One of the best ways to lose friends and be rejected is to go all the way with God. Get serious about spiritual matters; forsake all your idols; turn to the Lord with all your heart and become possessed with Jesus; get your eyes off the things of this world — and you have suddenly become a religious fanatic! And you are in for the worst rejection of your lifetime.
According to Paul, we who believe in Jesus have been raised up from spiritual death and are seated with him in a heavenly realm. “Even when we were dead in sins, [God] hath quickened us together with Christ…and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5-6).
In the early years of the church, a great persecution took place. During that awful period, the apostle John was taken prisoner and sent to Rome. The Roman emperor at that time (either Nero or Diocletian) banished John to the Isle of Patmos. This island was a small, desolate, uninhabited place. Its only populace was a few prisoners who'd been banished there to live out their days. Like them, John was sent to Patmos to die.
Throughout the Bible, God's people are commanded to pray at all times. We're to pray when we're low, in good times and bad. And we're to pray in all seasons -- periods of joy and health, as well as sickness or depression; seasons of rest and prosperity, as well as sadness or grief. No matter what our sitiuation or condition, we're to pray without ceasing.
In a letter to the Christians at Thessalonica, Paul speaks of a future event he calls "the day of the Lord." He writes:
"We beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.
"Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition" (2 Thessalonians 2:1-3).
I once heard a minister tell an audience, "The Old Testament isn't relevant to our times. There isn't any need to study it anymore."
How wrong he was! One reason I love reading the Old Testament is because it explains the New Testament in clear, simple terms. Its stories are full of types and shadows of eternal truths, played out in the practical lives of real people.
Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth" (Psalm 124:6-8).
In Psalm 124 we read of fowlers and their snares. You've heard of fowlers. They were professional bird-catchers in the days before firearms. They captured birds by spreading a net on the ground and attaching it to a springed trap or snare.
I could list for you a whole catalog of sins that believing Christians practice. But none of these sins would come near to the sin that I want to talk about. This sin is the mother of all sins — the one that gives birth to all others. It is the sin of unbelief!
"And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you" (Joel 2:25).
How many years did you waste before you repented and surrendered all to Jesus? How many years of your past life were eaten up by the cankerworm of sin and rebellion?
You know you are forgiven and your past forgotten because it is under the Blood of Jesus. But wouldn't you love to get back those years and live them for the glory of the Lord?
According to God's Word, Christians are to live every day as if "the end of all things is near." We are to be always looking for His coming. We are to be awake and diligent, as servants waiting for their master to return from a long journey. With Paul, we should rejoice that we will be leaving this earth to put on our new bodies. We ought always to long to be with the Lord.
