[Power, Southaven, MS, Southaven church of Christ, July 2000, Vol. 9, No. 7, p. 4.] The Christian should attend regularly to be eager to obey God’s command to assemble. Hebrews 10:25 is a command, not a request. The Hebrews writer used the word “assembling” not “assembly.” Therefore, attendance on Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night will be no problem to the faithful Christian. Rebellion toward God’s commands is a tragic sin in God’s Book. “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry” (1 Samuel 15:23). We should assemble regularly to show respect for God who gave his Son (John 3:16-17; 1 John 4:10; 2:2). To show respect for Christ who gave his life. No man had greater love than Jesus who died for his friends (John 15:13), but he is a friend only to those who obey him (John 15:14). He became the “author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Hebrews 5:9). One simply cannot be a friend of Jesus and forsake the assembling of the saints. To show respect for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gave us the New Testament which we are under as a law (Romans 8:1-2). He gave us the pattern of the worship, work, organization and purpose of the church. Therefore, to forsake the assembling of the saints is an affront to the Holy Spirit himself. To show love and concern for one’s brethren. Hebrews 10:24 says to “consider” one another in provoking to love and to good works. Therefore, it …

The old man sat in his chair with a blank piece of paper on the stand beside him. He placed it there with a special purpose. As he approached his final days in life, he wanted to make sure everyone from church that visited him would get a letter of thanks and encouragement. The old man had been a member of the Lord’s church for many years; the majority of his life was dedicated to the Lord and the Lord’s church. He had served as elder and treasurer during the hard times and good times. Many years of his life were spent in service to the church, many hours given to the needs of others. He was there to see many members born and many pass away. If something broke, he fixed it; he was a regular handy man. The same with the people’s lives that he worshiped with, if something happened or direction was needed, he was there to shepherd the way. In the last part of his life, the struggle began and he could not get out on his own. His body was slipping away. He could not make it to church or attend services. His heart was still with the Lord; his mind was still active and knowledgeable in the Lord. He loved to talk about the Bible with anyone. When his body finally failed him and he went to be with the Lord, beside his chair and on the stand remained a blank piece of paper. Then …

In a letter to the editor of The Tennessean, January 19, 1993, Michael Greene writes, “We learn that an Appeals Court has ruled it unconstitutional for Gideon International to hand out Bibles in public schools in Indianapolis. It is alright to hand out condoms to 13-year-olds. It is alright to graphically instruct junior high kids on how to have safe sex. It is alright to give free abortion counseling to 14-year-olds without parental consent — but wrong to give them a Bible in America. Now to an extent I can understand why our children need to be protected from the dangerous doctrines contained in the Bible. Have you looked at it lately? It has such “dangerous” concepts as “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and “do not covet your neighbor’s wife.” And of course, young ears should never hear such words as “do not commit adultery” or “flee fornication.” Oh, no we cannot, even under the principle of academic freedom which says that all competing ideas have a right to be heard, allow someone access to the Bible. Why they might read and believe, and live by some of those “dangerous concepts.” If that were to happen, the world as we know it would come to an end. Parents would be respected and obeyed, as would teachers. We wouldn’t need policemen in every school. Hatred and racism would die. Teenage pregnancy and the perceived need to hand out safe-sex materials would soon be gone. By all means protect us from such a …

Saul was the first king of Israel. He was commissioned by God to destroy the Amalekites. He was to slay them all — men, women, children and all their livestock. In short order, the Amalekites were defeated and Saul returned the conquering hero. Much to his surprise, God was displeased with him. It seems Saul had not followed orders. He spared Agag, king of the Amalekites, and the best of their flocks and herds. Upon returning, Saul said Samuel: “Blessed are you of the Lord! I have performed the commandment of the Lord” (1 Samuel 15:13). Samuel replied: “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?” (1 Samuel 15:14). Saul tried to defend his actions but couldn’t. Samuel continued to chastise the king: “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22). Finally, Saul was told that the kingdom would be taken from him because he had rejected the word of the Lord (1 Samuel 15:23, 26). What do we learn from this account? First, partial obedience, even if considerable, is still disobedience. Saul had carried out most of what had been commanded, but he had not fully complied. James wrote, “For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all” (James …

Yes, I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This does not mean I have met him in person. This does not mean I have felt him touch me. This does not mean he has come to me in person and spoken to me. Those who say they have had such personal experiences with Jesus may be sincere, but they are sincerely wrong. Someone may ask how anyone could have a personal relationship with Jesus without having such experiences as those stated above. My personal relationship with Jesus is not by feeling or fantasy, but by faith. What is this kind of faith? It is believing what Jesus and those whom he guided by divine inspiration have said in the New Testament. When one ignores this New Testament teaching, he cannot have a personal relationship with Jesus. He has neither the Son of God nor God the Father (2 John 9)! One should be very careful not to substitute emotional upsurges and fantasy for the Word of God! What My Personal Relationship With Jesus Includes It is very personal! I am in Christ because I have been baptized into Christ (Galatians 3:27; Romans 6:3-4). Not only am I in Christ (Colossians 1:2), Christ is in me (Colossians 1:27). This also means I am in the body of Christ which is his church (Colossians 1:18; 3:15). Believing all this makes me feel good, but my feeling good about it is not the proof of it. The proof of it is that …

Christians are often perceived by society as being intolerant. Some people who claim to be Christians are not tolerant. And some people who claim to be tolerant are worldly minded and intolerant of Christians. Since all ought to be truly tolerant, this matter of tolerance and the new tolerance needs to be discussed. Tolerance is differing with people without persecuting or doing violence to them. Intolerance is opposing a view to the point of violence. The new tolerance has come to expect that people will not disagree with any belief and that every belief is acceptable. Critics of Christianity, especially homosexual critics, criticize Christians for being intolerant, but this charge is untrue. For 300 years under pagan Rome, Christians were tolerant of paganism and many “isms.” They did not persecute the Jews, but certainly strove to understand them or to refute them or withstand them. Neither did they persecute pagans or those intolerant of Christianity. Apologetics in the New Age by David Clark and Norman Geisler says, “Pluralists are wrong when they claim that tolerance depends on pluralism. Exclusivists can be tolerant in accepting the right of others to have different beliefs. Pluralists can be intolerant in telling adherents of all religions that they are wrong when they hold exclusive beliefs. Indeed the whole notion that one needs to accept as true the other person’s belief in order to tolerate that person is a misuse of language. It makes no sense to speak of tolerating ideas with which we agree — …

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The English text is in the King James Version. The Greek and English part shows that the order of words in sentences in the Greek New Testament is generally not the same as the arrangement of words in English sentences. In this sense, any English translation of the New Testament is a paraphrase. The Greek word for sin both times in the text is “hamartian.” Because of what many New Testament texts plainly teach, we know that Jesus did not sin. It is evident that he did not become a sinner when he was offered for our sins on Calvary. What Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21 is said in another way by Peter, “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree…” (1 Peter 2:24a). “Bare” of this text is the translation of Greek “anenegken” defined as “carry up; bear up…” After Jesus had cast out devils and healed sick people, Matthew wrote, “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses” (Matthew 8:17). “Bare” of this text is from Greek “ebastasen” defined “to bear; carry; to take away, remove…” This all means that when Jesus “bare” the sicknesses of people, he did not get sick, but it means he took their sicknesses away …

The institution of marriage involves a covenant between a man, a woman and God. Man and woman, by mutual consent, enter the arrangement. But the procedure, in order to be valid, must be consistent with divine law. The Origin of Marriage According to anthropologists, there is no society wherein marriage does not exist in some format (Montague, 240). The institution is, therefore, a universal phenomenon. Since every effect must have an adequate cause, there must be some reasonable explanation for this feature of global society. Actually, there are but two logical possibilities. Marriage either is of supernatural origin or it had a naturalistic beginning. Those who subscribe to the theory of evolution allege that marriage is “a human development from animal mating relationships” (Huxley, 34). A writer in a popular encyclopedia says: Some scholars are inclined to trace the origin of marriage to pairing arrangements of animals below man. Studies reveal that a more or less permanent association between one or more males and one or more females is common among birds and higher mammals (Locke, 311). A more slippery statement will be hard to find. Is it “more or less … one or more”? The fact is, such a theory is seriously flawed. While it is true that some creatures apparently mate for life (e.g., some species of geese), the ape family (supposedly higher on the evolutionary scale than birds) is quite “promiscuous”! That does not square with the notion that marriage gradually developed as various kinds of organism were …

In virtually every one of the so-called sitcoms that one sees on television these days, there are open and frontal attacks made upon what the world calls “Christianity.” Those who believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of the only true and living God are attacked, ridiculed, and many jokes, some of them not so nice, are made at the expense of believers. Christianity is made out to be some kind of a stodgy, antiquated religion which is about to pass away. They also depict ministers as inept, sinful, hypocritical and lazy. If any other group of people, such as homosexuals, for example, were singled out and depicted in such a way, there would be a scream go up that could be heard all over the earth; the ACLU would immediately start a lawsuit against someone. But this is not the only persecution that is directed at those who call themselves “Christians” in the land in which we live. The federal government feels that it has the right to step in and investigate the doctrine of various churches — whether that has been requested by those churches or not. They feel they have the right to overturn, by making illegal, such doctrines as they feel are opposed to “civil rights.” There is a movement at this very hour to have homosexuals treated as a minority race in this country, and if that movement succeeds, you and I will not be able to tell a person who is living that life-style …

The seventeenth century poet-preacher John Dunn gave the world these widely quoted words: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; the bell tolls for thee. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, was once asked by a Greek tyrant what he was doing at the Olympic Games. The philosopher replied, Some come to try out for the prizes, some come to sell their merchandise, some come to enjoy themselves and to meet their friends. I am one of those who came just to stand on the sidelines and look on. Telling the story, many years later, Bacon observed: “But man must know that in the theatre of man’s lives and God’s world, it is reserved only for God and the angels to look on.” All of us are deeply involved in all of mankind and there is nothing that happens anywhere in the world that affects people that is not a matter of our concern. From the very beginning of time, man has been involved with his fellow man though he has not realized it. After Cain killed Abel the Lord …

We must use the knowledge of the Word of God to findthe way to resist temptation, to overcome evil and to do good. The devil is after our souls today. Maybe more so than ever before. We need every help we can have to resist the devil and overcome him, and to anchor our souls. The knowledge of the Word of God is one of the best offenses and defenses that we have to perform this task. Jesus used just such knowledge in resisting the devil (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13). He spent 40 days in the wilderness being tempted of the devil. He ate nothing in those days. When the time was finished, the devil said unto him, “If thou art the Son of God, command this stone that it become bread” (v. 3 ASV). Jesus then said unto him, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone” (v. 4), quoting Deuteronomy 8:3. The devil continued his temptation by showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and offering to give him the authority over all these if Jesus would worship him. Jesus answered, “It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Luke 4:8). Then the devil continued his temptation, telling Jesus, “[C]ast thyself down from hence: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, to guard thee: and, on their hands they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Luke 4:10-11). …

There is a difference between a secret religion and a religion in secret. Some in Jesus’ day were secret disciples for fear of the Jews (John 7:13), including (at one point) Nicodemus (John 19:38). Some today are secretive about where their affections lie, not wanting classmates, co-workers or comrades to know they are Christians. They should “come out of the closet” (Romans 1:16; Mark 8:38) and take a stand for Christ (Philippians 1:17; Jude 3). Others claim to be Christians, but only in public. They are outwardly devoted, attend worship assemblies and try to keep good reputations. But that is about as much “religion” as they can muster. Christ is not mentioned around their dinner tables or invited into their inner chambers. When private lives become public record at Judgment, they will be red-faced. Jesus gave some indication at how he will handle this when he confronted some while still on earth whose lips did not match their hearts (Matthew 15:8-9; 23:1-39). They did not leave smiling! God intends for Christians to have religion in secret, though not secret religion! He wants us to practice “closet Christianity.” CLOSET CHRISTIANS PRAY IN PRIVATE. Jesus said, “…when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6:6). “Closets” may be taken literally, of course, but the word (tameion) simply refers to, “a chamber on the ground-floor or interior of …