Hello Friends,

On this week’s delay… The Wii made me do it. Complete and total distraction. Anyhow, I’ve got our Wii online now. If any ya’ll got a Wii too, let me know and let’s hook up sometime.

So did you all notice how you reacted to circumstances over the past week? Did you observe the inner you and what it was telling you and/ or commenting to you about so and so? I hope you did. This may seem like a silly thing to do or an “I already know about that so I don’t need to do it” exercise, but understanding what it going on inside your mind is absolutely necessary to “Take stock”, as it were, of your spiritual condition.

The Bible says in 2nd Corinthians 13:5,
Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!

Why Jim???

Remember Adam (not Reynolds) and Eve in the Garden of Eden? (Review the 12/29/2008 message if you need to.) Remember they disobeyed God’s command not to eat the fruit of a certain tree. And remember I suggested they became spiritually alienated from God at that time… thanks to sin.

Well, the reason why we examine ourselves is to see if WE are alienated from God or not. You know the old saying… Won’t seek the cure if there’s not a problem. And sin is a problem…. A huge problem. But just look at how we are apathetic towards everyday sins. Thinking back to your “fruit” over the past couple of weeks… were you apathetic to your sins? I know I was for a couple of days. (And God chastised me for it too.) That apathy has a source…

Genesis 3:13 [Post fruit eating] Then the Lord God said to the woman (Eve), “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent (Satan) deceived me, and I ate.”

Aha! The Specter is revealed! Do you like the Rolling Stones? They sang a song about Satan:

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game

And the nature of his game is still what Eve described… deception. And the pattern of the fruit you bear is a tell-tale sign of whether you are deceived as Eve was or not.

Matthew 7:17-20 So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their
fruits.

Satan tricks people into thinking they’re good trees bearing good fruits. I know this from 30 some years of experience! I was deceived on the state of my faith until just a couple of years ago. Check this out:

1970s Went to occasional Sunday school class
1983 Got baptized after taking Eucharist class at All Saints’
1984 Helped as VBS aid during Summer
1985 Go to Linton Hall Catholic Military school, recite Lord’s Prayer/ Rosery
1987 Answer altar call at Stryper Concert
1989 Get “Slain by the Spirit” and “Gift of Tongues” in DR
1990s Yadda Yadda Yadda
2005 Rebaptized “The Real Way” a la full body submersion in outdoor setting
2006 Realized I was a bad tree, one day to be cut down and thrown into the fire

So you see? It can happen to the best of us, ;)! Satan is the master deceiver.

Now our dear ancestors Adam and Eve were originally told to multiply and subdue the earth… Be kinda like keepers of the earth, (Genesis 1:28). God made the earth (And it is still His), but He gave control (dominion) of the earth originally to Adam and Eve. When Satan came along and tricked them, their disobedience was also a forfeiture of their rule of God’s earth. Guess who received it then and has the rule now?

1st John 5:19 … the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.

So Satan has a hold on the system, the machine, the prevailing attitudes of the world. He’s got a big hold on religion too. His control is sooo massive and all encompassing that it can be hard to know which way is up.

I vividly recall a conversation I had with Mark Reiter (roughly 15 years ago) about the effects of the McDonald’s Happy Meal promos… sucking kids into ungodly worldviews at a young age. After all my waxing eloquent he quipped, “It’s all evil Jim, everything is evil.”

Despite Satan’s grip and trickery, God in His mercy gives us the truth revealed in His word, the Bible:

John 14:6 Jesus said to him (Thomas the disciple), “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father (God) but through Me.

How’s that for political correctness? How’s that for black and white? As I like to say, “Them’s fightin’ words!” If Jesus says that, then anything else, by default, is from Ye Olde Dragon. Is this why people say, “Ignorance is bliss”?

As people who participated in a youth group seeking a more uplifting environment and meaning, we need to actively continue to uplift our souls by first examining ourselves. Having grown older does not make this moot does it? Nay, it does not, but all the more so.

God loves us too much to leave us ignorant of our natural (inherited) spiritual condition. Let’s jump from the familiar story of Adam and Eve and Satan in the Garden of Eden and fast forward to Moses and the 10 Commandments. They’re very helpful to us… they can teach us what we may have forgotten about ourselves…

But first, any people out there want to give their take on the 10 Commandments?

Peace,
Jim