Who's Your Daddy?????

This Sunday is Father's Day, but what do you do if your father is deceased? If you are a Christian the answer is simple... look to your Heavenly Father. God is the Father of all who accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

For those who have an earthly father the Bible has a few things to say to you. Both in the Old Testament in the book of Deuteronomy and in the New Testament in the Epistle to the Ephesians, the Bible promises that if we honor our father and mother that it will go well with us and that we may live long.

Deuteronomy 5:16 "Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that it may go well with you in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”

Ephesians 6:2-3 "Honor your father and mother"—which is the first commandment with a promise— "that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth."[

I believe this is even more true if we honor our Heavenly Father. Honoring God will make things go well with us as we invite and authorize God's protective hedge to be put around us. Isaiah chapter 5:1-6 talks about what can happen if we dishonor God as it relates to the hedge of protection.

The Song of the Vineyard
1 I will sing for the one I love
a song about his vineyard:
My loved one had a vineyard
on a fertile hillside.
2 He dug it up and cleared it of stones
and planted it with the choicest vines.
He built a watchtower in it
and cut out a winepress as well.
Then he looked for a crop of good grapes,
but it yielded only bad fruit.

3 "Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.

4 What more could have been done for my vineyard
than I have done for it?
When I looked for good grapes,
why did it yield only bad?

5 Now I will tell you
what I am going to do to my vineyard:
I will take away its hedge,
and it will be destroyed;
I will break down its wall,
and it will be trampled.

6 I will make it a wasteland,
neither pruned nor cultivated,
and briers and thorns will grow there.
I will command the clouds
not to rain on it."

The Bible is very clear from cover to cover. When we honor and obey God, it will go well with us, God will be pleased and we will receive a blessing. When we dishonor God, we invite God's anger upon us whereby removing the hedge of protection from around us.

I urge you to use the Father's Day to reflect on how well you honor God The Father. We all fall short in this area and need to repent and ask God to forgive us of our dishonor towards Him. This will help restore a close fellowship and "it will go well with us".

What Notion Is Our Nation

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 2000 years ago, the "government" realized that if they did not control Jesus, His teachings, and His followers that they would lose their power over the people. This is seen in scripture, John 11:48 "If we let Him go on like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” True, this verse references the Romans, but you could just as easily apply it today and substitute the word Romans with "The People".

 The Federal Government thrives on 2 conditions that they count on from its citizens: ignorance and apathy. As Born Again Believers in Christ, we should not be either of those. Yet, it is far too prevalent. Over time we have allowed our government to make legal, and acceptable, removal of God from the classroom, the teaching of Evolution over Creationism, abortion, and gay marriage just to name a few.

 I list removal of God from the classroom first because this is how the degeneration gets started. Removing God and the Bible from the classroom opened the door to teach the idea of Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. Without Biblical truth to stand on, many children will be persuaded and believe this idea of evolution . If they believe there is a God, they obtain a skewed vision of God as being some vicious dictator who just wants to tell everyone else what to do in order to make everyone miserable and ruin their lives (wait, I digress... for a second I thought I was describing our government).

The Government is smart.. they realize what Proverbs 22:6 said long ago "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it."   The Government knows that if a child is endoctrinated with their ideas that the child will retain those ideas into adulthood. Each idea builds to another. Teaching of evolution over creation, devalues life which opens up the door for acceptance of abortion because after all it's not a created baby in there, it is just a mess of tissue.

The Government is also smart in knowing that if it can keep the people away from God and His teachings that the people will become desensitized to what was going on around them, which creates a state of apathy. They know that if the people look to God for their strength and answers to their problems (not Government) , that it will take the power that they thrive on away from them and turn it back to God (and God's people).

 So two question remains  .. are we still a Christian Nation and does anyone still care?