold (v. 23). – New Testament Recovery Version

The student smiled and thanked us for giving her the word of God. Just that alone was such a sweet encouragement to us. Thank the Lord for these sweet opportunities.

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An Exceedingly Good Land – How to Possess the Land

In this Bible study we reviewed the history of the children of Israel, as they left Egypt and the things they experienced on their way to the Good Land. The Lord really led us to focus on two matters: Confessing our Sins, and Eating Christ – through His Word.

Although we are on a college campus, reading many books and articles and studying topics thoroughly, our eating of Christ in His Word is something special. We must come to His Word, linger there, contact the living Person there, and learn to exercise our spirit, our deepest part, to receive Him, digest Him, and assimilate Him.

Why did God bring us to this university? To meet other Christians and mutually help one another to… POSSESS THE LAND!

Download this short Bible Study: An Exceedingly Good Land 09

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The Tree of Life – Christ Opening the Way

Christ Opening the Way

Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 6pm.

And Jehovah God said, Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever—Then Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to work the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out, and at the east of the garden of Eden He placed the cherubim and a flaming sword which turned in every direction to guard the way to the tree of life. (Gen. 3:22-24)

He then says, “And their sins and their lawlessnesses I shall by no means remember anymore.” Now where forgiveness of these is, there is no longer an offering for sin. Having therefore, brothers, boldness for entering the Holy of Holies in the blood of Jesus, Which entrance He initiated for us as a new and living way through the veil, that is, His flesh, (Heb. 10:17-20)

Genesis 3 describes how Adam and Eve were driven out from the Garden of Eden. What happened to the way to the tree of life?

In Hebrews 10 we can see that we have the way to enter into the Holy of Holies. Compare the way that was lost in Genesis in the Old Testament to the New Testament way that was regained and is presented in Hebrews.

For the word of God is living and operative and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, and able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Having therefore a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast the confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all respects like us, yet without sin. Let us therefore come forward with boldness to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace for timely help. (Heb. 4:12, 14-16)

Tell us something about this great High Priest presented in Hebrews.
We’ve covered many aspects of Jesus Christ as the tree of life but how can we enjoy Him and even eat Him as the tree of life?

Further reading: The Tree of Life, chapter 9, published by Living Stream Ministry