the Christian faith – Godinterest

January 2, 2024January 2, 2024

Scandalous Discipleship

Throughout December, we’ve looked at the scandals of the advent. The definition of the word scandal is an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing public outrage. From the King becoming to an unmarried teenager, to being born in Poverty, then the murders surrounding Jesus’ birth. What about the expensive elaborate gifts given to a humble king? Then having to be moving like a fugitive to avoid the law of the land. The greatest of all scandals must have been the insurrection at the cross. Jesus’ scandalous death on the torture instrument called the cross would cause outrage and cast a long shadow over his life and his followers.

What makes the Christian faith different from any other, is how Christ’s followers all have scandalous lives just like the Advent and the crucifixion. The Christian faith has the boldness to declare that we were lost in sin and through Christ’s death on the cross the world was reconciled to God. The Christian faith has the audacity to declare that those who are Jesus’ disciples should take up the cross…

I suppose the ultimate scandal is that suffering can be used by God for our good. Suffering is not only redemptive in the life of Jesus. It is redemptive in our own lives. Christ will use our sufferings to establish his kingdom, witness to his gospel, and work greater holiness in our personal lives. On this day as we kick off the new year, here’s a resolution worth keeping: Take up Christ’s cross of obedience, face the hardship that such a life of discipleship creates, and follow your Lord with everything you have – loving your neighbour as yourself. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

“Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:38).

Let’s Pray Yahshua, thank you for your willingness to bear my burdens. Father, give me the strength to bear the burdens of others and take up the cross of discipleship and all that it brings for your sake. In Christ’s name, Amen.

October 3, 2019October 4, 2019

Your Year of Independence

If you want heartburn try eating everything.

No matter what you do you will not be able to please everyone. So why try? You know coming out of last year I felt the need for detoxification. No, it is not what you think! I wanted to detoxify from people.
Yes, people. I have watched others, including myself, at times fall viticm to people pleasing. I have allowed some people knowingly and unknowingly to control parts of my life. It is one of those behavioural patterns that left me scratching my head. I would sometimes say to myself, “what were you thinking signing on to that crap.”

People pleasing can become counter-productive to your success, if not, checked at the door. I find myself becoming so irritated when I see people allowing themselves to become someones doormat for a, “that’s a good boy!”

I have witnessed over the years the destructive effects of people that have loss a since of themselves because they have allowed others to control their lives. Witnessing adults that can’t make sound decisions because they are so afraid of being singled out and ostracized is a sobering reminder, people pleasing is a destructive behavior.

Possessing within oneself the strength to say, “No” is a powerful and sought after quality in my opinion. To have ownership of ones life is a must. It is a sobering reminder that we must harold and respect appropriate boundaries for our lives.
I believe that if we live our lives to please God then we won’t spend so much time trying to please others.
So I have come up with my mantra and you can rock it too…,

“It’s time to detoxify.”

I have made up my mind that I will rid myself of hurtful and harmful habits and emotions such as people pleasing.

People pleasing can be extremely harmful to our mental health and self-esteem. You don’t have to look any further than social media to see the devasting effects of people addiction.

Likes and dislikes have become the new form of people pleasing and some people will almost kill themselves to trend in likes.

We have to combat and confront such harmful patterns of self-deprivation and ineptitude. We must begin to form and practice good habits of self-love. We must strive to see ourselves in a positive light.

How we see ourselves is so important to how we treat and let others treat us. Why should someone else respect you when you don’t respect yourself? We must practice good habits and detoxify our minds from the grips of people pleasing.

Serving others and caring for them with respect and love can be extremely valuable. However, when we allow ourselves to be self-serving trying to please others to please ourselves, we cause great emotional and mental harm to ourselves.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to see people happy.

The problem comes in when we allow other peoples desires to become idols to us.

For example: We can’t sleep unless everyone is pleased with our decisions.

This kind of behaviour is a problem. We should do our best to be fair to all. But the key is not to lose ourselves in pleasing others to the point of making idols out of them.
Stop waiting for people to sanction your every move. We must trust God to direct us and put the right people in our paths to take us to the next level.

Pray while you’re moving. Make a God sought decision for your life by prayer, thoughtfulness and trusting that God will not stir you wrong.

Mike Anthoni host of the Urban Christian Podcast: Making An Impact Christian Podcast Show

May 13, 2018May 19, 2018

70% Of Teens Quit Church After High School. Here’s Why

Let’s face it: the Christian youth are not prepared for all the skeptical and atheistic views that they encounter once they leave the nest. They do not have the necessary knowledge to withstand an attack against their faith, and eventually, they start to questions their beliefs. Before you know it, they return home on vacation with beliefs different to that in which they were brought up in, puffed up with ‘intellectual proof’ that church is either irrelevant or that Christianity is a based on a book of fairy tales and fables. Our Christian youth are joining the ranks of atheists and agnostics at an alarming rate, and we may just be paying for it to happen.

Most of our Christian youth will enroll in a college after graduating high school, and obviously, we are all for encouraging them to further their education and become a contributing member of society. However, gaining knowledge has come with a major side effect: we are experiencing a great falling away of our youth. Just take a moment and think about that. Our youth are the future, they are the ones that we are going to pass the baton on to lead the next generation. But if they are leaving the church in droves, where does that leave the church? We are meant to be preaching the Word of GOD and adding to our numbers, but instead, we are losing Christians. Many world events point to the fact that we are clearly living in the End Times, and so we cannot be losing souls to the world. How are we to stop this exodus? Well, it’s important to know why they are leaving in the first place. The reasons, you will find, lie with both us (the church) and the intellectual skepticism that is running rampant on campus grounds.

The Church

I’m sure that we mean well when we emphasize the emotional aspect of Christianity. Teenagers today have a shorter attention span than the youth of yesteryear, and they lose interest rather quickly, so keeping them entertained seems like the obvious path to take in order to keep them in church. We provide the youth with riveting skits that keep them entertained, we have video nights that cater to their need of movie nights and popcorn with fellow Christian mates. We raise their endorphins and get their hearts pumping with a live band that delivers music to move and woo them to continue expressing their love for the LORD. We do a fantastic job of feeding them emotionally with the Word of GOD, but we neglect to give them the basis of our faith.

2 Corinthians 10:5 says “…casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of GOD, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.”

We do not teach them this command, or, if it is taught, we do not stress the importance of it. It is important that we instill the fear and love of GOD within them and demonstrate that love with praise and worship, but emotion is not going to protect their minds. Feelings are fickle, they sway this way and that- it just depends on the tide. Imagine having them being coddled with sentimental feelings about Jesus, only to render those emotions useless in the face of much hate, skepticism, and distrust of the Christian faith. They will not be able to uphold the command in 1 Peter 3:15:

“But sanctify the LORD GOD in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.”

They will see reason in intellectual skepticism, and, with no ‘proof’ to believe in the existence of Jesus, they will eventually discard their faith. You see, we are supposed to know what we believe in and why we believe it. If our Christian youth do not understand this, we are opening the gates to their doom.

Intellectual Skepticism

College is a place of broad-minded individuals. The campus environment is all for ‘awakening your mind’ and encouraging enlightenment. Typically, most college professors identify themselves as atheists. It’s amusing (not really) for me to come across people who are against hearing the Word of GOD, but they think nothing of those who are intent upon converting them to atheism because, according to them, GOD does not exist. Let me tell you something: it takes more faith to be an atheist! With so much evidence of GOD’S handiwork, it takes much faith to ignore this in favor of the big bang theory. I once read somewhere that Darwin himself recanted his beliefs, but that knowledge is not widely circulated. While I cannot prove this, I wouldn’t be amazed if he did indeed go back on his previously held beliefs.

Our Christian youth are not being given the knowledge to question the atheistic and skeptical views that they encounter when they leave home for college. It’s no secret that college professors who are atheist look unfavorably upon those associated with the Christian faith. I do not think that it seems out of place to believe that these professors will use whatever intellectual ammunition they have to convert their students to atheism, and our Christian students are just not equipped to handle and resist the atheistic firing squad.

The campus is full of anti-Christian individuals who are intent upon undermining the Christian faith and will present all types of arguments and so-called empirical evidence to debunk the truths present in the Scriptures. They encounter the works of atheists such as Richard Dawkins, who has been quoted as saying “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” Do you see the foolishness in this? Another atheist, Sam Harris, has written a book titled ‘The End of Faith’, and yet another atheist, Christopher Hitchens (now deceased), has been described as ‘The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist’. I can see why he was notorious, with comments such as “The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament-the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana- is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea” , and “To ‘choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid”. You can bet your bottom dollar (just an expression- we certainly do not bet!) that popular and celebrated atheists such as these are thrust into the lives of our Christian youth, plying them with lies and seductive worldviews that attract and ensnare them into emptiness.

Many of our youth, having been presented with much freedom, see all the world has to offer and they want to take a bite out of the apple. They put GOD on the back burner and immerse themselves in a hedonistic existence that is worlds apart from the God-fearing life they led before. It’s worth noting that not all youths in the church are Christians, many of them simply attend church because of their parents, so once they live the home, they are free to pursue their own beliefs and form their own opinions sans the influence of their parents. There are also youths that have left the church because they find Christians to be judgemental, hypocritical and selfish- the opposite of what is taught from the Scriptures. We know this to be true, but it is a great travesty that these youths have not been in the presence of a loving and God-fearing woman or man to show them what serving the LORD truly means, and what is that hope that we have in Christ.

It is vital that all of us Believers who are in the position of positively influencing a teen should teach them the truths of our faith and give them a solid foundation with their feet planted firmly on the Rock, that is Christ Jesus. If we do not take the time to lovingly guide and teach our youth the Word of GOD in its entirety (not just bits and pieces), then outsiders will undoubtedly do it.

May 13, 2014May 13, 2018

Dear Christian: You Stink Of Death

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a sneer? Someone scrunching up their nose in distaste? According to Scriptures, it’s because you stink of death. Now, I’m not saying that you literally smell of a decomposing body, but you, dear Christian, represent death for those that are perishing.

We have a lot of hate directed towards us. It seems as though professing our faith is becoming as bad as declaring war on a defenseless country! To top it all off, people are throwing historical events and facts in our faces, blaming Christianity and not individual people for the destruction, control, and death of people for centuries. So, would it be accurate of us to say that we hate Germans because from the 1930’s to 1945 they executed a multitude of Jewish people as well as many other ‘unmentionables’? Should we hate the Belgian people for their horrific ill-treatment of the Congolese people during colonial times? Should the people of colour in South Africa hate Afrikaners because of Apartheid? Anyone with any sense in their head would realize that this should not be the case- you cannot blame a whole country or race for the acts of a select group of people! So why is it acceptable to identify a few bad eggs out of a nest and then seek to destroy the rest of that nest with perfectly good and nutritious eggs? I’ll tell you why- because to the majority of the world who are perishing, we are the aroma of death that leads them to their death.

There is something within the perishing world that wants us gone, or at least, they want us to revoke our faith and deny Christ, but that would lead to our death, and not just a physical death, but a spiritual death as well. You see, we smell of Christ and it’s a wonderful scent to us who are saved. There is something special within us that is offensive to the perishing world, and that is the knowledge of the truth. The truth is that Jesus came down to earth in the form of man, died on the cross for our sins, arose from the dead on the third day and now sits on the right-hand side of GOD as our Mediator. Because we believe this, we are thus the fragrance of Christ.

Some people will go so far as to show us a point. For example, the members of the Temple of Satan have sought to push their religion wherever and however they can to come against the Christian faith. In the past few years, they have tried to set up their own monuments to Satan wherever Christians monuments have been installed. The Ten Commandment monument in Oklahoma was set to get a rival in the form of a Baphomet monument (which is now installed in Detroit), the metal silhouette of an infantryman kneeling before a cross (which was removed by the way) in Minnesota, had the Satanic temple wanting their own monument in the shape of a solemn black cube holding an upturned helmet, its sides adorned with an upside-down pentagram (it thankfully got the axe). They even want to introduce ‘After school Satan clubs’ in challenge to Christian evangelical groups that sponsor after-school religious programming. Oddly enough, Lucien Greaves aka Doug Mesner (founder of the Temple of Satan), said that his organization does not worship the devil, but that they are a nontheistic religious organization. Lies. When the Baphomet monument was put up, a video was shown of people coming to pay their respects to the monument, and to worship their dark lord- Lucifer.

The state of California is also trying their best to control the Christian faith. People in other countries are dying because of their beliefs and many Christians are meeting in secret for fear of persecution just to come together to praise and worship GOD. I recently came across an article based in Scotland that stated that Christians are finding it difficult to practice their faith because they are being questioned about it- a young child saying grace before eating her meal was questioned by her peers and teachers about her purpose in praying! It seems as though some people no longer know what the purpose of praying is.

Let’s just face it, more and more people are finding us troublesome, harmful and dangerous. Can you imagine that? We, who are meant to be as gentle as doves, are the dangerous ones! What is the world coming to? To put it bluntly, they are coming to their death.

Honestly though, are we really that dangerous? It seems that people choose either the flight or fight option when they encounter a Believer: they will run away from us, or they will attack us and demonize us for all the world to see. I watched a news report that claimed Chick-fil-A has infiltrated New York City with their ‘pervasive Christian traditionalism’. Infiltrated and pervasive are rather strong words, don’t you think? This method of publicly attacking us is gaining supporters from all walks of life who would like to see the demise of the Christian faith. It’s a war out there, people, and it’s only getting worse.

I know that Christians have been preaching about the End Times for centuries, but that preaching is needed. We need to be ready for the return of Jesus, and it seems as though He is well on His way to coming back to earth to collect His saints. You may stink like death now, but to those who hear the Word of GOD spoken from your mouth and choose to believe in Jesus, you become an aroma of life leading to life.

Ending Thoughts: To one we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to the other the aroma of life leading to life.” 2 Corinthians 2:16. You may be the aroma of death to some, but most importantly, you are the aroma of life that will lead a once lost soul to life.