The Word for today
“[Christ, v. 15] existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
18 Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead
So he is first in everything.
19 For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross” (Colossians 1:17-20).
♦♦♦♦♦♦
The Billy and Albert Story
When Billy Graham was 92 years old, he was struggling with Parkinson’s disease. In January, a month before his 93rd birthday, leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina, invited their favorite son to a luncheon in his honor.
Billy initially hesitated to accept the invitation because of his struggles with Parkinson’s disease. But the Charlotte leaders said, “We don’t expect a major address. Just come and let us honor you.” So he agreed.
After wonderful things were said about him, Billy stepped to the podium, looked at the crowd and said: “I’m reminded today of Albert Einstein, the great physicist who this month has been honored by Time Magazine as the Man of the Century. Einstein was once traveling from Princeton on a train, when the conductor came down the aisle, punching the tickets of every passenger. When he came to Einstein, Einstein reached in his vest pocket. He couldn’t find his ticket, so he reached in his trouser pockets.
It wasn’t there. He looked in his briefcase but couldn’t find it. Then he looked in the seat beside him. He still couldn’t find it.
The conductor said, “Dr. Einstein, I know who you are. We all know who you are. I’m sure you bought a ticket. Don’t worry about it.” Einstein nodded appreciatively. The conductor continued down the aisle punching tickets. As he was ready to move to the next car, he turned around and saw the great physicist down on his hands and knees looking under his seat for his ticket.
The conductor rushed back and said, “Dr. Einstein, don’t worry, I know who you are; no problem. You don’t need a ticket. I’m sure you bought one.”
Einstein looked at him and said, “Young man I too know who I am. What I don’t know is where I’m going.”
Having said that Billy Graham continued, “See the suit I’m wearing? My children and my grandchildren are telling me I’ve gotten a little slovenly in 
my old age. I used to be a bit more fastidious. So I went out and bought a new suit for this luncheon and one more occasion. You know what that occasion is? This is the suit in which I’ll be buried. But when you hear I’m dead, I don’t want you to immediately remember the suit I’m wearing. I want you to remember this: I not only know who I am I also know where I’m going. Life without God is like an unsharpened pencil—it has no point.”
Whether you personally concur with either of their expressions, it’s a good story. [Contributed by John Smelser]
A prayer for the reader: May each of us live our lives so that when our ticket is punched we don’t have to worry about where we are going.
♦♦♦♦♦♦
The “Other Sheep” Doctrine
To whom was Jesus referring when He spoke of His “other sheep”?
In John 10:15,16 Jesus said: “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”
These verses are still being used by some to teach a doctrine that the Christian faith is not the only path to God during this age and that pagan unbelievers may also be on a different path to salvation.
Jesus was speaking prophetically to make His main point that the covenants which formed the foundation of the Jewish faith would not be limited to 
Jews but would also be open to “all men everywhere” (Acts 17:30), i.e., the Gentiles who would become a part of the body of Christ (Acts 10:9-28). He would embrace them in due time but He spoke of them as though they were (Romans 4:17). The Lord was also speaking prophetically in a similar fashion when He said to Paul, “I have much people in this city [Corinth]” (Acts 18:10) when the work in Corinth among the Gentiles was only just beginning to get its legs.
There are two groups that God presently continues to deal with and work through—the Hebrew nation and Christians. A Jewish believing remnant will surface after the Rapture and play an important role in the Tribulation after the true Christians have been removed from the earth. We are not supersecessionists who posit that the church has replaced Israel in God’s plan.
Bottom line: John 10:16,17 in no way suggests that those in other faiths and/or serve other gods today have the promise of eternal life.
MacLaren’s additional exposition:
During His earthly life our Lord, as we know, confined His own personal ministry for the most part to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Not exclusively so, for He made at least one journey into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, teaching and healing; a Syro-Phoenician woman held His feet, and received her request; and one of His miracles, of feeding the multitude, was wrought for hungry Gentiles. But while His work was in Israel, it was for mankind; and while ‘this fold,’ generally speaking, circumscribed His toils, it did not confine His love nor His thoughts. More than once world-wide declarations and promises broke from His lips, even before the final universal commission, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature.’ ‘I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.’ ‘I am the Light of the world.’ These and other similar sayings give us His lofty consciousness that He has received ‘the heathen for His inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession.’”
♦♦♦♦♦♦
Tired of keeping records on computer?
Here’s an alternative idea from fourth century B.C. Idumea, an area south of Judea and the Dead Sea.
Today’s businesses increasingly relying on sophisticated computer software to document transactions and track fiscal performance. But in fourth-century B.C. Idumea, about 40 miles southwest of Jerusalem, business records were kept by writing in black ink on ostraca (broken pieces of pottery).
As archaeologist Ada Yardeni explains, “These inscribed ostraca provide us with a window into the agricultural, economic and social life in the Hebron hills.”
While the Aramaic ostraca mainly record the delivery of wheat, barley and straw, they also document the delivery of everything from olive oil to workers and even to mice. Yes, ladies, there was an order on the “books” for 30 mice! (Check out that next pot of Idumean gumbo before diving in!) Found on the ostraca were 600 personal names—one hundred were Edomite and a large group were Arabic. In the fourth century, the population of the Hebron hills was indeed diverse, with many engaged in agricultural practices.
Next time your bookkeeper or secretary complains about the work load, especially the digital filing system, suggest that you go back to the ostraca system and check the response.
Source: Bible History Daily 9/8
♦♦♦♦♦♦
Intelligence expressed
“Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected. And if these, or either of them, are regulated by no certain laws, and are subject to no certain principles, and are held by no certain tenure, and are redressed, when 
violated, by no certain remedies, society fails of all its value; and men may as well return to a state of savage and barbarous independence.” — Joseph Story (1833)
Intelligence depressed
“The political left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy.” – Thomas Sowell
Intelligence confessed
“AI is kind of a fancy thing. First of all, it’s two letters. It means Artificial Intelligence.” – Kamala Harris
♦♦♦♦♦♦
Ever wonder…?
…if Ben and Jerry, the Ice Cream Boys, are going to transfer their corporation to indigenous people from whom it was reportedly stolen? Or if they are the only ones still drinking Bud Light? [Perhaps the guys at Anheuser Busch are gobbling up B/J’s ice cream to help that company curb their economic free fall.] The chief of the Native American tribes in the area of Ben and Jerry’s HQ said he is still waiting for the corporation to move out and turn over their land and facilities to the tribe. They have heard nothing.
…what would have happened when God and the Bible were removed from public schools if all the children had followed?
…why or how we elected a president who just last week learned to count past six?
…where the Hardy Boys are when you need them to find the cocaine user in the White House?
…if your Beagle pup could have sniffed out the coke user in the White House within 15 minutes?
…why Dems are confused by parades where everyone wears clothes and don’t swing strange toys around?
…if America can handle this much common sense: “If you are able-bodied, you work. If you take out a loan, you pay it back. If you commit a violent crime, you go to jail. If you’re a man, you should play sports against men.” – Senator Tim Scott
…if the aliens some claim are among us (crashed crafts, biologic remains, all unseen by the public so far), what kind of evangelistic effort should be planned for their conversion to the Christian faith, or will they, through AI, seek to convert us to the “Kryptonic faith”?
♦♦♦♦♦♦
Speaking of personal pronouns: Is the Holy Spirit an “It” or a “He”?
I recently ran across an interesting take on anti-Trinitarianism and the KJV Bible. In Doug Kutilek’s monthly newsletter he pointed out that Dr. Emery Bancroft (1877-1944) in his book Christian Theology suggested the possibility the Socianism, a strongly anti-Trinitarian movement founded by Italians Laelius Socinus and his nephew Faustus Socinus during the Reformation, may have played a role in the text of the KJV. Laelius was definitely a reformer, yet his views seldom crystalized into solid doctrines that aligned totally with the major reformers. His nephew Faustus, however, constructed an anti-Trinitarian doctrine that came to be called “Unitarians,” or merely Socinians. They believed in one God, Jesus was not of divine origin, and that the Holy Spirit was more of an “influencer” or an expression of 
power of the one God. Socinianism became rooted in Poland among the Polish Brethren Movement and established a university near Kraków.
The movement was later the victim of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and Polish believers were forced into exile in other European countries, including England. There the Socinians influenced John Biddle, later called the father of English Unitarianism. He vehemently attacked the doctrine of the Trinity, elevating the Father and considering the other two as fulfilling the role of subordinates. He held that Christ was fully human, divine only by office and not by nature. The Holy Spirit is not a co-equal divine person with the Father. Biddle was belittled, imprisoned, fined, but through it all influenced many Englishmen who agreed, some of whom came to America aboard the earliest ships carrying Pilgrims and settlers.
When the KJV text was determined by the translators, among them may have been at least one whose mind was bent somewhat in the Unitarian direction. Bancroft seems convinced that Unitarian or Socinian influence was in play in perhaps four renderings. He says, “This circle of people had a well-defined doctrine to teach. The great mass of Christians refused to accept the doctrine, but nevertheless passed unconsciously under its chilling influence, and almost the whole church came to think of the Spirit of God as an influence, if not to speak of Him as such. In the Authorized Version, the personal pronoun which refers to the Holy Spirit is translated by the neuter ‘it’ [John 1:32; Romans 8:16, 26; I Peter 1:11] as an index of the trend of thought among Christians at that time. Men prayed of the Spirit as of ‘it,’ an energy, proving that the Socinian teaching had chilled the zeal and enthusiasm of Christian doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit.” (Emphasis his)
These references to the Holy Spirit as “it” present no cause for concern for Oneness believers since we firmly hold…[Continue reading this article by clicking HERE]
♦♦♦♦♦♦
Views from the crib:
“I’m a new believer…in static electricity.”
“As the new Marshall of Tombstone, I am coming for you, Hunter!” – Wyatt Slurp
“I’m off of Ben and Jerry’s for good since I discovered Blue Bell’s Homemade Vanilla.”
“Just look what those stupid liberals are doing to Austin!”
“I was conceived during the Twump administwation!”
“If she could be a boy for just one day, she’d wish she had never been born a girl!” 
“Don’t feed me that socialist malarkey. I got two eyes and I can see what’s really going on!”
“Mom just decided to become a vegan. Yuck!”
“I pucker for Grandmas!”
“I hope you read this entire blog and share it with a friend. If you don’t, I’m coming your way with some brass knuckles!”
♦♦♦♦♦♦
Last Words
“If your religion doesn’t let Jesus be what the Bible says He is, you need to drop that religion and pick up a new one.” – Johnny James
“The name of Jesus is the superlative wonder of linguistics; it is the picture of the ugliness of sin and the beauty of holiness. Jesus’ name is a portrait of the love of God painted on a human canvas.” – Also Johnny James, known as The Walking Bible
“Life without God is like an unsharpened pencil—it has no point.” – Billy Graham
Stay cool in August…spend more time in an air conditioned church.
unfurl it and encourage others to do the same. “In God we trust!”
multiple sources for less than $5.00.
be their covering. Preserving Judah at this juncture was ultimately “God’s battle.”
he full moon names used by The Old Farmer’s Almanac come from a number of places, including Native American, Colonial American, and European sources. Historically, names for the full or new moons were used to track the seasons. Today, we think of moon names as “nicknames” for the moon.
deliberate.
And, insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
this my proclamation designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. And I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite at their several places of public worship and their respective homes in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
many pilots and their planes.
Otherwise the gospel can be manipulated (Galatians 1:8,9), inviting eisegesis and false assumptions, thus misleading both readers or hearers. We could even be guilty of adding to or subtracting from the Word of God (Revelation 22:18,19). As Jonathan Corrado has said, “Interpretation in context seeks to allow the Bible to speak for itself within its original setting before drawing conclusions about how it applies to our modern setting. In tandem with the aid of the Holy Spirit, who will guide Christians toward a thorough biblical interpretation (John 14:26), these tenets point Christians toward the truth of Scripture and dissuades them from misunderstanding and misapplication.”
and his six-year old daughter, Nana, to travel back to America on board the Lusitania. However, he decided to delay their departure for one week, so that they could sail on a new ship, the Titanic, which was about to make its maiden voyage.
saved. After he went down; and there, alone in the night, and with two miles of water under me, I believed. I am John Harper’s last convert.” Only seven people were plucked from the icy water that night to join the survivors in the lifeboats. Webb was one of them.
immediately frozen for any reason the monitoring bureaucrats choose. This will be a cashless system that will accommodate the antichrist.
selling.”
Welcome to our May blog! Grab a cup of coffee and let’s visit. Your input and feedback are appreciated. 
door of a room where a prayer meeting was taking place? Ans: Because it gives sensationalists a handle.
portion of Matthew 28. The only MSS we have of that complete chapter before A.D. 325 are missing verse 19, due mostly to damage. Is that coincidental? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Let’s keep watching for a clue as to when verse 19 first included the words “of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” in manuscript copies. Is the phrase original or was it added subsequent to Matthew’s composition as many scholars now believe?
and its 18,000 pastors see what Hitler and his Nazis were up to, although with little success. The German Protestants, particularly, were rocked to sleep by a popular nationalism driven by Nazi ideology and somehow could not grasp the courage to speak up even when it became clear what was really going on. The great majority of the pastors and lay leaders never found their voice, their silence greasing the slide of that nation into genocide, dooming them to an eternal shame.
blatant unscientific folly being poured into the minds of our children in schools. But such action would be an intrusion of the political realm, some say. So? Condemn Nathan, Daniel, Obadiah, Jesus, John the Baptist, the apostles Peter and Paul. Condemn William Wilberforce, and M. L. King if we will. And Rosa Parks, Lech Walesa, and Ronald Reagan while we are at it. They spoke and acted even when there were laws preventing such speech and when there were none.
assumed power. They voluntarily turned up the volume of organ music when trains passed to override the cries of the Jewish prisoners on their way to the death camps. We must not intrude into the political realm, they opined. Their respectability among the ruling class was a higher priority.
churches, the nation itself depended on it. The large majority of pastors, however, opted for silence. That silence doomed the nation to virtual destruction. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of churches ended up as rubble, millions dead, families scattered, women violated by the Russian victors, the stench of burning flesh from the Auschwitz ovens forever in their memory. With tongue and pen, Bonhoffer had pleaded for their eyes to be opened before it was too late. Few were willing to listen. “We must not be political,” was the mantra.
He will see that everything turns out right.” Pray, certainly; but none I have named in paragraph four above stopped at that. Pray but don’t act is the easy way, the comfortable way, the broad way. Poland would still be under the grinding heel of Marxism if it were not for a Walesa. Please don’t call Rosa Parks a loser for refusing to go to the back of the bus. She multiplied herself a thousand times over when she acted. The Berlin wall might still be standing unless a Ronald Reagan had loosed a forceful challenge at the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Would slavery still be in the West were it not for a William Wilberforce who breathed hope to millions of slaves: “Surely the principles of Christianity lead to action as well as meditation,” he said.
we, as the German church did, fail to connect the dots in time?
“So what exactly did the German church fail to see? In a word: the future. …They did not connect the dots.”
some parts of its inner strength held on. Enough of it stayed together to feed the sizeable trunk and remaining limbs.
all the way to heaven where Jesus lives, which is our destination.
translations, expressed doubt that the words “of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” came from the mouth of Jesus?
children communicate rarely. “God created man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). It is sad that we seem virtually enslaved to them, but those inventions have indeed made idiots out of lots of folks.
church leaders have caved to the demands of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion crowd, backed by BLM and LGBTQ+ organizations. Every religious group in the West, and particularly in America, is being pressured to embrace their agenda or be ostrasized…or worse.
and buy some more tunnel. – John Quinton
Wuhan as did the dollars.
Speaks first, thinks later
justification, then clarity and truth will come through, untainted by the idols of the carnal heart. The presence of idols caused the prophet Jeremiah to say, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Is it wicked by nature only, or has wickedness been augmented by some idols we have set up there?
words and deliver them to God. This is an unfortunate rendering of the Hebrew since it can easily evoke a misinterpretation…and has indeed. I read it in a book just a few days ago. But it is highly unlikely that the team of KJV translators were attempting to convey that angels possessed that ministry.
Epistles? “Do we not already possess,” it may be said, “in the Authorized Version the most beautiful rendering which any language can boast?” Some people whom I have met go even further and feel that a modem translation is not only unnecessary but even offensive. They cannot bear to see the time honored words altered; it seems to them irreverent.
words because Greek words are not the words they spoke when they were children. It is a sort of “basic” Greek; a language without roots in the soil, a utilitarian, commercial and administrative language. Does this shock us?
blessing.” – Graham Goldsworthy in Gospel and Kingdom
pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing their clergy and priests to bless same-sex marriages. Bless their hearts, let them do as they please. Here is what I would like to say in this regard: Adult people can do as they please. We in Russia have always seen it that way and always will: no one is going to intrude into other people’s private lives, and we are not going to do it, either.
by J. R. Ensey
issues were debated and passed in conferences. It is easier in today’s cultural climate to give up the fight than to take the time to find out why Pentecostals believe what we do. Here are 224 pages of some common sense, Word-based answers for our apostolic positions.
by J. R. Ensey
with you.”
correct?
Zhong Shanshan – 94 Billion; Chinese pharmaceuticals
Pregnant mothers are at risk, and children of all ages.
Silence about this matter doesn’t seem to be a wise option. There is not enough space here to describe the many cases that are coming to light. Please use wisdom in making important health choices.
redemption, virtue, individualism, Hell, Heaven, judgment, personal responsibility, integrity.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither a pig nor a guinea. If teachers taught, why don’t we say that preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
strong enough to stand. Let’s make 2023 a year of spiritual harvest!
my church,” He said. Building would be the thrust of His ministry.
flesh (I Timothy 3:16). He had expressed His manhood, now the moment had come to express His Godhood. Those who noticed had caught a glimpse of it at age 12 in the Temple. They heard it from heaven at His baptism. Now He was open with it: “I and my father are one…I am the living bread which came down from heaven…I am the light of the world…I am from above…before Abraham was, I am…I am the resurrection and the life…Ye call me master and Lord, and ye say well; for so I am.”
You may have noticed this yourself. The first mention of the word “book” in the Old Testament is in the first chapters of Genesis (5:1) and had to do with the generations of Adam. The first mention of book in the NT is in the context of “the generation of Jesus Christ” (Matthew 1:1). Each of those books has an “end” to match. The OT bookend is in Malachi 3:16 where it is recorded that a “book of remembrance” is being recorded for the faithful. The NT bookend is in the last chapter of Revelation where the warning is given for those who would seek to add to or take away from “the prophecies of this book” (22:19).
Since he felt that Saul had been chosen by God to lead the Hebrew nation, and was its first king, he went the second mile to recognize and submit to his position. But as Saul gradually removed himself from God’s favor, loyalty was stretched to its limits.
church knows that the context wasn’t Jesus explaining what it did or didn’t take for Gentiles to be saved in the coming grace period. He was speaking directly to an individual Jew who had already been keeping the Law of Moses.
Restrictions governing the “clean and unclean” vessels, kosher food types, particular threads for clothing, etc., were not carried over to the Gentile church (Acts 10:9-15).
of the nation’s largest book publishers employing a host of editors. A couple of years ago I purchased a Bible from Zondervan and forthrightly discovered a typo in the Book of Psalms. An entire verse was missing from the first edition of the Apostolic Study Bible. I am sure that we all have observed typos in Louis L’Amour’s paperback books, possibly because they were published in such swift succession for a time that the editors couldn’t keep up.
by J. R. Ensey
gospel, and His Word, not to any earthly individual or entity. If someone or something to which we have an attachment, including our local church, our pastor, or ministerial organization, is faithful to those elements and also to their founding principles, then they deserve our genuine loyalty. If such faithfulness is not in evidence, however, a question arises as to the level of loyalty that should be extended. No individual or association is owed loyalty when faithfulness to scriptural truth and basic ethics has been abandoned. When some insist that loyalty must be extended regardless of what the entity or its leaders do, they are misguided. Blind loyalty to a friend or mentor who has departed from the faith is spiritually dangerous.
JREnsey Blog 