“There seems to be no good news in the news, just judgment absent of grace of faith and love.”

My last line from yesterday leads us to the option to look for the good mews.

Luke 4:18

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

Also 19 “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

I include verse 19 for one and only one purpose; to point out there is a limit to the amount of time left to us to preach the good news. We live in the church age and it will end someday and then it will be too late to take advantage of that free offer of grace and mercy to a lost and troubled world of sinners.

Some of us are decades into this new life in Christ. The longer we live here the more comfortable and secure we find ourselves. Once we feel secure we are free to focus on the will of God and serve Him as is fit for us according to the gifts and talents that are uniquely our own.

The further we are from that moment of rebirth the harder it is to remember what life was like without God. Our focus turns from what we did for ourselves to what God is doing for us and through us.

How can we relate to the lost if we have forgotten how it felt to live without God?

We have the Word of God to remind us of how man acts without God or if they worship false gods. If we look at the history of mankind we might see that the nature of fallen man has not changed. The world has changed and there have been unbelievable improvements in the quality of life. We do not have to look back 4,000 years to see how much easier life is now.

“Volume of knowledge is doubling every 12 hours, the doubling rate used to be 25 years in 1945. Speed with which technology is progressing is the driver which are upending our careers, transforming lives and disrupting economies.” Source Linkedin

This statement is a world view and  implies that vast gains in global knowledge does not improve our lives if it truly disrupts economies. There is a better way to measure personal security.

John 10:10

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Jeremiah 5:3

O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You have struck them down, but they felt no anguish; you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent.

2 Corinthians 13

Final Warnings

This is the third time I am coming to you. Every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. I warned those who sinned before and all the others, and I warn them now while absent, as I did when present on my second visit, that if I come again I will not spare them— since you seek proof that Christ is speaking in me. He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful among you.

Both statements are true and oftentimes the truth is hard to hear. While we tell ourselves we are good because we have compared ourselves to others and we do not see their failings in ourselves, that is judgment. We might not accept that we judge others to make ourselves feel good. That is the Soap Opera life, viewing the disasters of others while patting our own backs that at least we are not like that.

“Not that the heart can be good without knowledge, for without knowledge the heart is empty. But there are two kinds of knowledge: the first is alone in its bare speculation of things, and the second is accompanied by the grace of faith and love, which causes a man to do the will of God from the heart.” John Bunyan from Pilgrim Progress

John Bunyan was a Puritan and his best known work Pilgrim Promise has survived the emotional disdain of Puritanical behaviors that sprang forth from raw emotions that Bunyan gracefully called bare speculations. Their judgment was not tempered by “the grace of faith and love”.

God is just and we are justified but that does not make us ministers of justice punishing those who have given in to their animal instincts. Punishment does not change behavior, it only makes the judge feel like he is doing his job.

Our job is to make disciples but we must be very careful not to make them in the image of ourselves. That will only create a legalistic theocracy that is void of grace of faith and love.

If we want to feel better about ourselves without loving others all we have to do is to turn on the Soap Opera we call The News.

There seems to be no good news in the news, just judgment absent of grace of faith and love.