Dalhart Nazarene

As I pray for you, and you pray for me, we are mindful of an uncertain future. But we need not commit one another to that future of uncertainty—rather we commit one another to a Father of reliability.

What a Risen Savior can do for You by Dalhart Nazarene

God turns everything upside down, from defeating the power of death, to breaking down our barriers that keep His life and hope out.

Our Lord’s arrival in Jerusalem just five days before His crucifixion is one of the stories that is reported by all the Gospel writers. Everybody remembers that day! It was a joyful and glorious day, a time of excitement, optimism, and renewed national pride for the Israelites.

Prayer to God has the power and the ability to set things in motion in the spiritual realm. But more often than not the prayers to God have the power to change the one who is praying.

We are faced with many challenges and opportunities in our lives. As a Christian we are rowing upstream against a society that is basically anti-Christian. Many things about the future are both exciting and fearful.

We do not know what Jesus looked like when he walked this earth, but we naturally presume Jesus looked something like us! I always imagined it would have been easy to pick Jesus out in his class photograph because he would have been the only one with a halo around his head.

The point of church is to come into the presence of God, realize who you are in comparison to Him and to walk away ready to do His work.

Isaiah’s writings to the children of Israel came at a bleak period in their history. They are in captivity, they have lost everything they thought they would keep forever, and they were home sick for the land and the blessing God had promised them.

The "Hand of God" was with Ezra because: • He Studied God’s Word • He observed God’s Word • He Taught God’s Word

Here’s what impresses me about David. He wasn’t afraid of looking foolish. He wasn’t afraid of taking off his royal robes and dancing without hindrance and without inhibition before the Lord.

As we look at the story of Abimelech it reads like a screenplay written to demonstrate the pitfalls of Human wisdom. To fully appreciate the wisdom God means for us to gleam from this passage the question we must ask ourselves is what’s wrong with doing what seems right in our own eyes?

“The world has yet to see what God will do with and for and through and in and by the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him.”

I know we all say that we believe the Bible. But believing is more than a positive confession. Believing is being fully persuaded, without a doubt, that what God says in His word, He can and will perform.

Let me encourage you in this final week of Advent to look for Him, even when the wind blows and the storms swirl. You may find Him as a babe lying in a manger or a carpenter’s son asleep in the boat. It may even initially seem to you, as it did to the disciples, that He does not care. But during whatever life holds this week, remember that Jesus comes in power as the Prince of Peace, always with us, restoring us to God through wholeness and comfort. May He be your peace this week, guarding your soul with peace, filling your spirit with the wholeness of shalom, and ruling as the Prince of Peace in your heart.

Joy by Dalhart Nazarene

No matter what kind of problems and struggles you are facing right now, no matter what kind of season of darkness and pain you are in, let me encourage you not to abandon hope. Hope is still alive, even in our deepest pain and most hopeless circumstances. Hope is alive because God is with us.

What keeps you going when life gets hard? What gives you strength in seasons of uncertainty or sorrow? For many, it is the promise of hope, the sense that something better is coming, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. As Christians, we have a hope that goes beyond wishful thinking or mere optimism. Our hope is rooted in the promises of God, secured by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In our lives, so much of what we do is driven by the idea of earning—earning a paycheck, earning recognition, even earning affection. But the reality of salvation, the greatest gift we could ever receive, is that it isn’t something we can earn. We could never be good enough or work hard enough to deserve it. The beautiful and humbling truth is that salvation is a free gift, given out of God’s abundant grace and love. It is not based on our merit, but on His mercy.

We need a plan to figure out God’s will for me? Here’s a good biblical plan: Romans 12:2, "Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is."

Work is God’s command to us and as such we are to engage in it as service not to man and not just to pay the bills and fill the belly but as service to our king.

All of us who have trusted in Christ are part of the team and prayer is one of our solemn responsibilities. Jesus said we should pray for the harvest and for the laborers. Specifically Paul requests that we should pray for the opportunity for the message to be shared and that it will be well received. He further asks for prayers of protection from those who would try to stop the message.

Some believe that the antichrist will be revealed and the time known as the tribulation will occur before the Lord returns for His church. Post-Trib. Others believe that only part of the tribulation will occur—the antichrist will be revealed and a time of great suffering and a time of rebellion will take place before the Lord takes away his church after which the Lord will pour out His wrath (the final portion of the tribulation. Mid-Trib. Still others believe that the force which is holding back the lawlessness in verse seven is the church and the Lord will come and rapture his church before the antichrist is revealed and the rebellion and tribulation occur while the church is with Christ in heaven. Those who believe this distinguish between the rapture and the second coming. Pre-Trib.

Because of God’s gracious offer through Jesus, we have the choice today whether to Be God’s people who persevere and are purified through the trials of life or we will experience the ultimate pain in payment for our own sins.

When a person becomes a Christian, he usually undergoes some radical life changes, especially if he has had an immoral background. Through the first steps of spiritual growth and self-denial, he gets rid of the large, obvious sins. But sad to say, many believers stop there. They don’t go on to allow the Holy Spirit to eliminate the little sins that clutter the landscape of their lives.

God’s people in the last days aren’t pictured as a doom and gloom crowd, but as a joyful people. It is one of the Marks of the Christian community. We are full of joy, we don’t worry but pray. Regardless of the circumstances of life, we recognize that through Christ we have much to be thankful for.

Christ has made the preparations for us! We could never prepare ourselves, because we could not pay for our own sins, so Jesus paid the price for us—dying on the cross for us—in our place. The Bible word for this is Grace—it means that Jesus gave us a gift we don’t deserve.

His first coming was clothed in weakness, “The Lamb of God”, He came to save the world. His second coming will be in power, “The Lion of Judah”, to initiate the conclusion of time as we know it. He will come to judge the world. Are you ready?

In these few paragraphs we’ve read today we can see an example of how love expressers itself, or a kind of pattern for how we in the church should relate to one another. John said “Let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth.” - 1 John 3:18. Loving isn’t always easy. But love demonstrates itself in sacrificial action. Taking time when you don’t have any, sharing from what little you have. One of the advantages of having one another is that we can encourage one another. We ought to look for those who need our encouragement and offer a few minutes of listening and share a prayer together. Send a card, make a phone call or a visit. That’s the role all of us have—to give one another a push in the faith. As you encourage one another, work to be building the faith of others. Prayer makes a difference in people’s lives. We should pray for one another, and even let one another know that we’re praying. If we cannot love one another, care for one another, or pray for one another as Christians then who can we do these things for?

All of you are leaders. All of you influence people, and ultimately all of us have been commanded by Christ to be leaders—we must make disciples of people everywhere we go—in other words we should be leading people to Jesus.

As Paul writes this letter of encouragement to a church He had started just a few years before, he begins by addressing them as ones “Chosen by God” and he notes several ways that their lives demonstrate that they are chosen. I’d like to suggest that if we are chosen of God that these same things should be evident in our life.