The Devotional

Papa J's rules for Livin #157

When you start to break down time you find that the number 718,320 is the hours of eighty two years, some may say that this is a lot, but known history has time at 7,000 years. That is 61,320,000 hours of existence. Placed against eternity and what you believe, humanity is still in diapers!

There is this story of an African woman who came to Christ, she began sharing her faith with her husband and one day he became so enraged by her continual praying and asking him to be saved that he decided to divorce her. So he decided to accuse her of being a thief. He took his key ring and threw all of his keys in the river. Later that day his wife went to the market and purchased a large fish for the evening meal and while she was preparing the fish for supper she found her husband's keys in the stomach of the fish. When her husband came home later that evening he demanded to know where his keys were. He threatened her in anger and she calmly handed him his keys and he, seeing them and knowing from where they were, instantly bowed his head and converted to Christ. Christian believers are warned against walking by sight, but sometimes seeing is believing, but for all of us who know the mind of Christ we have this wonderful assurance that God will meet with us and those He calls when we allow Him to open the eyes of our heart. You know – such as the Centurion in Mark 15:39 So when the centurion... saw that He cried out like this and breathed His last, he said, “Truly this Man was the Son of God!” Mark 15:39

1 Corinthians 5

1 Corinthians 5:1-3 The church of Jesus Christ is a place where the saints of God come together. If we fully understood the past lives of the people sitting next to us in the congregation and membership we might decide that we are in the wrong church. As far a people go, there is no such place as “just the right place” and the fact is that if you are there in church as a “saint” then you are in the right place and your presence there is the same as all the rest – saved and holy.

Sexual immorality is an ugly subject, that is because all of us are affected by this sort of conduct and the more it spreads within a group of people the more controlling it becomes. All sin is controlling, but sexual sins take us one step further since it goes beyond that barrier of the human conscious, in that; a stable conscious protects even unsaved people from crossing. It goes beyond morality as the word immorality defines. All sexual misconduct leads to pride and selfish idolatry, the two sins that control the original sin of “unbelief”.

The church is a Spiritual place of worship and training in the things that God has freely given to us through His Lamb. The sacrifice of Christ Jesus our LORD is a “Most Holy Truth”. The people who have come to accept this truth are men, women and children who have had there souls washed in the blood of this most holy sacrifice. If we fail to deal with sin, “all sin” within the church we become like the churches found in the book of Revelation. First we resemble the loveless church of Ephesus, then as the sin gains more control, we become one that compromises with Light and darkness like Pergamos. Then pure corruption sets in like the Thyatira church and finally the church becomes dead like the Sardis church, Revelation 2 and 3. Developing this on Monday.