Contentment

If I am content with what I earn, then I will be a cheerful giver 

If I am content with where I live, then I will be able to open my heart to the one who does not have a home

If I am content with what I have, then my eyes will search out for the ones with needs

If I am content with what I do, then I will have time for another who is weak 

If I am content with my family, I will yearn to search for those without one

If I am content with what I don't have, I can still be content because I can do all things through  Christ who strengthens me 

For Godliness with contentment is great gain.

- Indu 

Worship - sermon notes, Pastor Rock Dillaman

Worship - sermon notes, 

- Pastor Rock Dillaman

1. Worship can flourish in the midst of evil! It’s rooted in our souls, not our circumstances.
2. Worship is a lifestyle of honoring God with uncompromised love and determined submission.
3. Authentic worship isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle, and the evidence of its existence is authentic holiness.
4. Worship is not for the faint of heart! It calls for courage.
5. Authentic worship contradicts the value systems of the world and will always face criticism.
- See more at: http://media.perpetuatech.com/watch?v=OUJEQzU1OTVEQQ&hrm=1&c=http%3A//www.acac.net/index.cfm/PageID/859/index.html#sthash.Q2kv73AF.dpuf

1. Worship can flourish in the midst of evil! It’s rooted in our souls, not our circumstances.

2. Worship is a lifestyle of honoring God with uncompromised love and determined submission.

3. Authentic worship isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle, and the evidence of its existence is authentic holiness.

You can jump high in church but walk crooked when you land

4. Worship is not for the faint of heart! It calls for courage.

5. Authentic worship contradicts the value systems of the world and will always face criticism.

6. Things initially seen as waste are often valued in heaven.

7. In God’s Kingdom it’s the recipient - not the gift - that determines the gift’s value.

8. Authentic worship serves the world even when the world doesn’t recognize that reality.

9. Authentic worship is extravagant in that it gives God its very best.

10. It’s our sacrifice that determines extravagance - not cost.

11. Worship has implications we could never fully anticipate and may not see at all.

12. Jesus puts meaning into the worship He accepts.

13. Authentic worship is content with anonymity. The knowledge that Jesus knows is enough for those who believe Jesus knows!

1. Worship can flourish in the midst of evil! It’s rooted in our souls, not our circumstances.
2. Worship is a lifestyle of honoring God with uncompromised love and determined submission.
3. Authentic worship isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle, and the evidence of its existence is authentic holiness.
4. Worship is not for the faint of heart! It calls for courage.
5. Authentic worship contradicts the value systems of the world and will always face criticism.
- See more at: http://media.perpetuatech.com/watch?v=OUJEQzU1OTVEQQ&hrm=1&c=http%3A//www.acac.net/index.cfm/PageID/859/index.html#sthash.Q2kv73AF.dpuf

1. Worship can flourish in the midst of evil! It’s rooted in our souls, not our circumstances.
2. Worship is a lifestyle of honoring God with uncompromised love and determined submission.
3. Authentic worship isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle, and the evidence of its existence is authentic holiness.
4. Worship is not for the faint of heart! It calls for courage.
5. Authentic worship contradicts the value systems of the world and will always face criticism.
- See more at: http://media.perpetuatech.com/watch?v=OUJEQzU1OTVEQQ&hrm=1&c=http%3A//www.acac.net/index.cfm/PageID/859/index.html#sthash.Q2kv73AF.dpuf

Learning to Wait

Learning to Wait
by John Ortberg, from If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat



When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. — Matthew 14:32

Waiting is the hardest work of hope. ~ Lewis Smedes

Waiting patiently is not a strong suit in American society.

A woman’s car stalls in traffic. She looks in vain under the hood to identify the cause, while the driver behind her leans relentlessly on his horn. Finally she has had enough. She walks back to his car and offers sweetly, “I don’t know what the matter is with my car. But if you want to go look under the hood, I’ll be glad to stay here and honk for you.”

We are not a patient people. We tend to be in a horn-honking, microwaving, Fed-Ex mailing, fast-food eating, express-lane shopping hurry. People don’t like to wait in traffic, on the phone, in the store, or at the post office.

Robert Levine, in a wonderful book called A Geography of Time, suggests the creation of a new unit of time called the honko-second — “the time between when the light changes and the person behind you honks his horn.” He claims it is the smallest measure of time known to science.

Most of us do not like waiting very much, so we like the fact that Matthew shows Jesus to be the Lord of urgent action. Three times in just a few sentences Matthew uses the word immediately — always of Jesus: Jesus made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead of Him “immediately.” When the disciples thought they were seeing a ghost and cried out in fear, Jesus answered them “immediately.” When Peter began to sink and cried out for help, Jesus “immediately” reached out his hand and caught him.

Jesus’ actions are swift, discerning, and decisive. He doesn’t waste a honko-second. And yet, this is also a story about waiting. Matthew tells us that Jesus comes to the disciples “during the fourth watch of the night.”

The Romans divided the night into four shifts: 6:00–9:00; 9:00-midnight; midnight–3:00; and 3:00–6:00. So Jesus came to the disciples sometime after 3 o’clock. But they had been in the boat since before sundown the previous day. Why the long delay? If I were one of the disciples, I think I would prefer Jesus to show up at the same time or even slightly ahead of the storm. I’d like Him there in a honko-second.

But Matthew has good reasons for noting the time. A. E. J. Rawlinson notes that early Christians suffering their own storm of persecution may have taken great comfort in this delay:

Faint hearts may even have begun to wonder whether the Lord Himself had not abandoned them to their fate, or to doubt the reality of Christ. They are to learn from this story that they are not forsaken, that the Lord watches over them unseen… [that] the Living One, Master of wind and waves, will surely come quickly for their salvation, even though it be in the “fourth watch of the night.”

Matthew wanted his readers to learn to wait.

Another moment of waiting involves Peter’s decision to leave the boat. He cannot do this on the strength of his own impulse; he must ask Jesus’ permission first, then wait for an answer — for the light to turn green. I wonder if another type of waiting was involved for Peter. What do you suppose his very first steps on the water looked like? I expect that Jesus was an accomplished water-walker. But for Peter, I wonder if there wasn’t a learning curve involved. Maybe, like the Bill Murray character in the movie What About Bob?, he had to start with baby steps.

Learning to walk always requires patience.

It was not until the whole episode was over that the disciples got what they wanted — “the wind died down.” Why couldn’t Jesus have made the wind die down “immediately” — as soon as He saw the disciples’ fear? It would have made Peter’s walk easier. But apparently Jesus felt they would gain something by waiting.

Consider the activity that Peter and the other disciples had to engage in right up to the very end: waiting.

Let’s say you decide to get out of the boat. You trust God. You take a step of faith — you courageously choose to leave a comfortable job to devote yourself to God’s calling; you will use a gift you believe God has given you even though you are scared to death; you will take relational risks even though you hate rejection; you will go back to school even though people tell you it makes no sense financially; you decide to trust God and get out of the boat. What happens next?

Well, maybe you will experience a tremendous, nonstop rush of excitement. Maybe there will be an immediate confirmation of your decision — circumstances will click, every risk will pay off, your efforts will be crowned with success, your spiritual life will thrive, your faith will double, and your friends will marvel, all in the space of a honko-second. Maybe. But not always. For good reasons, God does not always move at our frantic pace. We are too often double espresso followers of a decaf Sovereign.

Some forms of waiting — on expressways and in doctor’s offices — are fairly trivial in the overall scheme of things. But there are more serious and difficult kinds of waiting:

• The waiting of a single person who hopes God might have marriage in store but is beginning to despair
• The waiting of a childless couple who desperately want to start a family
• The waiting of Nelson Mandela as he sits in a prison cell for twenty-seven years and wonders if he will ever be free or if his country will ever know justice
• The waiting of someone who longs to have work that is meaningful and significant and yet cannot seem to find it
• The waiting of a deeply depressed person for a morning when she will wake up wanting to live
• The waiting of a child who feels awkward and clumsy and longs for the day when he gets picked first on the playground
• The waiting of persons of color for the day when everyone’s children will be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”
• The waiting of an elderly senior citizen in a nursing home — alone, seriously ill, just waiting to die

Every one of us, at some junctures of our lives, will have to learn to wait.

Waiting may be the hardest single thing we are called to do. So it is frustrating when we turn to the Bible and find that God Himself, who is all-powerful and all-wise, keeps saying to his people, Wait.

Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for Him… Wait for the LORD, and keep to His way, and He will exalt you to inherit the land.

God comes to Abraham when he is seventy-five and tells him he is going to be a father, the ancestor of a great nation. How long was it before that promise was fulfilled? Twenty-four years. Abraham had to wait.

God told the Israelites that they would leave their slavery in Egypt and become a nation. But the people had to wait four hundred years.

God told Moses he would lead the people to the Promised Land. But they had to wait forty years in the wilderness.

In the Bible, waiting is so closely associated with faith that sometimes the two words are used interchangeably. The great promise of the Old Testament was that a Messiah would come. But Israel had to wait — generation after generation, century after century. And when the Messiah came, He was recognized only by those who had their eyes fixed on his coming — like Simeon. He was an old man who “was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.”

But even the arrival of Jesus did not mean that the waiting was over. Jesus lived, taught, was crucified, was resurrected, and was about to ascend when His friends asked Him, “Lord, will you restore the kingdom now?” That is, “Can we stop waiting?”

And Jesus had one more command:

Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised.

And the Holy Spirit came — but that still did not mean that the time of waiting was over.

Paul wrote,

We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Forty-three times in the Old Testament alone, the people are commanded,

Wait. Wait on the LORD.

The last words in the Bible are about waiting:

The one who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’

It may not seem like it, but in light of eternity, it is soon. Hang on. “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” All right, we’ll hang on. But come! We’re waiting for You.

Why? Why does God make us wait? If He can do anything, why doesn’t He bring us relief and help and answers now?

At least in part, to paraphrase Ben Patterson, what God does in us while we wait is as important as what it is we are waiting for.

Christ's second coming

Christ's second coming

I am no bible scholar. But I know this - Jesus promised us He will come again. The great hope of Christian life is that He will come again, and when that happens, our responsibility is to be blameless and holy. The work of the Holy Spirit in every believer is to help us become holier each day. I for one know it is extremely challenging. But, that's exactly what we should aim to be - blameless and holy. 

While we await the second coming of the Lord, it is good to also recognize what the Bible teaches about the time when He will come. There are lots of passages in the Bible we can study and interpret and maybe even over interpret. Let's just look at what Jesus said.

1. He will come like a lightning - it will be quick, at a time when we do not expect, and everyone will see it.

2. The World will be just like the time before the great flood in Noah's days.

3. No one knows the time and the day or hour.

4. He has prepared room for you - He is coming back to give you eternal life with Him.

5. Be ready for His coming, always.

What can we learn from these statements in the gospels (For eg; Matthew 24)?

- Don't believe anyone if they say they know the exact time when Jesus will come again. No one will know it. Jesus said it. 

- Be ready always - aim to live a blameless, holy life. 

- Put your hope and trust in His words, and live a life of watchful waiting.
 

Meanwhile, as we instruct and warn our fellow believers, what is the one thing we should maintain? Discernment. Let me explain. For instance, there is a statement that the American healthcare law, nicknamed Obamacare, has mandated placement of a chip in everyone's body. Is this true? I have searched the 2500+ page document. There is absolutely no mention of this. Has anyone been subjected to a chip placement? No. So, are we propagating falsehood when we forward whatsapp messages that we get stating such false news? Yes.

This is the problem with enthusiastic Christians. We are blinded by our pastors and teachers. We gulp whatever they throw at us. We believe all the whatsapp messages we get. Including this one. Make it a practice to verify information before passing it on.

What is the consequence of such lack of discernment? People stop trusting your words. If we propagate one false news, what is the guarantee that the rest of your statements are correct? It is the like the famed children's story of a boy who tricked his villagers about a tiger coming to kill them. He manages to scare them once, twice, three times. But then, when the tiger really came, no one believed him.

So, dear fellow believers. Let us not be like that boy, and cause confusion among the rest of the fellow believers. Let us not spread rumors. 

Instead, let us await His second coming with hope, and live a life of faith and love.  Let us encourage each other in their walk to become a mature Christian.

Who Is the Antichrist?

“[The man of lawlessness will] set himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God” (v. 4b).
- 2 Thessalonians 2:1-17

Second Thessalonians 2:3–4 speaks of a coming “man of lawlessness” who will set himself up in God’s temple and proclaim himself to be God. Revelation 13 tells of a coming “beast” who will wear out the saints of God and be known by the number 666. The epistles of John warn of “antichrist.” Who are these people, or are they all the same person?
As always in the area of prophecy, there are a variety of views. The older historicist approach usually identified the beast (“out of the sea”) as the Roman emperor, while the second beast (“out of the land”) of Revelation 13, together with the false prophet of that chapter, were associated with the papacy. The man of sin was also the pope, for he sat in the temple (the church) and exalted himself.
Modern futurism links the man of sin and the beast, and says that this is a man who will arise in the future just before Christ returns. He will be the false Christ, the antichrist, and will unite the world in a new tower of Babel against the remnant of the faithful.
Preterists usually see 666 as a symbol for the name “Nero Caesar,” and thus they identify the beast as Nero, while the second beast and false prophet are identified with the Sanhedrin and Judaizers who sought to stamp out the early church. The man of sin is taken by some to be Nero, and by others identified as the high priest, who literally sat in the temple and opposed Christ.
Modern futurism tends to have a very political understanding of this figure. Beast/antichrist/man of sin is a world leader, not an ecclesiastical opponent of the faithful. The older views (preterist and historicist) focus attention more on the church. The greatest enemies of the faith, they say, are in the church, as the serpent was in the Garden.
What about the antichrist? Here there is a different kind of question. Did John intend for us to envision some particular person as the antichrist, or did he mean that any self-conscious opponent of the faith is an antichrist (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7)? One thing we can be sure of: There will always be political beasts and ecclesiastical antichrists who seek to oppose the truth, and we must always be on our guard against them.

What should I do to prepare for the rapture?

What should I do to prepare for the rapture?
 (based on John Piper's interview)

The rapture is mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18. That in essence is rapture. It is when the Church (those who died, and those who are living) rises to meet the Lord.

Therefore, encourage one another - you will meet him. Don't worry! He is coming.
2 Thessalonians 1:10 - He comes to be glorified, and to be marveled. We are made to marvel - and this will be the day when we have the best marveling experience.

But, does this event happen after or before the season of the great tribulation (Matthew 24:21; Revelation 7:14). Do we go through the tribulation? Or do we go skip the seven year period of tribulation? There's difference of opinion about this order. Piper believes in post-tribulation (the former). The reason he believes in post-tribulation is because of the following verse.

2 Thessalonians 1:5-9 -  All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering.  God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you  and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels.  He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.  They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.

According to Paul, God will give you relief from the suffering when he is revealed from heaven.  So according to Piper, there's only one second coming, and it happens after the suffering and tribulation. 

How should you prepare for the rapture? 
1. Pray for Jesus to come. Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus.
2. Trust the promises of God to turn all our suffering for our good. 
3. Do the will of God so that when he comes, he will find you faithful. 

 

First day

Another first day in my life. I have had so many of these that I have lost count - first day at nursery and first grade (I still remember crying and watching my dad walk away), first day at the new school where I found all my friends, first day at the board exams in tenth grade (I cried yet again), first day at the eleventh grade, first day at medical school (I reached late), first day at graduate school (I had trouble tying a tie and ended up half an hour late because of that), first day at the new hospital for residency, first day for fellowship, first day at new work, and finally today, the first day seeing patients as an independent medical practitioner in the United States. There's a nervous excitement, naah, I would say an anxiety. I know I will be fine, because I know I am walking in God's will. When that happens I have peace.

But still, it's a first day nonetheless. Thankfully, my parents arrived and they were there to send me away. Papa ironed my shirt as always. Amidst all the first days, I have that sense of constancy in my life for which I am thankful to the utmost. The constancy of having people who love you from the bottom of their hearts. I am just plain and simple grateful today. And, if you are wondering - I did not cry today.

I did go through another of my old traditions - I read Psalms 121. Now, off to the clinic.