Want a good quality of life? Pay attention to your biological and spiritual heart

Wanted: A Pure Heart

TEXT: MARK 7:14-23

Key Verse: “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders” (Mark 7:21). 

In many ways, the heart serves as the engine room of the human body. From biological perspective, it is the organ that pumps oxygen and blood to different parts of the body. It is this activity of the heart that sustains life. On the other hand, the heart is the stream out of which flow “the issues of life.” It is the chamber where thoughts are incubated before they transform into action. Your heart’s condition is a most critical determinant of the quality of life you live. 

This is the truth Christ teaches in the text. The teaching came as part of His response to the hypocritical posture of the Pharisees who faulted His disciples for eating with unwashed hands. The Pharisees practised a religion of forms and rituals with little or no morality. In their pretence to adhere strictly to the Mosaic laws, they added traditions that made them to neglect the weightier matters of the law. Soon, “the tradition of the elders” became their cardinal doctrine and standard. Ceremonial hand-washing before meal was one of such traditions. Their faultfinding penchant could not bear to see Christ’s disciples flout this tradition. 

Christ’s message here is clear: defilement does not come from eating with unwashed hands or from what we eat. This does not excuse the evil of consuming hurtful substances. It simply implies that defilement and wickedness come “from within, out of the heart of man.” The list of sins mentioned in verses 21 and 22 are just a fraction of the soul-damning evils that man’s depraved heart can produce. 

Your natural heart needs regeneration or spiritual rebirth. This happens when you approach God penitently, acknowledging, confessing and forsaking your sins with faith in Christ as your Saviour and Lord. After this experience, you must keep your heart with all diligence to avoid polluting that precious fountain. 

Source: Daily Manna

The greatest thing in the world IV

The defense

     Now I have a closing sentence or two to add about Paul's reason for singling out love as the supreme possession. It is a very remarkable reason. In a single word it is this: it lasts. "Love," urges Paul, "never faileth." Then he begins again one of his marvellous lists of the great things of the day, and exposes them one by one. He runs over the things that men thought were going to last, and shows that they are all fleeting, temporary, passing away.

    

 "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" It was the mother's ambition for her boy in those days that he should become a prophet. For hundreds of years God had never spoken by means of any prophet, and at that time the prophet was greater than the king. Men waited wistfully for another messenger to come, and hung upon his lips when he appeared as upon the very voice of God. Paul says, "Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail" This Book is full of prophecies. One by one they have "failed"; that is, having been fulfilled their work is finished; they have nothing more to do now in the world except to feed a devout man's faith.

Believers must step up their game in soul winning

This report by the CNN is alarming. The Governments of the concerned nations have a lot to do and must quickly set out to neutralize all avenues employed by Boko Haram to undermine them. Much more than that, believers should step up their game in soul winning as men willingly flock to the to their eternal foe and enemy of the Church, the devil. It is the same case with ISIS. One marvels at what attract young people to join these merchants of sorrow and death.

Young Cameroonians joining Boko Haram
By Ngala Killian Chimtom, for CNN

Cameroon's security forces are predicting a drawn-out battle with Boko Haram as evidence filters out that the insurgents are now recruiting there.

"We don't doubt that Boko Haram is recruiting in Cameroon," said Col. Joseph Nouma, commander of Operation ALPHA, a special military operation set up by Cameroon's government to fight the Nigerian terrorist group.

He says communities bordering Nigeria have been emptied of men between the ages of 10 and 45.

"Many of them are found across the border in Nigeria, training with the terrorists," he told CNN.

God's way of saying "black, brown, yellow, red and white - all are Mine"

I once watched a South African farmer unconvincingly trying to prove that nature supports apartheid. That was even in post-apartheid South Africa. But it seems nature has its own way of refuting man's lies and God has ample means of powerfully expressing where He stands. Read this interesting story from the CNN about a pair of twins, one black, the other white.

UK twins turn heads: One is white, the other black

By Michael Pearson, CNN

Here's a pair of twins no one will have trouble telling apart: One is white, and one is black. Thanks to a rare quirk of nature, Lucy is the alabaster-skinned redhead, and Maria has their part-Jamaican mother's dark skin and hair.

Images of the Aylmer sisters of Gloucester, United Kingdom, rocketed around the Internet this week when a British newspaper carried their story.

"I can't stop crying! This is all so amazing," Lucy Aylmer posted on Facebook. The girls were born to a white father and a biracial mom in 1997, according to the Daily Mail story that started all the fuss.

The greatest thing in the world III

(Continued from 25 November, 2014)

The analysis

After contrasting Love with these things, Paul, in three verses, very short, gives us an amazing analysis of what this supreme thing is. I ask you to look at it. It is a compound thing, he tells us. It is like light. As you have seen a man of science take a beam of light and pass it through a crystal prism, as you have seen it come out on the other side of the prism broken up into its component colours--red, and blue, and yellow, and violet, and orange, and all the colours of the rainbow--so Paul passes this thing, Love, through the magnificent prism of his inspired intellect, and it comes out on the other side broken up into its elements. And in these few words we have what one might call the Spectrum of Love, the analysis of Love. Will you observe what its elements are? Will you notice that they have common names; that they are virtues which we hear about every day; that they are things which can be practised by every man in every place in life; and how, by a multitude of small things and ordinary virtues, the supreme thing, the summum bonum, is made up?

   
     The Spectrum of Love has nine ingredients:--
     Patience . . . . . . "Love suffereth long."
     Kindness . . . . . . "And is kind."
     Generosity . . . . "Love envieth not."
     Humility . . . . . . "Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up."
     Courtesy . . . . . . "Doth not behave itself unseemly."
     Unselfishness . . "Seeketh not her own."
     Good Temper . . "Is not easily provoked."
     Guilelessness . . "Thinketh no evil."
     Sincerity . . . . . . "Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."

Anything is possible

Do not say something is impossible because anything is possible. Do not say it doesn't matter because it does. Unless you sat at the divine council, discussed the matter with God and reached a conclusion with Him; then you cannot say "it is not possible" or "it doesn't matter".

Do not say "it is impossible" because "anything is possible". It was Peter who told Christ that it was impossible for Him to be killed. "Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee" Peter said but Christ told him to hold it, that that was a lie from the pit of hell. The antediluvian people thought Noah was crazy, going about making an ark for an imaginary rain and attendant flood that would never happen. But they were wrong. Esau thought it didn't matter and carelessly tossed his birthright to Jacob but learned the bitter truth too late. 

Anything is possible especially when believers play politics instead of praying, preaching and living practical Christian lives. Anything is possible when they engage in carnal disputations and discussions and surface-level reasoning instead of Spirit-inspired in depth analyses, factual dissection of issues and discerning the mind of God. Anything is possible when they begin to buy the old lie "it doesn't matter" instead of standing on "others may, I cannot". Anything is possible when believers have sight and know all the facts but have no vision and faith in God. 

We need to watch and pray, say no to all evil and act right because anything is possible.

(Written from the perspective of the threat of subjugation of Christians in Nigeria and some people claiming it is impossible)

Resisting temptation - wisdom nuggets for Christian wayfarers

"There is no state so holy, no place so secret that temptations and trials will not come. Man is never safe from them as long as he lives, for they come from within us"

"The man who only shuns temptations outwardly and does not uproot them will make little progress"

"Fire tempers iron and temptation steels the just. Often we do not know what we can stand, but temptation shows us what we are"

"Resist the beginnings; remedies come too late, when by long delay the evil has gained strength"

SO LONG as we live in this world we cannot escape suffering and temptation. Whence it is written in Job: "The life of man upon earth is a warfare."* Everyone, therefore, must guard against temptation and must watch in prayer lest the devil, who never sleeps but goes about seeking whom he may devour, find occasion to deceive him. No one is so perfect or so holy but he is sometimes tempted; man cannot be altogether free from temptation. 

Yet temptations, though troublesome and severe, are often useful to a man, for in them he is humbled, purified, and instructed. The saints all passed through many temptations and trials to profit by them, while those who could not resist became reprobate and fell away. There is no state so holy, no place so secret that temptations and trials will not come. Man is never safe from them as long as he lives, for they come from within us -- in sin we were born. When one temptation or trial passes, another comes; we shall always have something to suffer because we have lost the state of original blessedness. 

Many people try to escape temptations, only to fall more deeply. We cannot conquer simply by fleeing, but by patience and true humility we become stronger than all our enemies. The man who only shuns temptations outwardly and does not uproot them will make little progress; indeed they will quickly return, more violent than before.