The Sword of the LORD

“As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him: rooted and built up in Him, and established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.” (Colossians 2:6, 7).   As I think about it today, it wasn’t all that difficult to receive Christ as my Savior.  I had been brought to a point in my life where I knew I’d messed up and couldn’t fix things or go back and change the choices I had already made that had brought me down the road that I was on.  I needed help, and more than that, I needed forgiveness.  I didn’t need a theologian to tell me I’d offended my Creator.  What little I knew about God was enough to tell me I’d blown it.  That’s when someone found me and told me about Jesus.  I was amazed to hear that my past could be forgiven, and that I could have a clean slate to write my life on.  It wasn’t difficult – I simply believed it.  As a gift from heaven, I just accepted it and discovered the joy of salvation and the gift of gra

We read in the fifth chapter of St. Luke about Jesus preaching the Word of God by Lake Gennesaret.  Because of the press of people, He entered into a fishing boat and taught the multitude from there.  As He finished speaking, He told Simon Peter, the fisherman who owned the ship, to launch out into the deep part of the lake and let down his nets.  Right away Simon Peter began to protest, but gave in to the request saying, “Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net.”                            Just like these fishermen, it sometimes seems like our best efforts to do the will of God and to win souls to Christ just seem to come up empty.  Many churches put together evangelistic campaigns, and special revival services, and even door-to-door initiatives; but for all their labor, very few souls are touched.  The key element that is often missing is that the Lord Himself has not directed the work.  We can “toil all the n

"For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.  And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey." (Matthew 25:14, 15).   In the parable of the talents, Jesus addresses one of the principles of servant-hood as it relates to the kingdom of heaven.  Because of the use of the word "talent" in this parable, many English-speaking folks confuse what Jesus is trying to convey, and interpret it to mean the God-given talents that we are each given at birth.  While it is true that people show certain affinities for music, science, art, language, etc., and these affinities can manifest themselves at an early age, this is not at all what the Lord was teaching about here.    The talent that the Bible refers to was a standard unit of weight that was applied to a variety of commodities.