"What You Trusting in, You Decide!"

Before I was saved I used to like to listen to some rap music, not all of it but some. Since being saved, I have found an artist called Shai Linne. He has more correct theology in one VERSE of one of his songs than most "seeker-friendly" pastors have in an entire month's worth of sermons. On top of that he is easy to understand his lyrics. I have posted a video below that includes the words to his song. I hope you enjoy it!

He's Been Distorted by the People...

...And it Just Ain't Right!



I had this video emailed to me from a fellow vendor and Christian brother, it is from the Passion for Christ Movement. I am curios what you all think of this video, please let me know.

President Obama, I Want to Respect You...

Mr. President, as the Bible says in 1 Peter 2:17, "Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor." I want to be able to honor you, but you must be honorable. I want to mirror what Pastor John Piper has said, and ask you to honestly and honorably answer truly honest questions. I believe that a honorable man will answer these questions:

1. Are you willing to explain why a baby's right not to be killed is less important than a woman's right not to be pregnant?
2. Or are you willing to explain why most cities have laws forbidding cruelty to animals, but you oppose laws forbidding cruelty to human fetuses? Are they not at least living animals?
3. Or are you willing to explain why government is unwilling to take away the so-called right to abortion on demand even though it harms the unborn child; yet government is increasingly willing to take away the right to smoke, precisely because it harms innocent non-smokers, killing 3,000 non-smokers a year from cancer and as many as 40,000 non-smokers a year from other diseases?
4. And if you say that everything hangs on whether the fetus is a human child, are you willing to go before national television in the oval office and defend your support for the "Freedom of Choice Act" by holding in your hand a 21 week old fetus and explaining why this little one does not have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to life? Are you willing to say to parents in this church who lost a child at that age and held him in their hands, this being in your hands is not and was not a child with any rights of its own under God or under law?

[EDIT] (These questions were taken from John Piper's Blog at the Desiring God web site)
Maybe you have information that you can revel to us in response to these questions or can defend your position reasonably. You are the President of the United Sates, you have immense sway and power, please use your power to protect the least among us, the defenseless unborn!

Regardless of what you do, I am going to try and be respectful of you. I will do my best to respectfully disagree with you on matters that I feel are too important to keep quiet on. I will try my best not to teat you disrespectfully, the way opponents of our last President treated him. Above all, I am going to try and make a point everyday to pray for you and your decisions, that they are good and in line with Biblical principles.

President Obama, please, please, please, consider the responsibility that God has graciously ordained you to have.

Humbled Servant

I am a little reluctant to share this for several reasons, mainly because it shows how I allow my sinful flesh to control me. I do not write this to lift myself up at all, I am not patting myself on the back, but rather I want this to give glory to the King.

On Sunday night I was at the laundromat doing...well laundry. For the first 45 min to an hour there was hardly anyone there and was able to read a good portion of God's Word. It started getting busier after I moved the laundry to the dryers. The thought of sharing the Gospel, or at least handing out some Million Dollar Bill tracts, entered my mind, but I allowed pride and shame to pushed the idea out of my mind. I thought that I really needed to read my hermeneutics book instead, after all I have been procrastinating and am behind. So, I started read the book and I kept noticing more people walk in, and the thought of sharing kept popping in my head, but I ignored it. I was having the hardest time concentrating on my book (I still have no idea what I read, I have to reread it) and then I noticed my palms started to feel clammy and my heart was pounding. I knew what I was about to do and it terrified me.

You might wonder why it terrified me, it was because I was about to something that my pride knew was going to make me look foolish and I had never done it to a complete stranger. I stood up, prayed, pulled two tracts from my wallet, and approached two Hispanic guys. Looking back, I now realize that my fear had temporarily dissipated as I walked over and handed the tracts to the guys. I explained what I handed to them was not real money but a Gospel tract and then ask what they thought happened to people when they die. One responded with very broken English about not being sure. This is where I became like Peter when he walked on water. When he was on the water he was fine until he saw the wind and the waves, then he started to sink. Well, when I heard his broken English my heart, unfaithfully, sank. I stumbled through asking him if he thought he was a good person and, of course, he thought he was. I tried asking him if he had ever told a lie and he gave me a shrug and a face that implied that he had NO idea what I was talking about. I tried a few more questions with the same result. Finally I asked him if he had a Bible at home and if so to read the Gospel of John. Almost seeming miraculous, the guy said that he did have a Bible and would read John at home that night. As I walked away I saw them both reading the tracts, so I now leave it in God's hands. As it says in Isaiah 50:11:

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

I know that I can trust God's Word in this matter. I know that I just did one of several things: (1) I just sowed a seed that will one day be watered and grow then be harvested, (2) I just helped water a seed someone had already sown, or the most terrifying of all (3) I just added to the cup of God's wrath that they will experience on the Day of Judgment. Let me explain what I mean on that third one. On the Day of Judgment, if these two men die in their sin, they will stand with out excuse in front of Almighty God and have to explain why they did not respond to His Grace in repentance and faith.

By man's standards, I was a complete failure, but I am not bound by man's standards, only God's. I am ashamed to say that I was so reluctant to be obedient. As my buddy, Wretched Sinner, said in his latest blog post, I needed and still need to "get out of my own way" when sharing the Gospel. There are lessons that I am going to take from this, one is not to ignore my conscience and be disobedient. I thank my God that this sin, along with all the rest, has already been forgiven. Another thing that I learned was how I am going to need to get direction and training to be more effective.

I have to say that my compassion for the lost has definitely increased since this encounter. I encourage you if you do not share your faith with strangers please consider it. I started out by dropping tracts on the ground in busy places, putting them in ATMs and handing them to cashiers. I know how terrifying it can be to go up to a stranger and talk about these things, but consider where they might be headed. Please consider these lyrics from Keith Green's song Asleep in the Light:

Do you see, do you see
All the people sinking down
Don't you care, don't you care
Are you gonna let them drown

God's calling and you're the one
But like Jonah you run
He's told you to speak
But you keep holding it in,
Oh can't you see it's such a sin?

The world is sleeping in the dark
That the church just can't fight
Cause it's asleep in the light
How can you be so dead
When you've been so well fed
Jesus rose from the grave
And you, you can't even get out of bed.

I ask for your prayers for these two gentlemen. Please pray for their salvation. I also humbly ask that you pray that God continue to grow my compassion for the lost and that my fear of man become fear for man.

"Peace to all of you who are in Christ." (1 Peter 5:14 ESV)

--The Wretch

The Magnitude of God

As I drive to my first stop in the morning and as I drive back from my last stop in the afternoon I have a fair amount of time to let my mind wander, usually about God or what I had been discussed on Wretched Radio that day (which is always about God and theology.) For the past few weeks I have been thinking about the magnitude of our God.

Not that anyone wants to know but I am 5' 7" tall, compared to most people I know, I am short. I am telling you what my perspective of height and size are. Mt. Everest is 29,035 feet (about 5.5 miles) above sea level and the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is 35,840 feet (about 6.8 miles) below sea level. These are the highest and the deepest points on our planet. This is absolutely amazing and hard to fathom these heights, but that is not all the circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles. The earth is also home to 6.7 billion people. That kind of make me feel insignificant, but my mind does not stay there, it keeps going.

Now the Earth's volume can fit into the volume of Jupiter a thousand times and Jupiter can fit into the volume of the Sun a thousand times. Feeling small yet? Our solar system is 3.7 billion miles across. But wait there's more! As my mind expands out we not have to switch measurement scales, we now need to use the speed of light. Light travels at roughly 186,000 miles per second (light can travel 7.5 times around the Earth in one second!) A light year is 5.9 trillion miles and our galaxy is 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars. Our closest galactic neighbor is Andromeda, which is 2 million light years away. I read recently that the Hubble Space Telescope has a current viewable distance of about 12 billion light years. There are millions of galaxies out there, we will never be able to say definitively how large the universe is and how many galaxies there are.

I know that this is a lot data and it is hard to comprehend the scope of it all, but I do have a point. In Isaiah 40:12, Isaiah tells us that God measures the universe in the span of His hand. There are millions of galaxies with billions of stars in them and Psalms 147:4-5 tells us that He not only knows the number of the stars but also knows the name of each one. God also knows each and every person that has lived, is living, and will live on this Earth. God also knows the number of hairs on each person's head, your head (Matt 10:30.) Are you starting to see the magnitude of God?

God commands the galaxies to form, and their stars to shine, and they do. He commands planets to form around the stars, and they do. He commands the mountains to rise and the ocean's depths to drop, and they do. He commands the seas to go only so far and the wind to blow, and they do. He commands storms to form and to dissipate, and they do. All of Creation obeys the commands of it's Creator, all but one group. Humans, the one part of Creation that God created with the ability to appreciate and enjoy the rest of Creation and to glorify and worship God as a result. But what happens? God calls us to to obey and glorify him and we say "NO! I want to do things MY way!" Woe to us rebels, God clearly laid out his commands and we all fail to meet his standards. He is so Holy and so Righteous and so Just that He cannot have sin, our disobedience, in His presence.

We have all fallen short of His standard. When we have lied, stolen, and taken his His name in vain He see us as lying, thieving, blasphemers. God also sees our thought life as well. In Matthew 5:27-28 Jesus tells us that just looking with lust (sexual desire) is adultery of the heart, and in verses 21-22 we are told that even being unjustly angry is murder of the heart. Who of us has not broken these commandments? Being guilty of these God sees us as lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterers and murders at heart, and these are just five of the ten commandments! The first five commandments deal directly with God himself. Have any of us always put God first in their lives? How many of us have fashioned an incorrect view of God in our minds?

As the Bible says, God is Holy, Righteous and Just and must punish sin eternally (for a description of Biblical hell view this post I wrote about it.) But God also has other attributes such as Mercy and Grace. God wants to show His mercy and grace but cannot just universally hand it out because He is a Just Judge. The Law has been broken by all men and the fine needs to be paid. We have to stand in front of this huge and mighty God. How can we justify ourselves, we can't.

God sent the Son, Jesus, to be the payment for all sin, all transgression of God's Law. Jesus was crucified and suffered the full wrath of God as payment for all of our sins. Jesus willingly walked into the court room and paid our fine. How great a sacrifice! The God who measures the universe with the span of his hand paid the fine! In order to receive forgiveness we need to respond to Jesus and his sacrifice in repentance and faith. Repentance is a turning from and forsaking of all sin and asking for forgiveness from God. Faith is putting your full trust in Jesus that he has saved you, like trusting a parachute when jumping from a plane. If you do this God will change you from the inside making you a new creature with new desires. All of the sinful things that you used to love you will start to hate and the things you used to hate, like read the Bible and going to church, you will start to desire.

I beg you, if you have not responded to God's grace and forgiveness on His terms, please do it! Think of all of your sins, your rebellion against God, and then think of His sacrifice on the cross. While we were and are sinners He still died for us to make that payment for sin. Let that burden crush you, then call out to God for forgiveness in repentance and faith!



"Peace to all of you who are in Christ." (1 Peter 5:14 ESV)

--The Wretch

More Paul Washer

"Peace to all of you who are in Christ." (1 Peter 5:14 ESV)

--The Wretch