Back to A Free Online Library of 21st-Century Christianity for Men and Their Families
***
Calling yourself a Christian does little to nothing for your spiritual well-being, but becoming a student of Jesus Christ will do you worlds of good!
***
Faith is Fragrant, Unbelief is Foul
Before I read the Bible as an adult and surrendered to the truth about Jesus that I found there, I was a know-it-all agnostic. Yes, “know-it-all agnostic” is a contradiction in terms; it’s what is called an oxymoron. I was therefore a kind of moron. Secularism produces such spiritual morons by the millions…and I was just one of them. “If we can’t be sure, no one can be sure!” Arrogance combined with ignorance is a double whammy. It’s worse than lipstick on a pig – it’s perfume on a pig. Lipstick is useless but at least it doesn’t make the stink stranger and stronger.
***
Start with Jesus and You’re Sure to End up with God
Don’t try to prove that God exists; prove that He has spoken. It’s a much more efficient use of your time. For if you successfully prove that God exists, you still have to prove that He speaks. But if you successfully prove that He speaks, then His existence doesn’t have to be separately proven because no one can speak without existing.
Don’t even try to prove that God speaks; rather, prove that He speaks through Jesus Christ. For if you successfully prove that God speaks, you still have to prove who is truly speaking for God and who has falsely spoken for Him. That is, you’ll have to choose between Jesus, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and many others…because many people have claimed to speak for God.
To sum up: If you want to find God, start with Jesus. Conversely, if you ignore Jesus, you’ll never find God.
(John 14:6; 1 John 5:10-12; 2 John 1:9)
***
Ignoring History Is the Path to Unbelief
By any objective measurement, Jesus of Nazareth lived the most impressive and influential life in the history of all mankind. The problem is: so few people these days measure anything objectively or have a proper appreciation of history. As a result, they ignore Him from whom they could learn so much that would help them with the problems they have in life.
***
Faith is a way of thinking…that leads to action.
***
Not all thinking is believing, but all believing is thinking.
***
Things Hard to Believe
There are things in this life that are hard to believe, and you cannot avoid this by rejecting Christ. For example, all Americans are currently expected to believe a man can become a woman, even though that’s very hard to believe. Another example is that we’re expected to believe in evolution even though it’s hard to believe in it, especially since evolutionists can’t explain the beginning of the process – that is, how something came out of nothing. As for being a believer in Christ, I’ll concede that it’s hard to believe some of the events recorded in the Bible – like Noah’s flood or the parting of the Red Sea. But it’s not nearly as hard to believe those things as it is to believe that a man can become a woman or that something can come from nothing. Therefore, since you’re going to have to believe some hard-to-believe things no matter whether you follow Christ or not, why don’t you pick the set of things that are not as hard to believe as the other?
My go-to attitude about hard-to-believe things is: if Jesus believed something, I don’t see what excuse I have for not believing it. And it’s clear He accepted as true everything that the Old Testament recorded. Whatever Jesus believed, that’s what I want to believe.
***
People Hard to Believe
There are people in this life who are hard to believe. Jesus is not one of them.
***
Believing in Noah’s Ark
Here’s an article about how Noah waterproofed his ark. By the way, this article includes a picture of Johan’s Ark, which is in the Netherlands. Johan Huibers has done for the Netherlands what Ken Ham has done for America. While I respect and appreciate both men and their ministries, I have to say that Johan’s ark seems more realistic than Ken’s. I have never understood why Ken built his ark with a ship-like hull. Noah’s ark didn’t need to navigate anywhere; it only needed to float. Therefore, I assume it looked more like a barge than a ship. Of course, modern American culture thinks Ken, Johan, and the rest of us are all nuts for believing the Bible’s account of Noah and the flood, but I’ll take the unusual things we believe over the unusual things they believe any day of the week.
***
In 2024, demographer George Barna reported that the number of American adults holding to a biblical worldview had declined to 4% – and among parents of young children, it was only 2%. Further, he said that neither percentage was stable; on the contrary, both were falling precipitously. This explains so much!
***
The New Testament: Truth or Lies?
The New Testament is either the truth or else a pack of lies. It cannot be anything in between because it claims over and over, and with great emphasis and clarity, to be telling the truth – especially about its central claim that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead according to the promises of God found in the Old Testament. The New Testament’s writers left no room for thinking they might be well-intentioned but mistaken. And all the copies of their writings that have survived say essentially the same things, so we cannot reasonably claim that the original writings said something different. Therefore, let us stop acting as if it’s rational to be neutral about the claims of the New Testament. It’s either true or false. Believe it or burn it.
***
What’s God Got to Do to Get Human Attention?
In all of human history, there is only one human being whose life has been reported as bearing these three inimitable marks: 1) virgin birth, 2) resurrection from the dead, and 3) ascension into heaven. Why aren’t more people curious about this man? There must be some reason. It’s as if the Creator is trying to get His creatures’ attention…and a great many of them simply don’t want to give it.
When you add to these three distinguishing characteristics the unprecedented quantity and quality of the miracles that God performed through the ministry of this man, the lack of public interest becomes all the more puzzling…until you consider that the public has a vested interest in ignoring the subject. In this world, it is costly to acknowledge the obvious.
***
Faith Comes by Hearing the Word of God
From the beginning, Satan’s go-to scheme against humanity has been to get us to live without the word of God. To be more specific, he tempts us to make decisions without reference to what God has said. This is how he deceived Eve. We are still falling for this scheme even though we have a Bible with hundreds of thousands of words from prophets and apostles who risked their lives to speak for God, while all Eve had was the faint memory of something her husband had said to her. Let us make plenty of room for the word of God today that we might truly live and not be walking dead people like the secular society around us.
And what is the word of God? In a word, Christ.
(Rom 10:17)
***
We live by faith. And we die by doubt.
(2 Cor 5:7; Rom 14:23)
***
Unbelief in Jesus is belief in someone or something else.
***
Faith, and hope as well, have to do with what is unseen. History, by contrast, has to do with what has been seen. Though faith and hope are different from history in this regard, faith and hope can be built on history, and in the case of Jesus Christ they surely are.
***
Faith in God begins and ends in Jesus.
***
Choose one:
- Jesus was a man.
- Jesus was a man of God.
- Jesus was the Son of God.
- Jesus is God.
- All of the above.
(Answer key: Isaiah 9:6)
***
To believe is to accept as true. This applies to a fact as well as to a person – such as, and especially, Jesus.
***
Everyone believes something; the question is what. Everyone believes someone; the question is whom.
***
Most people don’t lack for an ability to believe or a reason to believe. Rather, they usually lack a willingness to believe.
***
The Bible tells us that faith can be
– sincere or insincere
– strong or weak
– present or absent
(See 1 Tim 1:5; Rom 4:20; Luke 8:25.)
***
It’s one thing to arrive at faith; it’s another to live by it. Too many people arrive at faith and think that’s all there is to the matter. The whole point of acquiring faith is to live by it.
(See Hab 2:4 and notice that it is quoted in Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11; Heb 10:38 and how it is made most specific in Gal 2:20; and in all cases, the point is to live by faith)
***
It’s not so much that we “accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior,” but rather that we accept that 1) He is Lord and Savior of the world, and, 2) we are called into personal relationship with Him.
***
Faith is personal.
(See Luke 8:25; Rom 14:22; Jude 1:20; Hab 2:4.)
***
Faith in the tabernacle, the temple, animal sacrifice, and the church were all temporal. Faith in Christ, however, is eternal. God, having completed His redemptive work in Jesus Christ, took a permanent Sabbath. That’s why He’s Lord of it.
(See Matt 12:8 and Luke 6:5.)
***
The Name “Jesus Christ” Is a Statement of Faith
“Jesus” is the name Mary and Joseph gave their child. “Christ” is the name given in the Old Testament to the great descendant of David that God promised would one day head a kingdom far greater than David’s. To put those two names together – “Jesus” and “Christ” into one name – is to say that Jesus is that promised king. Thus, “Jesus Christ” – those two words combined into one name – is a statement of faith that Jesus was and is the promised king sent by God. Therefore to believe in that name is to believe in Him.
***
Why Believe in Jesus?
- Why do I believe in Jesus? Because of…
- what He said,
- what He did,
- what happened to Him and how He reacted to it
- before He died, and
- after He died.
***
Faith Must Be in Someone or Something
People sometimes speak of their faith as if it were a thing unto itself, but the Bible doesn’t present faith as a standalone thing. Rather, faith is always in someone or something. In the eternal age in which we now find ourselves, faith should be in Jesus Christ – not anyone or anything else. And certainly not in nothing but itself. (I’m speaking of people who talk as if they have faith in faith – as if that word can having any practical meaning by itself.)
Even more specifically, when our faith is in Christ, it is in things He has said. To say we have faith in Christ but not have it tied to anything He has said is an untethered and useless faith. The finer a point there is to faith, the better.
***
Faith Must Be Maintained
Since it was by absence of faith that humanity fell from grace (i.e. Adam and Eve did not trust God’s warning about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), it is by the presence of faith that we rise back to grace. That faith must be present every day if we are to live in grace every day. We read the Bible daily to refresh our faith because faith comes from hearing the word of God – specifically, the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). When faith in the word abounds, grace abounds. Otherwise, we sink back into a graceless state.
If you find yourself fallen from grace, go back and do the things you did at first in your relationship with Jesus. He who saved you once will save you as many times as it takes. He saves forever. It’s His name! (The Hebrew for “Jesus” means “The Lord saves.”)
A Bible Reader's Website 