Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; (2Corinthians 13;5a)

It is important to know whether you are a true Christian. So how do you know?

I will start by explaining how I know I am a Christian. Then I will try to expound on what the scriptures seem to say.

In my twenties, I went through a period of feeling empty about life. Nothing seemed to satisfy. This led me to wondering about my spiritual condition. I didn’t know what it meant to be saved or lost, I just felt empty.

Circumstances led me to a Christian guy in my college class. This classmate spoke about how he had begun a relationship with Christ that had changed his life. This got me interested and later when my classmate invited me to a small group bible study, I accepted and began a weekly meeting with him and one other guy.  We studied the New Testament teachings about sin, salvation and Christ together.

After several weeks, I attended a weekend Christian conference of college age people and while there, realized that I was not really in the mental state that these people were in. They spoke of a faith that I didn’t have, an excitement about God. While alone between meetings, I grappled with the frustration of my situation, and I remember praying, “God help me to believe.” A peace came upon me then with the realization that I had done all that I could do and it would be up to God to do the rest. It gradually came to me that I had the faith that I had wanted to have. 

Over a few days, I became aware that I was a different person inside and that my past life was behind me and I was in a new life. This was a mixture of feeling and inner knowledge of God’s presence. Study of the bible and prayer became the most important activity of my life for quite some time. As I studied the bible, it became alive to me and I seemed to understand the spiritual meaning of passages that had been a blank to me in the past.

As I think back on my experience, my assurance of a new spiritual life was based on an inner assurance that came from the Holy Spirit. I found myself praying for things of importance, reading the bible, enjoying comradeship with other Christians, anticipation of Church attendance. I wanted to conform my behavior to the teachings of Christ. Obedience to the Lord seemed paramount. Old ambitions and desires faded away. There are many scriptures that support these inner manifestations that I was experiencing.

So, how do I know I am saved?

1. The Holy Spirit witnesses to my spirit that I am an adopted son of God (Romans 8;16)
2. I had and have now a new outlook on life (2Cor 5:17)
3. My comprehension of many scriptures is clear (John 16;13)
4. My overall direction is to follow the Lord in all things (John 14;21)
5. I feel forgiven and am assured that I will be in heaven with Christ (Rom 6;23)

If you are not sure that you are a true Christian or you are not sure you will be in Heaven, do not push this thought aside. Your heavenly Father wants you to be saved and will guide you into a full assurance of your eternal destiny if you will be honest about it and seek the Lord. Here is a simple way to gain assurance of your own salvation.

There was a Kentucky politician in my youth who served as Vice President under Harry Truman. He was given the name, Veep instead of the more cumbersome Mr. Vice President.

Alben W. Barkley served in many offices over the years and one day in the early 50’s while visiting with my grand parents in Lebanon, Ky he passed through town making a political speech.

Barkley was regarded as a completely honest politician but had his differences with Republicans and other Democrats as well. He ran against Adlai Stevenson and A.B. “Happy” Chandler for governor. Back in those days, politicians vied against each other just as they do today but without the display of personal rancor that seems to prevail now.

In April 1956, Barkley was at a political meeting seated in the rear with freshmen congressmen and when his turn to speak arrived, he noted, in referring to Psalm 84:10, “I’m glad to sit on the back row for I had rather be a servant in the house of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty.” Those were his last words spoken publicly as he collapsed on stage and died of a heart attack, aged 78. 

He was buried in Paducah, Kentucky, a city I visited several times with my father on government business trips and on my own business trips years later.

Barkley was a lay preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church.

God is of all. He is the God of all creation and all, period. No one or no thing can escape that. Whether you believe in evolution, creation, intelligent design, big bang, nothing or whatever, God is God of all. He resides in eternity and is without time or space, beginning or end.This can be argued, debated, denied, but is true.

The big question is whether God is your father?

He is not your father unless you have been born again into His family. This born again factor is one of adoption. God tells us we can be adopted into His family and will live forever there. There is only one way we can be born again and that is through Jesus Christ. If you deny Jesus Christ, ignore Jesus Christ, rebel against Jesus Christ, despise Jesus Christ, you will not be born again and you will not be a child of God. 

A child of God sees Him as a Father. All the wonderful attributes of a loving Father are yours. You have no need for anxiety, no need for fear, no needs unmet as they are all supplied by your loving Father.

John Calvin, an eminent Protestant theologian, taught that particular individuals were elected and predestined by God to be saved and all others were predestined to be lost. Essentially, this meant that their wills were constrained by a work of God. It also meant that nothing which the individuals did could reverse this election. 

This teaching is a basic of the Presbyterian Church today.

It is plain that there is an election as it is taught in Ephesians and in Romans as well as elsewhere. But it is also clear that Christians can forsake their state of grace by protracted acts of the will in which they apostatize the faith. This is taught in numerous places, particularly in Hebrews 6. How are these teachings to be reconciled? 

My belief is that indeed there is an election and Christians are predestined to be saved but my belief is that this election is a corporate election; not an individual election. In other words, God has elected that all who willingly trust Christ and continue in the faith are elected. There is an election from before the foundation of the world that all who trust Christ will be saved. It is much like a train. Election is a train conveying men to eternal life. All who remain on the election train will reach the destination of Heaven. All who decide to forsake their destination may leave the train at their peril. No force on earth or hell can force anyone off the train but anyone on the train may decide of their own accord to leave.

This is the only way the clear teachings against apostasy can be understood and have any meaning. Otherwise, the warnings against falling away have no meaning. There are those who would say that the warnings are the means of insuring that the elect remain on the train and that anyone who ignores the warnings was never on the train to begin with. This is an attractive idea but is simply contrary the clear teachings of the warnings themselves. 

Should we appease God?

As we struggle with our relationship with the Almighty, the tendency is strong to seek ways to win His favor. Appeasement seems a natural thing. We try to do things that hopefully, will influence Him to come to our service.

Appeasement conveys the idea of bribery, or bargaining to say the least. We visualize a weak person seeking to placate a much stronger one by various devices.

If our God was a being who was not so very intelligent, he might be persuaded about some of the deals we offer him, such as obedience for some miracle or special work. To be so persuaded, he would have to have some need that we could satisfy.

A God like this would not be seeing us as children but as merchants he could bargain with for something.

Such a God would have to be limited in his own ability to be persuaded that he could be helped by us. Finally, he would have to have a weak sense of justice to subvert it to his personal gain.

All these things speak not of an all powerful, all knowing, all just God. They do not suggest the God revealed in the Scriptures and in nature itself nor in our inner sense of who God really is.

Appeasement is not founded on the real relationship that we have been granted by the Lord. The Lord has granted to us something far better. He has conferred upon us sonship. By virtue of what Christ won for us on the Cross, our sins are forgiven. The sin is what created the gap in the first place. If sin had not entered the picture, our relationship would always have been perfect. There would have been no need for appeasement as God would no longer have been seen as distant and forbidding, demanding and stern.

The true approach to God is not appeasement. There is no bargaining with God. We have nothing to offer Him. We are empty handed to start with and in any case, God needs nothing from us. In fact, He is offended by the idea of appeasement. He looks with a smile knowing we are helpless and incapable of doing anything to help Him. He is not offended by us as He understands our broken nature and tendency to mis-understand His great love for us.

If we could only see Him as a father who knows much more than we, who is much more powerful than we can even conceive, it would help us to understand better what our attitude and approach should be.

Most of us have had fathers who had less than saintly attitudes, less than Solomon’s wisdom, less than true generosity. So it is a bit unlikely that we will be able to achieve the attitude and approach by replicating that which we had with our earthly father. Instead, we must keep our eye on the holy Scripture and depend on the Holy Spirit for the right approach to the Lord.

Our God is a warm, caring, knowing Father who wants only our good. He is able to bring about our good and is not only able but is willing. 

Our prayer to Him should be first preceded by a re-cap of who He is, How great He is, How merciful and loving He is. We should remind ourselves that He really does care. He is not only able but willing to do for us what we cannot do ourselves.

We can know God only indirectly by our human senses. His creation appeals to our sight, our hearing, our senses and our intelligence. 

We can only know God by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit moves upon our consciousness and our conscience as to the reality and presence of God. The word of God revealed to us are only words of no effect except by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God quickens our spirit and makes the word of God a living thing in us. Apart from the Holy Spirit, we can have no true consciousness of God.

He is a grumpy old guy with a ledger keeping track of our every action, good and bad.

He is a sleepy old guy who has to be shaken awake when we need him.

He has an extremely short memory and we have to keep asking him for the same thing over and over.

He has no idea of how to solve problems so when we pray, we have to give him an action plan for our problems.

But he never forgets our faults so we have to keep apologizing over and over for the same thing.

Begging is necessary to convince him of our needs.

He has no idea how to run a world so bad things are happening everywhere.

He constantly invents tragedies, calamities and troubles and irritations just to see how we react.

Several times in the New Testament are mentioned the brethren of Jesus. The use of the term “brethren” while frequent among Christians today when referring to “brother” Christians is rather used in the New Testament to refer to actual relatives of Jesus. Were they really His brothers?

Actually, there are four brothers and several sisters mentioned, raising the question, “Were they the children of Mary by Joseph?” Some theologians think so and that would be the simplest answer and would make them half siblings of Jesus. That is, they were children of Joseph and Mary after Jesus. 

An early view is that they were cousins of Jesus, that is, they were children of Mary’s sister and of Clopas. This view also holds that three of the brothers were among the 12 apostles.

My own view and that called the Epiphanian view is that they were children of Joseph by a previous marriage and that Mary was truly a virgin all her life. The reasons for this view are as follows:

1. It is the oldest viewpoint, being current in Palestine in the 2^nd century.
2. If Mary had a large family of her own, the tradition of her perpetual virginity could never have gotten traction which it did and still has, especially in the Catholic Church.
3. Jesus on the cross would not have committed his mother’s care to John if she had four living sons.

The Epiphanian view still is held in the Eastern Orthodox church.

A fair question is raised by the absence of any of them in the visit by Jesus at age 12 to the Temple in Jerusalem. But being older, they might have stayed at home or attended the feast by themselves.

His brethren were not believers during Jesus’ lifetime on earth but it does appear from Acts 1;14 and ICor 15;7 that they were converted after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

In our early parentage a friend gifted us with some guidelines for child discipline*. We were struck with the wisdom in them and adopted the rules for our own children’s upbringing. Many years later we found that every one of our children love us and respect us despite the practice we had of faithful application of the rod when disciplining our children when they were young. Here are the highlights of how it worked.

First, immediate obedience was expected of our children; we did not tell them three times to do something. On the first command, if they did not obey, we used a rod to correct their behavior. As a result of this, several things happened. 

• We never got angry because we applied the rod before our anger developed. The rod was  a piece of yardstick about 18 inches long; enough to get some leverage but there was no way you could actually injure a child on their posterior.
• The children learned quickly that obedience was required and in its absence they must expect discipline
• We never threatened; we just acted when disobedience was manifested
• Tantrums were absolutely intolerable; the child learned that and they never tried again.
• Discipline was the concept, not punishment.
• We could hug and love the child after discipline because there was no anger involved.
• Use of the rod was much more effective than just the hand as it was felt by the child with much less effort on our part. Using the hand is too emotional; the rod is clinical.
• One swat was usually all that was necessary
• By early grade school, obedience was the rule of their behavior and the rod was no longer needed.

The children knew the bounds of behavior and lived by them.

Were the children moody, resentful or sullen as result of this approach? Absolutely not. Because discipline was not an emotional process but a merely a training approach.

It is a grave mistake to think that physical discipline is abusive or harmful to the child. Quite the opposite is true. Without discipline, a child is rudderless and doesn’t know what the bounds of behavior are. The child sees the parent’s anger and sudden impulsive behavior and doesn’t understand. Every incident is emotional and stressful. The child learns that he can get by in public because the parent will not apply any correction. Just a multitude of wrong. 

Physical discipline applied unfailingly produced a moment of pain but no anger and no resentment as the kid knew he/she deserves it. No emotion, just discipline. 

It worked.

• Why Daddy Likes to Come Home.

After more than 50 years of marriage and a lot of study of the scripture, here are some thoughts on love in marriage.

First, no one marries another for what he/she can do for the other… we all marry for what it can do for us. Selfish, isn’t it? Well, think about it. Isn’t that how it is?

But second, the key to the marriage becoming a wonderful thing is true love. And true love is looking after the well being, the good, the happiness of the other party. When only one of the parties adopts this approach, the marriage is unfortunately short lived or maybe just a survival. But when both parties adopt this approach, then marriage becomes a beautiful thing worth our lives and a great joy.

You see, love is not a feeling. Love is an act of the will. Now, I understand that there are great feelings in a romance leading to marriage. But true love is something that says, “I am going to give myself for another. And truth be known, until we make a commitment to our spouse’s well being first over our own, we aren’t really practicing love.

Think about this and if you haven’t already discovered this ageless truth, then make the commitment that you are going to truly love your partner. Commit that you are going to do things, say things and think things for the betterment of your partner. Tell your partner that you are doing this if you want to. And then just trust the Lord to make that seed of true love produce real fruit. Your joy will come in this true love and hopefully, it will be reciprocated by your partner if it hasn’t already been reciprocated.

Third, being a true Christian makes this far more possible as we already have learned that we are loved by our Heavenly Father. (See John 3:16) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”