Newsletter # 73

SALVADOR & DIANNE’S MSINDISI MONTHLY

NUMBER:      73.       OCT 2010

PO BOX 1481
VRYHEID 3100
KWAZULU NATAL
SOUTH AFRICA
+27 (0) 728311008
Email:  msindisi@gmail.com ,
salv.di@gmail.com

Moriel KwaZulu Mission Website: https://morielkzn.wordpress.com

Personal Website: http://msindisi.googlepages.com

 

Dear Friends and family,

 

This has been a full month for us with much happening. Time seems to have flown since we last wrote. On a personal note we can now say that our hut is completed. Di finished painting the doors over the month just in time as some of the rains have started. We were given a water tank to collect some of the summer rains this is now installed and doing its job. This will make a huge difference we will use this water for the toilets, garden, and clothes washing. Water is very precious when you cannot just turn on a tap. Di is still in the process of finishing painting Gogo hut. This will help keep some of the damp out. Gogo is delighted. There is much activity at the Kraal has Phumulani is also doing work on his hut as it has been leaking badly. We are eating from our veggie garden which is always a pleasure to go out and pick from whatever you need.  We also have a small herb garden that is full of basil, rock, parsley, coriander.

 

 

This month we have had a lot of truck troubles, the stabilizing bar snapped in half and also the bearings have gone. The carburetor also needs replacing. We work the truck like a pack horse as it is needed everyday for the work. Due to these few hick ups sadly we have had to postpone a few visits to evangelize in the Ngenitsheni area. Friends have been so good in helping us out, lending us their car and a couple of Christian businesses in Vryheid whose owners attend the Baptist Church have also done work on the truck at short notice. Many many thanks. On a Sunday we often have up to 16 people in the truck taking them to church. Last week was a particularly special time. As we arrived to pick everyone up, Mr. Khumalo (an older gentleman who has been coming to church with Jabulani) approached Sal and explained that he was unable to attend this week. He then went on to say that he really wanted to leave all the old stuff behind and follow the Lord. Sal said that was wonderful and asked when he decided to follow the Lord. He said “today”. Sal then asked “Would you like to pray now?” To which he replied “yes”. They both dropped to their knees there and then and prayed. These are very precious moments in the work as the path is narrow and few are traveling on it. We give all Glory and Honour to God for his gracious leading of Mr. Khumalo into His eternal Kingdom. Just yesterday he came over with Jabulani for his baptism even though it was a cold day here in KwaZulu in the same place that Jabulani was baptized. Jabulani was grinning from ear to ear. Sunday had taken him by surprise because Mr. Khumalo had said nothing to him about his decision to follow the Lord. Another wonderful time was had. As we left he said to Sal “I left the old man back there.” They both do some small scale farming and sell vegetables to the local community. Mr. Khumalo has even tried to plant Pineapples and is seeing how it goes. They are hard workers who work with what they have.

 

We have the pleasure of having 2 families from the Baptist church coming over for lunch on Saturday. We have made some great friendships. One of ladies runs a pre-school for Zulu kids in town (Vryheid) called Care Bear. She asked if we would come and share with the kids one morning which we were very happy to. This has turned into a regularly monthly time of singing and sharing the gospel.

 

The Louwsburg bible study is still going well. Sal is now going through last day teaching. Over the last few weeks we went through the different interpretations on when the rapture maybe. This was helpful for many. Several are now looking at the different possible options and realizing that whenever the time we must be ready. We are never promised that we will not have persecution and suffering just because we are Gods children. It gives you a much deeper concern to pray for all presucted Christians out there who are suffering for Christs name today. It is essential that what ever our view of the rapture, we are committed to following the Lord, whatever suffering or persecution awaits us and to long and hope for our Lord to return and grant us our new bodies. The nearer we get the more we should long for Jesus’ coming and make the most of the time we have left to share the Gospel.

 

Kim, one of the ladies who attend the Louwsburg bible study, asked if we would give a message to a women’s group in Louwsburg in the month. This is group which is set up for older woman and younger woman to come together on a Monday and share craft ideas. However, just before we were to go, Kim’s farm had been set alight by a kid, playing with matches, and the veldt fire took off being aided by a strong wind. We tried to help but it was pointless until the local forestry guys and a couple of farmers came to help before which we left for the ladies group. We were late but the group was very open to hearing the gospel and asked Sal many pertinent questions about their culture and the bible. Some of their craft work is just beautiful. In the future Di will be sharing with the group how to knit the little jumpers that the Aussie ladies send over for the kids.

 

 

The month sadly saw the moving of an Afrikaans couple who lived across the road from us. They had been staying in the home for 10years. However when the land was sold to the government, a few years back, it was given to a small community. Gogo tried hard to keep them their but the family are scared of certain community members turning to violence and harming their children. We helped them to move their stuff over two days. Salvi was able also to witness to them of his faith.

 

Evangelism continues in the other areas. On Sunday afternoons Phumulani and Salvi have finished the area called Esihlengeni and are starting to do the area between Eastmine and Alpha mine. While they were finishing the area around Esihlengeni they managed to witness to a guy called Muzi. Muzi has quitted the ancestral and witchcraft. He says he only prays to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However he is still in the Zionist church and is torn between that and the Shembites who believe Shembe was the black messiah. He said he was a Zionist in his mother’s womb and insinuated that he cannot change. Salvi said, “You are 100% correct. You were born a Zionist, you need to be born again.” Please pray for him. The guys gave him a bible and he promised to read it every day. Salvi has almost finished the Eastmine area. It will be completed in a month or two. To make more progress in Eastmine, Salvi has stopped doing the gospel study at the KwaNyandeni Kraal and will invite them to church instead.

 

Salvi has completed his Greek assignment and is now studying the next Greek module. He has also been training on a Friday evening with Arsenal Football Club… no, not the Premier English team but the local Zulu club who named themselves after that club. The guys are great and have a really good manner. When someone starts to get upset at a fowl or mistake the others say, “Calm down, calm down” in a Zulu-liverpool accent. Unfortunately Phumulani hasn’t been able to write a report for the church for this month’s newsletter. Time is unfortunately against us.

 

We just want to thank you all for your prayers and involvement in our lives and ministry here. All glory to the Lord for His salvation and grace in and through us.

 

Salvi and Di.

 

1 JOHN PART 1

 

CHAPTER 1

 

The Preservation of the truth.

 

I believe that certain epistles in the New Testament are placed in their order for a reason. The letter to the Romans comes first, and I believe that is the case because it is a letter that expounds the Gospel, full of foundational truth. Then the letter of Corinthians is to do with sanctification, adding to ones faith moral excellence. Then the letter to the Galatians speaks of the threat of the Judaisers in perverting the gospel; adding to ones moral excellence, knowledge. But when we come to 2 Peter onwards every letter is dealing with the problem of false teachers. This is not presented as a side issue or one of many issues in these letters but as a main issue. 3 John is slightly different because the person who John is speaking out against is not so much teaching heresy but is teaching the believers not to be hospitable to other believers. If they did, this person (whom John names as Diotrephes) would put them out of the Church. So in effect John says, ‘Watch out for that guy, when I come I am going to challenge him.’ ‘I will call to mind his deeds which he does.’ Now why are the letters that major on deception put at the end of the bible? Is it because they are the least important?

 

Jesus said, when the son of man comes, will he even find faith on the earth? That word faith is ‘pistis’, (Lk 18: 8) which not only means trust and persuasion but it also means faithfulness. Are the elect going to keep crying out to the Lord for justice, are they going to stick by Him and trust in Him or are they going to turn to another?

 

2 Thessalonians 2: 1 – 12. In this Church it seems that there were people who were going around saying that the day of the Lord had already come. Now look at verse 3. Let no one deceive you! Automatically deception is linked to Jesus’ return. We see this in Matthew 24 when the disciples asked Jesus what the sign of His coming would be. The sign that he spoke of most was deception, false christs and false apostles. Now 2 Thessalonians warns of 3 deceptions. One for the present time, one as a setting up for the antichrist and the last as a deception from the Antichrist and false prophet. The first deception is what we read in verse 3. Paul deals with the deception of the timing of Jesus’ return. That is why it is wrong when people say, ‘Jesus is coming back on such and such a day’, ‘the rapture will happen on the 5^th of June 1996’, etc. Paul said, ‘Even if the letter looks like it has come from us do ot believe it.’ But the second deception lies also in the same verse and this is called the apostasy. The Greek is ‘Apostasia’, and this means a falling away or a defection from truth. It is the feminine for of the neutral, ‘apostasion’ meaning divorce. Because when we separate from Truth we are separating from Jesus.

 

But why is this connected with the end times? Because look at the last deception in verse nine and onwards. The last deception is to do with signs and lying wonders. When people speak against the anti-christ many will rebuke them and say “How dare you speak against God’s anointed, who had a fatal wound that was healed. How can the devil heal a fatal wound?” “How can you say this prophet is of the devil? This great prophet caused fire to come down from heaven, just like Elijah. Would you saying Elijah was of the Devil too?” The man of lawlessness is preceded by the spirit of lawlessness. His deception is preceded by a deception within the church. There would be no way that churches would accept the anti-christ if they were not conditioned to accept him in the first place. And what is the antidote to this spiritual sickness? How do we protect ourselves from the delusion that God is going to send? Verse 10 shows that we need to receive the love of the truth to be saved. I like how Paul writes it because he uses the word receive. Because naturally we do not love the truth, at least in the way God expects, therefore the love of the truth has to be a gift given from God. Do we truly pray, ‘Father, please give me a love for the truth’, and start to soak in the Word of God or are we going to go through the motions of church attendance and ‘going with the flow’ of universal Christianity. 2 Peter says these false teachers secretly bring in destructive heresies. They do not say “this is heresy”. Rather they say they have received new revelation from the Lord. And this is what John is writing into.

 

Paul writes that we should share the truth in love and John is a very good embodiment of this. He talks more about love in this epistle than any other epistle in the New Testament. But John’s love is not a ‘namby, pamby’ love that is scared of offending people. His love is a love of protecting his children. He is like the father who is protecting his daughter from the lad who is notorious for knocking up young ladies. It does not seem loving to the guy or the daughter but it is full of love for the purity of his daughter and the protection of having her heart broken. John tells us the reasons he has for writing this letter in different verses. I will pick out three of them for this introduction. Firstly in 1 John 1: 3 he states that the apostles declare their message so that his readership can have fellowship with them and with God. Secondly in 1 John 2: 26 John says he has written these things concerning those who are trying to seduce them and thirdly, in 1 John 5: 13 he has written to them that they may believe in the name of the Son of God and that they may know that they have life. You see these Christians had had contact and had been disturbed by Gnostic Christians. Gnosticism was a stream of Christianity that started to developed during the time of the apostles but became more systemised by various groups after the apostles died out. It’s foundation was based in platonic ideas. Plato who lived about 400 years before Christ believed that anything physical was a pale shadow of the spiritual reality and was inferior to it. He also taught that there was something of the divine in everybody’s soul. This developed into the idea that everything physical was evil and everything spiritual (i.e non physical was good). Those influenced by Plato, such as Philo the Alexandrian Jew, would often treat the bible’s history, esp Genesis, as merely containing symbols of higher spiritual truths. He found the historical context unimportant and possibly viewed Genesis as mythical. Even Christian bible interpreters coming after Philo, such as Clement of Alexandria and to a lesser degree, Origen, (both of which lived after the apostolic era, regarded the literal, historical sense of scripture as inferior. What really mattered was the higher spiritual truth. So they were heavily allegorical in their handling of scripture.

 

During the time of the apostles these platonic ideas, that everything physical was evil, started infiltrating the Church. This started to conflict with the teaching of the apostles at various points. Firstly the view of the resurrection was rejected because a physical resurrection would be something evil, so this was spiritualised. The physical return of Christ was spiritualised. Towards 100AD these ideas began to develop more and after 100 AD more complex Gnostic theologies emerged. Working from these platonic presuppositions and changing scripture to fit in with them it was argued that God was spirit and was good. But because everything physical is evil, it was reasoned that a good spiritual God could not have created the cosmos. Therefore the teaching was asserted that many emanations (deities) flowed from the Divine and the further these emanations were removed from the source the less good. Thus a lesser deity, who was far from the Divine source created the heavens and earth. He was seen to be the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Jews. Only, when man fell it was not because he sinned against God but because he was tricked by the Jewish God into believe that He was the only true God. Thus man lost his knowledge of the Divine source.

 

The true spiritual divine God therefore sent Jesus to free people from that evil God of the Jews and to restore the lost and hidden ‘knowledge’ hence we have Gnosticism. This ‘knowledge’ was seen as the ticket to salvation and was attained by different levels of knowledge into which certain Christians were initiated. All other Christians were seen by the Gnostics to be on an inferior level. The Christians who had not yet received this revelation knowledge were carnal and the Gnostics were spiritual. These Gnostics were attaining to higher levels of secret knowledge, through their visions and experiences with ‘wisdom’. After ascended through the various levels of secret knowledge, one came to the revelation of knowledge that had been lost through the fall that man also has the spark of the divine within him. Man is God. More could be said about Gnosticism but this is enough information to help us understand the situation John was writing into. These Gnostic Christians were coming into these churches and upsetting the faith of Christians whose faith was not informed by dreams and visions but only by Apostolic teaching, such as we find in scripture. For them, revelation knowledge was apprehended by all Christians and not only those who had a certain experience. The claims of the Gnostics, who would claim to see Jesus, or ‘Sophia’ (the angel wisdom) were unsettling them.

 

We see that on our own day there are types of Gnostic teaching. Some claim that the Bible is OK but they have a more direct line to God. “Yes you have the Bible but Jesus appeared to me and told me.” “You have head knowledge, but we have the revelation knowledge.” Gnostics in the early church believed that Jesus was either the Christ who appeared to be a man, but was not or he was a man who received the Christ spirit and became Christ at his baptism. This is the same spirit of the statement by Kenneth Copeland who stated that if he had the same knowledge as Jesus He could have died on the cross for our sins. The heart of it is to bring Jesus down to our level and to raise us to God’s. One such person of John’s day was a guy called Cerinthus and it is documented in Eusebius’ history of the church that John went to have a bath in the public bath at Ephesus, recognising Cerinthus being inside, rushed out shouting “Let us get out of here, even let the bath house come down because Cerinthus, the enemy of truth is inside it.”

 

1 John 1: 1-4

 

With these first four verses I want us to gain 2 perspectives; a negative one and a positive one. Firstly, from the introduction we have looked at can you see what John is driving at? You see these Gnostics were saying, “Jesus told me this. I have divine revelation.” If a Christian said, but “the bible teaches the opposite” then that person would have been looked at as one who is not initiated. ‘You have not received that special experience, you have not gone through the right rituals and so obviously you are ignorant, unenlightened and you cannot understand the bible in the way that we can.’ What John is saying in effect is this. ‘Oh these people have seen Jesus in a vision have they? I have seen Jesus too, except the Jesus that I saw was not in some vision that could be argued to be a figment of my imagination. This Jesus I touched with my hands and saw with my eyes. I lived with Him, ate with Him. He was not an esoteric word. I did not get a word from the Lord. The Word became a man and lived among us. We were his friends. And this Jesus is saying something different to your Jesus, so which is the real Jesus?” The last verse of John’s epistle is “Little Children keep yourselves from idols.” Do you think he is talking about wooden little statues? He does not even mention idolatry once in the letter. No, rather he is hitting against the Gnostic ‘Jesus’ because if we are worshipping a Jesus that contradicts the bible then we are committing idolatry and that is why doctrine is important. Doctrine does not only concern beliefs about someone that can be taken or left. Think about yourself and the things you dislike in other people. Maybe you have a real aversion to lies. You hate lies more than anything and you hate liars. What if someone went around calling you a liar? ‘But it is just a doctrine, is it not? Can you not take it or leave it? Does it really matter?’ God forgives wrong doctrine but he hates wrong doctrine because wrong doctrine is maligning His very character. In fact 1 John 1: 3 says that what they (as the apostles) have heard and seen, they declare to the readers that the readers may have fellowship with the apostles and with God. In other words if we do not hold to the teaching of the apostles as they taught it, if we go against scripture and twist it we are not fellowshipping with the Lord. Fellowship and Biblical unity has to happen through Truth, holding onto the teaching of scripture. And the outcome of this is also joy.

The second perspective I want us to draw from these four verses is a more positive one. You see when John first saw Jesus he saw Him as a man, just like them, but a special man and John hoped that He would be the Messiah. But somewhere down the line came the realisation that this ‘man’ who he ate with, who he hung around, who he leant on the bosom of, was actually there before the creation of the world and that must have been a scary realisation. Look at Revelation 1: 17. This same Jesus who John was close to, intimate with, who John was so familiar with, is the same Jesus in Revelation but when John sees Him, there is no familiarity. Rather John describes Jesus as if He was someone he had never met before and the same Jesus who he rested on at the last supper is the same Jesus before whom he falls down as one dead. Just when you think you know someone! Have you ever had that experience? It is an awesome thought, that someone who you think you know so well turns out to be someone that you barely knew at all. In most cases people feel betrayed, but not John because Jesus was not deceiving them. He was always who he was but they were too dull, and often we are too dull to perceive it. For the Gnostics the Word, the logos, was a concept, a spiritual thing beyond the realm of the physical, experienced by only the privileged few who had a special initiation. But John came to the realisation at some point in his life that this elusive logos was actually so near to them it was unbelievable. This logos was a man who was there for all to see and the only initiation needed was to believe in the one whom God had sent. By believing we may have life in His name and what is eternal life? John 17: 3; eternal life it is to know God.

 

1 John 1: 5 – 2: 2. Next John explains what the message is that the apostles gave. At the crux of the whole issue is the Truth that God is light and in Him there is no darkness. There is white, there is black but there is no grey. God deals in truth, the devil deals in lies mixed with the truth. I knew of one church where the pastor forbade new Christians to read any book other than the bible. I would not say something like that should be imposed but I can see the sense of it. God is light and in Him there is no darkness. You see light is connected with Truth and darkness is connected with non truth or lies. John makes a distinction between the two, he makes a sharp contrast. We either walk in darkness or we walk in light. We must decide which way we are going to travel in. If we are going to walk in the grey area then we are deciding to walk in darkness because in God there is no darkness. I know we are human, I know we fall. Even John acknowledges this in verse 9 but we must make a conscious commitment to walk in light. Light is painful and revolutionary. Why is light painful? Because it exposes your sin and your shame and brings your muck and filth out into the open for God to see. I have to face up to my shame. John 3: 19 – 21. Why is light revolutionary? Because the world is in darkness and light is in stark contrast to darkness. Therefore we are different to the world. The world pretends that it is good but we own up, with hands raised that we are guilty as charged and need the grace of God.

 

In this passage John gives us two types of lies and because of this we can say there are two aspects of Truth. Firstly John states in verse 6 that if we confess we have fellowship with God but are living a life that is not consistent with that profession we are lying and we do not practice the truth. Your profession may be biblical but it is only truth if the practice of ones life is informed by the truth. We are not saying if someone falls and sins, they forfeit their salvation. What it is to say is that if you sin, do not go on sinning. Walking is not a one off action but is a course of life. We cannot walk down a path of sin and say that we have the truth. Our profession may be theologically correct but we are still lying. Secondly Truth has to be theologically or biblically correct. It has to accord with the scriptures. Verse 8 says that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Doctrine is not just words that people spout out. What we confess and teach must be in line with scripture. But we are so fallen and after hearing this we may feel that there is no hope for us. We may think, ‘I have a problem with sin, maybe the truth is not in me’. Take courage and lift your head up. John does not want to bring his readers under a weight of guilt without lifting a finger to help. John knows what we are like, he knows that we kick ourselves for stupid sins that should never have been committed. He was a son of thunder himself and wanted to see whole cities wiped out. He was selfishly ambitious, seeking for place and position in Jesus’ kingdom, but he says in verse 9 if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Why do we need to confess? Because God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. To confess our sins means to be vulnerable. To open up about our sins to God is to tell him things about ourselves that He finds so hideous that He must punish it. To open up to God about your sin is to say to Him, ‘Lord, You deserve to squash me. I only deserve condemnation and judgement.’ To open up to God means to allow ourselves to be broken. So why would we even do such a thing? Because of the promise God gives us. If we can just stay in the light; if we can open up and allow ourselves to be broken; if we would put ourselves in that place that God would be able to squash us; if we would do all that, He will not squash us. Instead He forgives us. Why? Because we are so special? No, but because God is love and though he is angry with the wicked everyday, He never delights in the death of the wicked. Because God resists the proud but He gives grace to the humble. But it does not stop with forgiveness. The blood of Jesus cleanses from all unrighteousness. We must not only seek for forgiveness from God. Many people, including ourselves at times, love the first part of this verse but not the second part. People want the forgiveness because it delivers from hell and the judgement of sin. People want that but they do not want to be cleansed. Why? Because being cleansed means letting go of sins that we would rather hold on to, that bring us some sort of temporal pleasure, or because it excuses our weaknesses so that we do not have to do anything about it. But the verse does not say that the blood of Jesus cleanses us from some unrighteousness but from all unrighteousness. Forgiveness and cleansing are part of the same package. We must not think that we can take one without taking the other. They come together.

 

Why does John seem so harsh? Why does he come across as so strong on them? There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Gnostics with their special revelation knowledge which came ‘directly from God’ believed that everything physical was inherently evil and so God being good couldn’t be connected to the physical. This was the whole thing of the Secret bible series on National Geographic. The Gospel of Judas is one such Gnostic work because it says that Judas was actually doing Jesus a favour when he betrayed him because Jesus was trapped by his physical body. Judas was the enlightened one who understood what Jesus was getting at and so delivered Jesus to death in order that Jesus be freed from his physical body and be released into a spiritual being. So why was John so harsh? Because these people who believed everything physical was evil were split into two groups. The one group is what Paul hit against with the Colossians, people who despised any sort of physical pleasure. They did long fasts, denigrated marriage as something unholy, they would saying drinking alcohol was a sin. Etc. But the other camp was of people that taught the flesh is evil but it will perish anyway. It is the spirit that gets saved and the spirit cannot be tainted by evil. Therefore I can do whatever I want in my body because it is my spirit that will be saved. And let us not be under a false impression. It is not like these people were malicious people. People who hold that teaching today can be some very kind and nice people that help others. It is just that they believe it is alright to sleep around, it is alright to get drunk, it is alright to give in to the flesh because it does not affect your salvation. But as Paul says in Romans 12, what we do in our body is spiritual. It is worship.

 

The second reason that John is harsh is love. 1 John 2: 1 shows that he regards them as if they were his own little children, who he wanted to protect and see them flourish. He did not want to see them sin. He knows they will sin and when they do he assures them that God is not going to cast them out into the street. If they sin, they still have an advocate who took their punishment for sin, who satisfied God’s anger. And he shows them how big Christ’s sacrifice is. It covers the whole world. Some people say that where it says that Jesus was the propitiation for the whole world that it is not referring to those that are not saved but only Christians. This does not make sense of the text. But John says that Jesus is the propitiation for our sin. If ‘our’ refers to all believers because of its context of salvation, then the word ‘our’ must refer to all believers past, present and future too. So if the word ‘our’ means all believers, then to what is John referring to when he says, ‘not for our sins only but also for the whole world’? Jesus’ atonement is not limited by God’s decree but by human rejection of it. Jesus wept over Jerusalem that stoned the prophets and rejected him in Matthew 23: 37 and said, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” The provision has been made on the cross. The satisfaction that was rendered on the cross was sufficient to save everyone in the whole world but the reality is that not all will come. And in the case of 1 John, even among those who come into the churches there are those who do not truly come but pretend to. They continue to live by the philosophies of the world and combine them with verses of the bible, mixing truth with error.

 

John is hitting against this Gnostic anti-nomianism. This has everything to do with the last days because anti-nomianism means lawlessness and that is what the anti-christ is. He is the man of lawlessness. In other words, “Do whatever you want, whatever floats your boat, and it does not matter because we will all still get into heaven. It does not matter what you believe or what you do because God is love and He will forgive you anyway. There is only one God and we all believe in Jesus do we not? Even the Hindus and Moslems believe in Jesus. Who are you to tell anyone else what to do? You are too narrow minded?” “We know God wants this because the pastor got a vision.” “Who am I to question him because he is closer to God? God speaks to Him in a special way.” When someone says ‘but Jesus told me, I saw Him in a vision and He told me so you have to believe it’ and contradicts the Jesus of the Bible, we can say to them, but I know of someone who touched Jesus and saw Jesus in real life, not in a vision and his Jesus contradicts the message of your Jesus. Which Jesus should I believe?

 

Paul writes to the Thessalonians that God sends a delusion on those who do not receive the love of the Truth so as to be saved. John shows us that Truth not only consists of right profession but of our life informed by that right profession. Yet Truth does not exist in wrong profession. We cannot accept this message of cheap grace but if we have fallen, stumbled and are not right God is ready to forgive and cleanse us if we own up and turn away from that sin, because Jesus took our punishment. Do not let someone stumble you in your faith because they claim you have head knowledge and they have revelation knowledge. Walk according to the word, the word stands authoritatively above all believers, pastors and so called ‘spiritual brethren’.