Posts Tagged ‘ daniel m klem ’
But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
MATTHEW 6:6, NASB
We must spend time alone with God. Prayer is not a last resort, it is our direct line to our Creator and Lord.
I did not do the silly high five at the end of this video! Am I a horrible person? (Theologically speaking, technically yes … apart from Christ …)
But it is addressing that tantalizing question: What is faith?
Many people do not really understand faith.
In a recent book, “A Manual for Creating Atheists”, philosopher Peter Boghossian defined faith as belief without evidence, pretending to know things you don’t really know.
But is this right?
In a word: no.
How does the Bible explain faith?
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1, ESV
Another way of explaining faith is putting your beliefs into action. If you believe something to be true, prove it! Prove you are faithful to those beliefs by acting on them.
The most used example of what faith is is a chair. You can say you believe a chair will hold you up, but faith is proving it by sitting on the chair. Typically, you are acting on evidence. (In this case, you have been told chairs are for sitting on, and you may have seen other people sit in chairs.)
As Christians, we do not have a blind faith. The Bible is our evidence for God and Jesus.
The Bible has several prophecies about the coming Messiah who would take away our sins, and Jesus claimed He was the fulfillment of those prophecies. He made many claims to His deity, as well, and He said that He would prove it all by dying and rising again.
The Apostles and early disciples did not just write about things they heard. They claimed to have heard these things and seen the crucified and risen Jesus with their own eyes.
And the Bible is the most reliable ancient set of documents we have from antiquity, by far. Few experts contest this. (Maybe the actual events, but not that at least the New Testament is reliably from people from the First Century.)
Everyone.
It is not only Christians and the overtly religious. My evidence for this?
How about evolutionary theory: How is it claimed life began? Several chemicals somehow combined in the right amounts at the right time to create the building blocks for RNA and DNA, creating the first living cells.
How do we know it happened this way?
We don’t. No one was there to see it, and no one as recreated it in the lab to test this hypothesis. People simply believe it is true.
This is more like blind faith than Christianity!
As said before, everyone lives by some form of faith in someone or something throughout their days and lives. Faith is putting beliefs into action.
What do you think? Am I way too far off the mark? (I think most others are.)
How about we talk about, either in the comments (on this blog post or on the YouTube channel) or through the e-mail: Together@asimplemanofgod.com, or even at the Facebook page: a simple man of God.
[Love] does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;
1 CORINTHIANS 13:6, NASB
We can not be so friendly with the world as to accept everything they do, nor do we celebrate when anyone suffers, but we we share the truth of Christ and rejoice all the more when a lost soul receives it.
We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ
2 CORINTHIANS 10:5, NASB
We not only let God change our thinking, we challenge what this world says about Him.
He is God. He is on our side. The world’s seemingly “good” arguments are nonsense compared to His Truth.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord , my rock and my Redeemer.
PSALM 19:14, NASB
Not only what we say matters, but what we think. We must let God change our minds – our way of thinking – if we want to be pleasing to Him.
Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
EZEKIEL 36:26, NASB
When we are born again as Christians, God renews our hearts and fills us with His Holy Spirit. And we will know this is true by our newfound devotion for God and His Word, love for the Church, and urgent compassion for the lost.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.’
MATTHEW 6:11, NASB
All we have and receive comes from God.
Ask Him.
Trust Him.
He is our Provider.
For this reason You are great, O Lord God ; for there is none like You, and there is no God besides You, according to all that we have heard with our ears.
2 Samuel 7:22, NASB
There is only one God, who reveals the end from the beginning and made a way for sinful humanity to draw near.
How great is our God! Let us tell the world!
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
Psalms 23:4, NASB
We will face problems in this life. Sometimes they are inflicted on us by others, and sometimes they are a result of our sinful choices. In all, God is in control and uses them to discipline and lead us to His final, eternal comfort.
Yep. I missed last week. We had family in town, and I never had a long enough, quiet enough stretch of time by myself to record a video. Here is a new one, though! Here is the new Give Me 5:
Out of the Reformation of the 1500’s came what we call “The Five Solas or Solae”, but what do they mean?
The Reformation started as a call to return to a simple faith not dogged down by man-made or superfluous rules and dogmas. (This is not the time for a debate about Catholic versus Protestant and denominational separation.)
It does lead to our first sola: Sola Scriptura – Scripture alone. Basically, this means that all of our traditions and understanding about God, Jesus, and humanity should be based on what the Bible says. There is value in traditions, the various councils, and books/teachings, but they must conform with what Scripture – as a whole – teaches.
This includes the matter of salvation, covered in the next solar: Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Solus Christus, Soli Deo Gloria – By grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.
This was summarized by Paul in Ephesians chapter two, when he said,
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
(vv. 4-9, ESV)
We still need to confess our sins – primarily to God, but also to each other (James 5:16).
We still do works – but as an act of obedience and love for the One who saves us (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).
But it is only by grace through faith in the work Christ to the the glory of the Father as revealed in Scripture that we are saved.
Now, this is only a brief overview. We can continue to discuss this in the comments or through e-mail at Together@asimplemanofgod.com, or even on our Facebook page, a simple man of God. I am sure more videos and articles will be made discussing these.
a simple man of God 