Shalom Aleichem...
Reflections is a weekly Christian Teaching Ministry. Each week we will talk about the Bible and lessons we can put to use in our daily life. We will try to, on a weekly basis, provide to you stories, thoughts, and just easy ways to live your life on a straight path.
THIS WEEK'S TEACHING....September 14, 2020
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO MY BEAUTIFUL BRIDE....TERRY!!!!! SEVEN WONDERFULLY BLESSED YEARS.
AND NOT TO FORGET THE OTHER WOMAN IN MY LIFE THAT HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT....TODAY WOULD ALSO MY MOM'S BIRTHDAY, RIP:)
This is the first in a teaching series called HOPE. We will cover a variety of ways we are to have hope, show hope and give hope to people in our lives. I pray in some small way these teachings will touch you in a positive way:)
God, is the Creator, He exists, He is not a product of man’s imagination, He is real, He is the basis of our Hope.
Our theme for this series is Hope Found Here, and this week we are considering the Hope we have in our Creator, our Heavenly Father, the one who created everything we see, and everything we can’t see.
Our English Bible starts with the book of Genesis, and the first words we read in Genesis is “In the Beginning God”. These words have been translated fron the original Hebrew, 'bereshith bara Elohim'. These words refer to history (there was a beginning, bereshith), then to creation (bara, He created), and then to the Creator, Elohim. God, is the Creator, He exists, He is not a product of man’s imagination, He is real, He is the basis of our Hope.
The Bible begins with the account of God creating the heavens and the earth and everything in between: stars and insects, trees and galaxies, planets and animals, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, and human beings, us. God is the one who creates all things and orders all things. He is the one who has made us, He is the one who has made everything.
If you are one of those people who have pondered if the chicken or the egg came first, Genesis clearly tells us that God created Life, and then told it to be fruitful and multiply. Whatever your views of science and the Bible, of creation or evolution or Intelligent Design the Bible teaches us that everything begins with God. God was in the beginning, actually, God was prior to what we consider the beginning of creation.
God is eternal. This is something that our finite human minds struggle to comprehend. We expect things to have a beginning and an end. God has been here since before we arrived and He will be around long after we’re gone.
God has always been and always will be. He is eternal. Life begins and ends with God. He comes first, not us.
Does it seem like I’m pointing out the obvious? Maybe I am. But I think that sometimes we need to be reminded of the most basic aspects of our faith.
Why? Because even as Christians we don’t always act or live like God comes first, do we? Just think of something simple, like how many of our sentences begin with “I” or have “I” as the main subject: “I’m going to do this today.” or “This is how I feel.”
Our thoughts revolve around ourselves and many of our feelings are ultimately self-centered. Almost without thinking about it, we put our thoughts, feelings, and even actions first. We often put more trust in our own abilities than in those of our Creator. Often our hope is based on what we think we can accomplish rather than placing our hope and trust in God.
Family, our Hope, should be in God. The Bible teaches us that Go is the Alpha and Omega, He is the beginning and the end. In The Message Bible the author Eugene Peterson introduces the book of Genesis by saying:
“First, God. God is the subject of life. God is foundational for living. If we don’t have a sense of the primacy of God, we will never get it right, get life right, get our lives right. Not God at the margins; not God as an option; not God on the weekends. God at center and circumference; God first and last; God, God, God.”
“God First” not me, not my hopes or desires, God’s plan and purpose first. God comes first, He is before all things, He is meant to have first place in our lives.
The first “day” would not have come into being without God, and God still creates our days. Without God we would have no hope, our days would be nothing, no order, no purpose, no existence.
With God we have hope, we have purpose, we have a destiny ordained by God. We have hope in our Creator, God has created us, God has provided a way for us to be saved from the penalty of our sins by trusting in Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
When we repent and turn to Jesus, when we become His follower, His disciple, the Holy Spirit comes and resides inside us, He empowers us and helps us to be the people God created us to be, He helps us to be the people God has saved us to be.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” God is the creator of the heavens and the earth, and God is our creator.
Genesis 1:2 describes the earth as “formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters”. God took something that was without shape, a formless empty void covered in darkness and He made something. God gave shape to the shapeless. God brought order to where there was no direction, He gave form to something that was formless.
This illustrates four things about our personal relationship with God.
First, without God’s creating and saving power in my life I am a formless void. Apart from God I have no purpose, no direction, no meaning, no hope. The earth was completely without order, purpose or direction then God’s creative hand shaped it and made it what it should be. That was the earth before God began his creative work, and that is like us before we allow God to begin His creative and saving work in our lives: formless, hopeless, empty, in darkness.
Second, it tells me that I cannot create my own life, I cannot make myself into what I should be. I cannot give shape and meaning or hope to my life. God is the Creator, only he can turn the formless void of my life into something that makes sense and is worthwhile. Only God can create something worthwhile out of me and my life. When God created the heavens and earth, He brought into existence something that never before had existence. What God creates is unique and the same is true of you and I. Just as He brought something new and unique into existence at the beginning of creation, He does the same when He takes the formless voids of our lives and recreates us.
The third thing is this: When God recreates and saves us, we become something entirely new from what we were before, and when He does, our lives will never be as they were. We are transformed. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17:
“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ.”
The fourth point is this: God takes us and shapes us using the material of our lives as He finds us. Not only does God create something new and unique out of us and our lives, He does it with who and what we already are. So for us God creates and saves and redeems us using the stuff of our lives: our talents, our failures, our successes, our strengths, our weaknesses, and our past.
God can redeem even the worst parts of us, and use it for His glory. God can take what is formless and without order and give it shape, direction, purpose, hope and destiny. For those who love God, for those who know Jesus as Lord and Savior, nothing is beyond the redemptive power of Jesus.
The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8:28: “we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for them.”
We are formless without the creative and saving work of God in our lives, and without God we are also in darkness. When we are in darkness, we can’t see clearly, in the dark we can stumble and fall...
Have you ever had a power outage at home? Have you ever had to wander around in the dark?
Sometimes when we wander about in the darkness, we can get hurt. John 3:19 says, “judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil.”
Without the presence of God in our lives, we are living in the dark, living in sin, heading for a lost eternity away from God. God’s love brings a light into our darkness. Trust in Jesus brings us from darkness into God’s marvellous light.
In Genesis, God speaks, and there is light. God speaks and there is hope. God is the only source of light and hope for us. Only the light God speaks into being can dispel the darkness of sin. Only the light God speaks into being can shine in the darkness and not be overcome by it. We can know that light in our own lives, that light, is Christ, the light of the world.
Let’s return to Genesis 1:2, “The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” The word for wind in Hebrew, RUACH as in Greek, PNEUMA, is the same as the word for breath and Spirit.
Here we have the Spirit of God present at creation, and when it says the Spirit “hovered” over the surface of the waters, the verb here has the sense of ever-changing velocity and direction – just like wind. I’m reminded of what Jesus says about the Spirit to Nicodemus in John 3, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The ever-changing movement of the wind in Genesis – of the Spirit of God – is movement with a purpose, movement with a creative purpose, to bring life out of nothing, to give form to the shapeless, and to bring light into the darkness. Only the Holy Spirit enables us to perceive Christ for who He really is. It is the Spirit at work in our hearts, that moves us to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. It is the Spirit who applies the work of Christ to our lives!
In John 15 Jesus tells his disciples that “apart from me you can do nothing”. Genesis 1 teaches us this truth too.
The earth was a formless void, no plants, no grass, no trees, no fruit, no life. The Earth was dark, desolate, unproductive, then God brought light and life and hope. Read in Genesis 1:11:
Then God said, “Let the land sprout with vegetation—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.” And that is what happened.’”
It happened. When God speaks, when He acts to create, things happen. Fruit gets produced. The same is true with us, isn’t it? Can we really be productive without God in our lives? Can we really produce anything of eternal value?
Without Christ in our lives, we are desolate, like the earth at the beginning of Genesis. But with Christ we are productive: we, by the power of God, produce the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5:22,23, and a harvest of righteousness, as it says in Hebrews 12:11. This is God’s doing not ours.
All of this is true if, and only if, God comes first in our lives, just as God was “in the beginning” in Genesis. Unless we learn to make God the priority He should be, unless we deliberately and willingly hand our lives over to Him, we will be left formless, desolate and in the dark without hope.
As I draw to a close, I suppose the most important question for me to ask is this:
Do we want to remain void and empty, without direction, purpose or hope, wandering in the darkness of sin or will you allow God to take you and mould you, and form you into something uniquely you, to bring you, “out of darkness into His marvellous light” ? (1 Peter 2:9).
In theology there is an important Latin phrase that gets used when we talk about God creating the heavens and the earth: creatio ex nihilo. In English this means “creation out of nothing.” This was how the world began. There was nothing, and God created, brought something fundamentally new and unique into existence.
Where before there was nothing, now there is something. This can also be true of us, when we come to recognize that it is God who comes first, and that is only God who can take all of our nothing and make it into something.
Hope is found here in our Creator.
Hope is found here in Jesus our Lord and Savior
Hope is found here in with the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Hope is found here as God speaks light and dispels darkness.
When we find ourselves empty, in darkness, without hope, God can bring transformation into our lives. For only God creates, and our hope must be in Him and Him alone. I love you all:)
DID YOU EVER WONDER???
Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may
fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has
happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason.
Charles Plumb, a US Naval Academy graduate, was a jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat
missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and
parachuted into enemy lands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese
prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came
up and said, "You're Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.
You were shot down!" "How in the world did you know that?" asked Plumb. "I packed your
parachute," the man replied.
Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, "I guess it
worked!" Plumb assured him, "It sure did. If your chute hadn't worked, I wouldn't be here today."
Plumb couldn't sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, "I kept wondering what
he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: A white hat, a bib in the back, and bell bottom
trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said good morning,
how are you or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot, and he was just a sailor."
Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of
the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his
hands each time the fate of someone he didn't know.
Now, Plumb asks his audience, "Who's packing your parachute?"
Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. Plumb
also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down
over enemy territory - he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional
parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety. His
experience reminds us all to prepare ourselves to weather whatever storms lie ahead. As you
go through this week, this month, this year... recognize people who pack your parachute!
BOOKS OF THE BIBLE...A TEACHING
This week, we begin the look at Islam: Beginnings
Islam is the world’s second largest religion, with about 1.6 billion followers in 2010 (more than 20 percent of the earth’s population). Including biological growth, it is also the globe’s fastest-growing, and is the majority religion in forty-nine countries. Contemporary politics and the issue of terrorism have thrust Islam into the worldwide spotlight as never before.
Islam is an Arabic word meaning “submission,” and the religion’s central theme is submission to the will of God. So a Muslim is one who submits to God’s will, which is revealed in the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book (Qur’an, an Arabic word meaning “recite,” is often transliterated Koran in English texts). Although the Arabic language and culture are central to Islam, only 25 percent of the world’s Muslims are ethnically Arab, and the four countries with the largest Muslim populations (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India) are all outside the Middle East.
Some older books on history and religion refer to this faith as Mohammedanism. This is inaccurate and offensive to Muslims, as they do not worship Muhammad. Although they revere him greatly and follow his example in many ways, they insist he was just a man. To deify him, they say, is contrary to Muhammad’s own teaching.
Islam teaches that God has sent a long line of prophets to reveal his will to humans, and many Muslims would say Islam has existed since Adam’s creation. However, to understand Islam today, we need to look at sixth-century Arabia and a man named Muhammad, considered Islam’s final and greatest prophet (in Muslim writings, his or any prophet’s name usually is followed by pbuh, meaning, “peace be upon him”; variations in English spellings of Muhammad are attempts to approximate the sounds of the Arabic letters).
Muhammad was born about ad 570, in Mecca, both a trade center and pilgrimage site even before Islam. As a young man, he frequently went outside the city to meditate in nearby caves. On one occasion, a powerful supernatural being appeared and told Muhammad to recite the message he was given.
Frightened and in shock, Muhammad related this event to his relatives and close friends. He initially believed the supernatural being was Satan, but his friends convinced him otherwise and encouraged him to return to the cave. This being, claiming to be the angel Gabriel, appeared to Muhammad many times over a period of several years, each time giving him more of the message that eventually developed into the Qur’an.
Many parts of the Qur’an bear striking resemblance to portions of the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity. Because Mecca was a center for trade, people of many faiths passed through it; Muhammad, engaged in managing camel caravans, undoubtedly encountered some of these. In addition, a sizeable number of Jewish communities were in Arabia at the time. But Muslims insist this had no influence on Muhammad and that the Qur’an was dictated to him directly—any similarities are because the other religions are like Islam rather than the other way around. Further, Muhammad was illiterate, so while he may have talked with followers of monotheistic religions, he did not read from any of their scriptures.
The religion of pre-Islamic Arabia was polytheistic and idol-worshiping. By contrast, the message given to Muhammad was that there is only one God, who could not be represented by any image. While some believed his reports, most citizens of Mecca resented and opposed his message. Persecution and threats against his life increased until, in 622, he and his followers escaped and went 250 miles north to the city of Yathrib (later renamed Medina). Muslims call this event the Hijra (migration, or escape), and rather than Muhammad’s birth, this event marks the first year of the Muslim calendar.
In Medina, Muhammad organized his growing number of followers and continued to teach. By 630, the Muslims had become powerful enough to conquer Mecca, destroy the idols at the center of the Meccan religion, and establish Islam as the Arabian Peninsula’s primary religion. Muhammad died shortly afterward (632), yet his followers quickly spread the faith westward. Even though this often coincided with military conquests by Arab armies, forced conversions were not the norm, at least among Jews and Christians, whom Islam considers people of the Book.
Political and spiritual factors in the Byzantine Empire also contributed to Islam’s rapid conversion rate among the conquered, non-Arab peoples of western Asia and North Africa. After conquering Spain, the Muslim advance was decisively halted at the Battle of Tours (732), in southern France, though it was many years before Muslims were expelled from Spain and Portugal.
To the east, Islam spread into central Asia, northern India, East Africa, and eventually to present-day Indonesia. While military conquest was a factor, as it was in the West, trade was also a significant means by which the message was propagated. In northern India, the Muslims ruled but did not convert the Hindu majority. In East Africa, where Arab settlements had existed since pre-Islamic times and the trade included slaves, little effort was made at converting the local people, since enslaving fellow Muslims was generally forbidden. This changed early in the 1800s, when Great Britain outlawed the slave trade throughout its empire and British naval vessels began to seize Arab slave ships in the Indian Ocean.
After nearly two centuries of incredibly rapid expansion, the spread of Islam slowed until the twentieth century. In the post-colonial era, it again began spreading. Globalization and migration have made a truly worldwide religion of Islam. Like Christianity, it believes it is a universal faith all people should accept, and it has organizations that seek to propagate it in new places. Today, there is probably no nation in the world without the presence of Islam.
Islamic beliefs and practices are based on the Qur’an, the Sunna, and the Hadith. The Qur’an is held to be sacred scripture, dictated to Muhammad by Gabriel. Many questions about faith and practice arose after Muhammad’s death, so Muslims asked those who had known the prophet and were still alive what he said or did in various situations. These were eventually written down and collected into the Sunna (or Sunnah) meaning “Traditions.” This multi-volume collection is sometimes referred to as the Hadith (Sayings), as it includes what Muhammad said. Although not considered a holy book like the Qur’an, in daily life, the Sunna is used more frequently.
HAVE A SAFE AND BLESSED WEEK:)
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