Devotional

@pb1022 said
Jesus Christ Himself said one has to be born again - born of the Spirit - to enter the Kingdom of God.

You have no answer for that so you just ignore it and pretend He never said it.

“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he i ...[text shortened]... hich is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

(John 3:3-6)

Here is the whole of the passage about being born again, or born of the Spirit.

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.(John 3:5-8 KJV)

Can Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

@rajk999 said
Here is the whole of the passage about being born again, or born of the Spirit.

[i]Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wi ...[text shortened]... Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

<<d. Do not marvel that I said to you, “You must be born again”: Again, Nicodemus did marvel at this statement, because he – like most all Jews of his time – believed they already had the inner transformation promised in the New Covenant. Jesus wants him to take hold of the fact that he does not have it, and must be born again.

i. We should not forget whom Jesus said this to. Nicodemus was a religious leader, a Pharisee, an educated man, and an earnest man. By all outward appearance, he was already transformed unto God – yet he was not.

ii. “These solemn words for ever exclude the possibility of salvation by human merit. Man’s nature is so gripped by sin that an activity of the very Spirit of God is a necessity of he is to be associated with God’s kingdom.” (Morris)

e. The wind blows where it wishes: Jesus’ idea to Nicodemus was “You don’t understand everything about the wind, but you see its effects. That is just how it is with the birth of the Spirit.” Jesus wanted Nicodemus to know that he didn’t have to understand everything about the new birth before he experienced it.>>

https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/john-3/

@pb1022 said
<<d. Do not marvel that I said to you, “You must be born again”: Again, Nicodemus did marvel at this statement, because he – like most all Jews of his time – believed they already had the inner transformation promised in the New Covenant. Jesus wants him to take hold of the fact that he does not have it, and must be born again.

i. We should not forget whom Jesus said this t ...[text shortened]... about the new birth before he experienced it.>>

https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/john-3/

I knew it. You dont have a clue what you are talking about, neither do you understand that passage.

Can Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

@rajk999 said
I knew it. You dont have a clue what you are talking about, neither do you understand that passage.

Can Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

Jesus Christ is making an analogy between the wind (how it moves) and how people are led by the Holy Spirit - that one doesn’t understand how the wind moves, that the wind moves of its own accord, and so it is with people led by God’s Holy Spirit.

Under your ultra-literal approach, Jesus is speaking to actual sheep and actual goats in Matthew 25 so humans can’t draw any lessons from it.

And are you neurologically incapable of disagreeing with someone without insulting them? It’s a very obnoxious habit you have.

@pb1022 said
Jesus Christ is making an analogy between the wind (how it moves) and how people are led by the Holy Spirit - that one doesn’t understand how the wind moves, that the wind moves of its own accord, and so it is with people led by God’s Holy Spirit.

Under your ultra-literal approach, Jesus is speaking to actual sheep and actual goats in Matthew 25 so humans can’t draw any les ...[text shortened]... incapable of disagreeing with someone without insulting them? It’s a very obnoxious habit you have.

Wrong again. Maybe you need to do some more research. Your explanation is church gibberish. The questions is

Can Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

Answer - Christians are flesh / born of flesh. Being guided by the Holy Spirit does not make someone a spirit.

@rajk999 said
Wrong again. Maybe you need to do some more research. Your explanation is church gibberish. The questions is

Can Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

Answer - Christians are flesh / born of flesh. Being guided by the Holy Spirit does not make someone a spirit.

And the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 are sheep and goats. Why do you keep claiming they’re human beings?

@rajk999 said
Wrong again. Maybe you need to do some more research. Your explanation is church gibberish. The questions is

Can Christians move like the wind? Are born again Christians spirit beings or are they flesh and blood?

Answer - Christians are flesh / born of flesh. Being guided by the Holy Spirit does not make someone a spirit.

<<Answer - Christians are flesh / born of flesh. Being guided by the Holy Spirit does not make someone a spirit.>>

You don’t think every human being has a spirit? You don’t think God’s Holy Spirit indwells Christians?

@pb1022 said
And the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 are sheep and goats. Why do you keep claiming they’re human beings?

Lol .. is that your way of twisting the words of Christ?
The bible says Christ is judging the 'nations'.
Nations are composed of human beings.
Tell your church pastor to Google that word... nations

I guess you get comfort from believing that Jesus is judging sheep and goats.
Sorry to interfere with your delusion .. I wont say any more.

@rajk999 said
Lol .. is that your way of twisting the words of Christ?
The bible says Christ is judging the 'nations'.
Nations are composed of human beings.
Tell your church pastor to Google that word... nations

I guess you get comfort from believing that Jesus is judging sheep and goats.
Sorry to interfere with your delusion .. I wont say any more.

No, no Christ is talking about literal sheep and literal goats. That’s the ultra-literal way you interpret John 3. Why can’t I use your ultra-literal approach for Matthew 25.

@pb1022 said
No, no Christ is talking about literal sheep and literal goats. That’s the ultra-literal way you interpret John 3. Why can’t I use your ultra-literal approach for Matthew 25.

Of course you can. Go ahead ... lol 😀

@rajk999 said
Of course you can. Go ahead ... lol 😀

I guess my point flew right over your head 🙄

“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things.”
Matthew 12:35

- JANUARY 22 -

RIGHT BELIEVING ALWAYS LEADS TO RIGHT LIVING

Most of us think that if we could just change our circumstances, we could have the lives we want. However, today’s scripture shows us that that is not what Jesus said. Do you see from His words that your life today is a reflection of what has been hidden and carried in your heart all this time?

If you don’t want your life to remain the same, the solution is not in changing your circumstances. It is in changing your heart, changing what you believe.

My friend, for every area of weakness, failure, or defeat that you may be experiencing right now, I assure you that there is some wrong believing in that area. Search the Scriptures for the truth. Your answer lies in right believing.

Now, commit this to memory: right believing always leads to right living!

Say it out loud for this is a powerful revelation you cannot afford to miss.

Let me share with you a powerful testimony of a precious brother in my church who struggled with a smoking habit. He had been smoking for many years and went through at least one pack of cigarettes a day. Besides feeling lousy every time he smoked, he felt condemned and constantly heard the voice of the accuser bombarding him with accusations:

How can you call yourself a Christian? Look at you—you are still a smoker! Give up, you hypocrite! You are not worthy to be a Christian.

The more he heard the accusations, the more he smoked. Though he tried to muster all his willpower to overcome this destructive habit, he just could not do it. He knew that his body was a temple of God, and he sincerely wanted to glorify the Lord, but there was no power to do so.

Then, he heard me preach on how the Holy Spirit is present in him to convict him of righteousness, and how the more he believed that he was righteous because of Jesus Christ, the more his behavior would line up with what he believed. So he began to confess this daily: “I am the righteousness of God through Jesus Christ,” even when he succumbed to the temptation and lit up. Every day, he would wake up, stare at himself in the mirror, and say, “I see a righteous man standing in front of me.”

This brother really believed that he was righteous, not because of what he did, but because of what Jesus has done. And the more he believed that he was the righteousness of God in Christ, the more his nicotine addiction faded.

He began to have a supernatural strength to cut down his daily tobacco intake within a short span of time. He began to replace the voice of the accuser that called him a hypocrite with the voice of the Holy Spirit that declared, “You are righteous in God’s eyes. God sees you as righteous as Jesus Christ today.”

The voice of the Holy Spirit became louder and louder until he finally heard only His voice, and one day he woke up and realized that the desire for cigarettes was no longer there! Hallelujah!

Can you see? Deliverance from destructive habits comes simply by believing the voice of the Holy Spirit and seeing yourself as the righteousness of God in Christ every day.

Just being faithful in believing and confessing, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ,” will cause a power to be released in your life that overcomes the bondage to cigarettes, pornography, alcohol, drugs, or gambling. Today is the day that the Lord will set you free from every lie, guilt, and condemnation that the accuser has been bombarding you with.

Please pray this prayer with me right now. My friend, let’s silence the voice of the accuser and allow Jesus to set you free to reign:

Lord Jesus, I thank You for the cross. I thank You that when You died for me, Your blood cleansed me from all my unrighteousness and the sins of my entire life. You are my Lord and Savior. I give You all my addictions (and/or bondages) today. I am sick and tired of being defeated and condemned by the accuser. Today, I confess that because of Your blood, I am right now the righteousness of God. By the supernatural strength and power of the Holy Spirit who is present to convict me of my righteousness, I will be reminded every day that I am the righteousness of God through You. Amen!

This devotional is taken from the book Reign in Life—90 Powerful Inspirations for Extraordinary Breakthroughs.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”
Matthew 7:7–11

- JANUARY 23 -

GOD LOVES IT WHEN YOU ASK OF HIM

There was a man in the Bible by the name of Jabez. His name was rather unfortunate. It means “sorrow” because his mother “bore him in pain” (1 Chron. 4:9).

What a name to have! But Jabez cried out to God, “Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!” (1 Chron. 4:10).

Some preachers claim that believers should not pray “selfish” prayers for themselves to be blessed. Jabez’s prayer would probably fall under their definition of a “selfish prayer” as it was all about him asking God to bless him, enlarge his territory, be with him, and protect him.

But God didn’t reprimand Jabez for asking Him for these blessings. Without any fanfare, the Bible in the very same verse simply records that “God granted him what he requested.”

That was all. No drama, no long list of what Jabez had to do or not do. It’s really that simple. God heard his prayer and granted his request! No rebuke, no instructions, no “Jabez, if you want Me to bless you, you must first do this.”

No, God honored the man’s faith and turned his sorrow into joy and his pain into blessings—all because he had an unshakable confidence in how good God is and asked big!

My friend, have a good opinion of God. He is not out to get you. He loves you and desires to unleash His favor into every area of your life. He loves it when you call upon Him. And He promised that He would answer when you do. Just see Him declaring to you Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.”

Could it be that we are not seeing many breakthroughs because we have made asking God for big things a taboo with our religious and legalistic rhetoric? Could it be that we are just not seeing many blessings because we have not been asking God and seeking Him with a confident expectation of good?

My friend, it gives your heavenly Father great joy when you ask Him. It’s His good pleasure to bless you as well as your family (Luke 12:32). Stop being held back by erroneous beliefs about God, and start asking Him for whatever is on your heart today!

This devotional is taken from the book 100 Days of Right Believing—Daily Readings from The Power of Right Believing.

“By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.”
Hebrews 11:11

- JANUARY 24 -

WHEN YOU HAVE NO FAITH

Perhaps you are at a place where you feel like you can’t conjure up any more faith, let alone “not waver at the promise of God” like Abraham (Rom. 4:20). Maybe you are thinking, I have tried and tried to believe for so long. I have no more faith to carry on.

Let me show you what today’s verse says about Sarah. There was faith involved when Sarah conceived and bore a child. But if you think faith is awfully hard and that you simply have no faith, I pray this will encourage you.

How did Sarah receive her miracle after so long and when it seemed impossible in the natural? She “judged Him faithful who had promised.” It seems so simple, but therein lay her miracle.

The faith walk isn’t hard. It is easy and effortless. When your faith runs out, judge God faithful. When you do not know how to have faith anymore, reckon on His faithfulness. Remember that He is faithful. Lean on His faithfulness.

Don’t give up because you think you don’t have enough faith. Once God gives you a promise, it is not for you to conjure up faith. It is for you to rest in the One who promised, knowing that He is faithful.

There is a beautiful verse I want you to emblazon across your spirit that will steady you in the fight of faith when it seems like your answers are not forthcoming: “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). Even when you are faithless, He remains faithful.

At the cross, as Jesus carried all our sins, God the Father had to turn away from His Son, and Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46). He paid the price for you and me to have God’s constant presence, and because of that, God will never leave you nor forsake you (Heb. 13:5). He will never relax His hold on you.

When you feel faithless, know that you don’t have to try to hold on to Him—He is the One holding on to you. The Bible says the Lord your God holds your right hand, saying to you, “Fear not, I will help you” (Isa. 41:13).

When you have no more strength to even have faith in your battle with your sickness, may I encourage you to do this? Take time to go into the Lord’s presence and tell Him:

Lord Jesus, thank You for Your faithfulness to me. You are faithful in Your goodness to carry out Your promises in my life. You are faithful to heal me and to restore to me every bit of health and well-being I have lost through this sickness. Right now, because You are faithfully upholding me, I can let go and rest in You. It is Your faithfulness that will cause my healing to manifest. Amen.

This devotional is taken from the book The Healing Power of the Holy Communion—A 90-Day Devotional.

Therefore there is now no condemnation at all for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.
Romans 8:1–2 NASB

- JANUARY 25 -

TRANSFORMED FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Today, let’s look at the Greek word for repentance—metanoia. Meta means “change,” while noia is from the word nous, which means “mind.” So metanoia or repentance means “a change of mind.”

Why is changing your mind important? Simply because right believing always leads to right living.

When you believe right about God’s grace, about your righteousness in Christ, and how you are called to be set apart for holiness, everything changes! His love touches you in the deepest recesses of your heart and you begin to experience transformation from the inside out.

That’s the grace revolution in action. You begin to live above defeat and experience lasting breakthroughs because the power to fight off any temptation is not from without, but from within. It is not contingent upon your willpower; it is contingent upon the power of the Holy Spirit living mightily and actively in you, bearing witness to the gospel truths you believe.

This precious testimony I received from Robert bears out this point poignantly:

I am a pastor in North Carolina who was preaching right living and trying to live right and do increasingly more to serve Jesus. But I also had a fifteen-year struggle with addiction to spit tobacco. I even stood on the pulpit one Sunday and confessed my addiction. I held up a can of tobacco and said that I, as David did to Goliath, would cut off its head and feed its carcass to the birds.

Full of remorse, I told the people I had resolved to put the addiction away, and many came to the altar that day to cast off their addictions too. However, I was back at mine within a week and feeling great condemnation. I fought and fought, quit and quit, over and over again.

Eventually a friend gave me some of Pastor Prince’s teaching materials. I was amazed at what I was hearing and reading, because I had never heard the gospel preached in this manner. I knew it was truth and it began to set me free. I heard Pastor Prince preach a sermon where he said that the solution was to quit trying to win on my own and to confess to the Lord, “Lord, I cannot, but You can.”

This became my motto and I quit trying to quit using tobacco. I no longer stayed buried under guilt and condemnation. I believed and confessed that even though I was struggling with this tobacco habit, God still loves me no less and that Jesus’ finished work still avails for me.

I can now testify that I have been tobacco-free for more than a year. Every time an urge pops up, I say to the Lord that I know His grace and what He has for me are much better than tobacco, and the urge leaves.

Praise God! This message of unmerited favor has changed my life and ministry. I am now preaching and teaching grace every time I step onto the pulpit! Thanks be to God and thank you, Pastor Prince.

My dear reader, no matter how long you may have struggled with a bad habit, I want you to know it is never too late to invite our Lord Jesus and His grace into your situation. It is never too late to return to His grace, the only power that can give you permanent inside-out transformation.

This devotional is adapted from the book Glorious Grace—100 Daily Readings from Grace Revolution.