Salvogesis

Their father had just died. His brothers believe that their dad is the only reason Joseph hasn't already killed them. It is in this circumstance that they contact Joseph and say (and they might even be lying), Verse 17, their dad said before he died, “This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly. Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father.” The brothers are guilty. They know it. They approach their Joseph – who is in authority over them – in full fear and trembling. It is with this same sense of deference and even trembling and we should approach God when seeking forgiveness (Psalm 2:1; Proverbs 1:7, 9:10; Ephesians 6:5; Philippians 2:2). We have all committed crimes against God and sins against our neighbours (Romans 3:23, 5:12; Cf. Daniel 9:11). And it is in light of this fact – pertaining specifically to worship - that Matthew 5:23-24 records, “Therefore, if ...

We just returned from Men's Camp a week or so ago. At this men's camp something amazing happened. Reinhard, a gentleman from the Port Alberni Corps got all geared up, climbed the large tree, was hooked up to a line, jumped, and ziplined across that part of the forest. Reinhard was 87 year old. I love Exodus 3 verses 11 and 12. Moses is 80 years old. God meets Moses on a mountain in the desert. God tells Moses that He will use Moses to bring the Israelites out of Egypt to this mountain. Moses asks God, "how do I know that this is true?" God answers, in effect, "When you do what you are told and they are brought back here then will know what I have said is true." When you step out in your faith in God, you will experience the results of God's faithfulness. God was not playing games with Moses. He wanted to encourage Moses in his faith. He encouraged Moses to step out in faith. Is God inviting you to step out in faith in some way today? If so, I encoura...

Have you read those Which Way or Choose Your Own Adventure books before? [1] They are series of stories and at the bottom of each page you get to decide how the story unfolds. The pages often end with a choice for you, the reader, to make. Something along the lines of: You have reached a fork in the road, if you turn left, go to Page 2; if you go right, turn to Page 3. Let’s try one of these Which Way / Choose Your Own Adventure style of stories here shall we? The objective of this story that we are reading is to get to Grandma’s house. To Get To Grandma’s House: You are walking in a dark forest, all alone, at midnight. You should have been to Grandma’s house an hour ago. You look around you. Instantly it strikes you that you are lost. You no longer know where you are. You have seemingly walked these paths a thousand times before but today you must have been dreaming and missed a turn or something. You are lost. You sit down to take stalk of the situation when all of a sudden ...

When Christ returns it will be like a thief in the night. The time and hour we don`t know but we do know the end is coming and then some will go off to eternal happiness and some to weeping and gnashing of teeth. To know this is good news, believe it or not. It is like disaster relief work: I have done a lot of this. A few years ago I helped in the aftermath of a hurricane. The good news is, like natural disasters in general and like when the hurricane struck Galveston Island in particular, was that even though 100 people chose to stay behind and perished, even though those of us who were helping with the relief efforts met, spoke to and prayed with people whose family members chose to reject salvation from the hurricane, people knew it was coming; they had a choice and as a result thousands of people were saved. Can you imagine if the news announcers were so ashamed of the fact the hurricane was coming that they didn’t share the information? Can you imagine if the meteorologis...

In the front of my mind one week, as I was preparing for sermons and Bible studies was the Holy Spirit and the fact that the word ‘spirit’ means ‘wind’ or ‘air’ or ‘breath’ and that as we receive the Holy Breath, we can be saved in everything both now and forever. And then the phone rang. I was told there was a man in the hospital who had a terminal respiratory illness. He was going to die from not being able to breathe the air, the wind. I was told he might not live until tomorrow. I was told he needed a minister and I was told his family wanted a Salvation Army Officer there. I was told he might be ready to accept forgiveness for his sins and receive eternal life. I ran downstairs, I told colleagues, asked for prayer and John drove me over the the hospital, he prayed and I headed upstairs to see the man and his family. And to make a long story short, this man who was dying of a lack of breath, accepted the Breath of God, the Holy Spirit and received eternal life; so that even as ...

Picture a famous Torontonian leading a big rally at the ACC, under all the championship banners hanging from the rafters, extolling the virtues of the ‘greatest hockey franchise ever’ and as everyone in Toronto here is cheering about how they will win another Stanley Cup and maybe even soon - understanding the speaker to be talking about the Leafs - and the crowd is all worked up and then he yells out ‘God bless Canada’s greatest hockey team... the Montreal Canadiens!’ This would be the feelings aroused in these scriptures. And even more, it would be like Jesus extolling the virtues of the greatest country on earth, working us all up into a frenzy believing he is talking about Canada and then says ‘God bless America’ or ‘God bless Saudi Arabia’… ‘Oh you, thought I was talking about Canada ?’You can see why they might get a little upset. They came here wanting words of encouragement and wisdom. Jesus read and spoke about the scriptures and he gave them some words alright. They tho...

I love to study Luke because Luke is a revolutionary text: Luke, like John Wesley, is crystal clear that the Gospel is a social justice gospel: Christians will not acquire and hoard wealth while others are in need. John the Baptist says instead we should “produce acts in keeping with repentance” (v.7). John answers cries from the crowd by telling people to share their money and possessions rather than save them. The tax collectors who are part of this crowd then say in essence, “yes, know that: everybody who is saved will give to those in need. But what specifically should WE, saved tax collectors, who have our own tax franchises, do when we make this public profession of faith?”   “Don’t collect any more than you are required to.” Poor people in the Kingdom of God should have the same access to life as wealthy people, so do your part, “don’t collect any more than you are required to.” To them and those of us who own businesses today, he says: don’t make a profit off peo...

 “Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall. If Satan is divided against himself, how can his kingdom stand?” (Lk 11:23, Mt 12:30) Jesus says, “He who is not with me is against me.” Jesus has been accused of exorcising demons by demonic power (Lk 11:15, Mt 12:24, Mk 3:22). A conviction of witchcraft was punishable by death. Jesus answers this charge by saying that not only is He innocent but also it is impossible to drive out evil with evil as is charged. Only good can drive out evil. Therefore since Jesus can drive out evil, He is good; thus if you oppose Him than you, by definition, are evil. “He who is not with me is against me.” Today are we with him or against him? Jesus casts out demons while telling this parable of the haunted house. Sin, in this parable, has many parallels with addiction. Any of us who have ever struggled with addiction know that each time one becomes clean and then slips up, it becomes more difficul...

Luke 9:25: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:26, Matthew 16:26). Do the ends justify the means? Recently I read an anthology of sermons by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. There was one point he kept coming back to that really resonates with me. His opponents accused him of being a communist. When people pointed out to him that, as far as the USA was concerned, many of his causes were communist ones; MLK would reply that he differs from the communists in one key way. “Lenin”, he said, “believed that the end justified the means.” As a Christian I can never believe that the ends justify the means because God reminds us that the means are the end – what you do on the journey reveals who you are in the end. This is true.   For example if we want to end violent oppression by violently throwing off our oppressors then in the process we will find that we provide the violent oppression for someone else to throw off. Violence ...

I was a Legion chaplain for years. Many times I preached the miracle of reconciliation that arose from WW2: even though the world was torn apart in death and destruction, at the end of the day old foes became friends: Germany , France , and England united in Europe . Canada and the United States too – once enemies – are now each other’s closest trading partners. I have preached on the glorious reconciliation after conflicts. Our service men and women lived, died and served for us. They sacrificed much for peace. I have a question though, how have we repaid them for that peace? Have we now sacrificed that peace for which they fought, lived and died? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the tide of military aggression has flown freely over the earth with nothing to impede its wave of innocent and other blood. Today we have many enemies. Terrorists, ISIL, Iraq , Lybia , Egypt , Syria , Hamas , Yugoslavia , Russia , China and others have all rightfully or wrongfully been named as our ...

Will there ever be world peace? Yes. The real question is when? The Scriptures say that the heavens and earth will be made anew or that even a new heavens and earth will be made. Jesus is the Prince of Peace and Jesus is coming back. When Jesus returns (if not before) there will most certainly be peace on earth. This is important. I think that sometimes we forget that Jesus is actually coming back. The Salvation Army’s official position on world peace is as follows: The plan for creation is that all people shall live in a harmonious relationship with God. It acknowledges that only within this relationship can perfect peace be fully known, and that this peace transcends the circumstances of this life. Greed, selfishness and injustice, however, have entered human lives and often result in conflict and, at times, armed aggression. Therefore, in the light of the Gospel and in obedience to the one who declared, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” The Salvation Army through its minist...

The first thing God told mankind to do when He created us was to go, scatter, fill the earth and the first story recorded after the flood episode, the first thing it is recorded we do in the very first narrative in Genesis 11 is to dig our heals in and refuse to move. We are given the commission to go and fill the earth and instead we build a city with a tower and say, ‘thanks but no thanks God, I think I’ll decline the orders to move.’[4] In Genesis 11 they want to make a name for themselves by disobeying God and staying put after He has tells them to scatter, go, and fill the earth. Now, of course, God vetoes their request to stay and just to show that He isn’t eternally angry He gives them a bit of a going away present – He gives them the gift of tongues, so to speak (Cf. Acts 2).[5] He confuses their language. They stop building this city and they stop building this tower and they go forth and fill the earth. There is a little bit of irony here too. They wanted to stay and build ...

Acts 2 is quite a dramatic chapter in the Bible and parts of it read like a suspense-filled thriller movie. Acts 2 speaks about an appearance of the Holy Spirit after Jesus has returned from the dead. It shows the power and authority of God to all who are present. The signs in this chapter show that Jesus is King; Jesus is God and as Peter speaks to them, the people realize that Jesus is the Christ and they understand, Verse 36, that they have killed the Christ, the one they have been waiting for to save them. They have killed him. These people now standing in front of Peter are like repentant children in front of the school principal, realizing that they’ve done something terribly wrong. They realize that Jesus is the Christ and they realize that they’ve killed him. We’ve killed him and now Jesus is back from the dead. If we didn’t know the ending and for those present who don’t, it could be like a 1970s horror movie. You wrongfully kill someone and they come back from the dead to s...

Is war ever just? This is certainly a difficult question to answer; brilliant churchmen and theologians (Augustine, Aquinas, Moore, Grotius, CS Lewis, John Paul II...) like others before them (Plato and Cicero) have wrestled with this question and fought to find various theoretical formulae in order to test for a just war. Though their intent was noble, the results are ambiguous. A prime example of the struggle is Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli was a brilliant reformer and staunch pacifist – he died in a battle he voluntarily entered.   Part of the difficulty in addressing the question of a just war is, of course, the two Joshuas. God used Joshua of the Old Testament to deliver His people into the Promised Land.   War and violence accompanied this conquest. (Joshua is a Hebrew name; the Greek translation of that name is Jesus.) God uses Joshua of the New Testament, Jesus, to deliver us into the eternal Promised Land. Jesus is the Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6) who teaches that one sho...

Today we are speaking about the church so I know that many people have seen interesting church signs on the Internet. I collected a list of interesting church signs here… 1. Well, you did ask for a sign 2. I don't know why some people change churches. What difference does it matter which one you stay home from? 3. Our Church is like fudge. Sweet with a few nuts. 4. Do you know what hell is? Come hear our preacher. 5. Sign broken. Message inside 6. If God is your co-pilot, switch seats 7. Life Stinks. We have a Pew for you. 8. To err is human, to arrrr is pirate These church signs of course are interesting. Today we are talking about an early church in the city of Corinth. As we remember, 1 Corinthians in our Bible is a copy of a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to this church around 53 or 54CE. That is about twenty years after Jesus has risen from the dead, between 15 and 20 years since Paul became a Christian and just 1, 2 or 3 years since the Christian Church w...