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CATCH UP!
"Moreover He said to me, "Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel." So I opened my mouth, and He caused me to eat that scroll. And He said to me, "Son of man, feed your belly, and fill your stomach with this scroll that I give you." So I ate, and it was in my mouth like honey in sweetness."
(Ezekiel 3:1-3)
Biblical faith is centred upon the written Word. Of course, the written word came after oral traditions, the age when human communities relied on their collective memory of the events that shaped their destiny and the values that governed their world. Writing in itself was as old as mankind, anyone with some knowledge of anthropology knows that writing, or the making of visible marks on some worthy medium actually began at the dawn of creation. It is giving meaning to apparently meaningless visible marks that took some time to develop. In sociological terms, noetic and semiotic processes aided the development of writing and gave birth to many alphabets, starting with the hieroglyphs and developing into cuineform tablets.
The Bible came in a God-given ordained process of imprinting collective memories upon parchment scrolls. Some people have worried themselves about the accuracy and the infallibility of the Bible. We have no such worries: the Author of the Bible is our God, the text that we have before us as the Holy Bible has been shaped over many centuries by the divine process of God's Holy Spirit moving upon God's chosen scribes to write the books of the Bible, to translate those books from ancient languages into today's languages. You won't be worried about accuracy or infallibility when you have a personal relationship with the God that is spoken of in the Bible. The God of the Bible will speak to your heart and remove the fleshly (humanly-limited) veil that hides God from your view. When that veil is removed, you will see clearly and think clearly about God, about His will for you in Christ Jesus. You will catch up with what you have missed for too long: a direct communication link with the Sovereign God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Maker of heaven and earth.
In a way, every Church is involved in some scroll-making, some writing pertaining to their faith in Christ Jesus. We do at Living Hope Church. We have a stable of "scrolls", including a weekly newsletter, giving notices of Church events, plus an editorial column.
Catch Up is our weekly newsletter, we launched it on Sunday 8 November 1998 as a thriving, punchy, entertaining news stuff for our members.
Please feel free to download copies of our newsletter from this page.
This file is a Microsoft Publisher file.
This file is a Microsoft Publisher file. |
A Recent Editorial from
Catch UP!
DO YOU KNOW GOD?
“The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits.” (Daniel 11:32b)
Your life as a believer reflects just how much you know God. This knowledge is not head-knowledge as such, it is knowledge based on a close and growing fellowship with God. It is relationship-knowledge. You may have read a biography of the Queen, but certainly you don’t know her as Prince Charles does! You may have read and heard a lot about God, you may sing to Him, clap to Him, be baptised in His name, and have an external appearance of being close to Him, but if God is not yet the centre of your life, you really don’t know God! There is something about the way you live, your level of affection for God, the way you respond to His Word, where you go frequently, what you do frequently, what you say frequently, the people you depend upon and the way you treat God in private and in public will show whether you know God. These things betray you like light shining through darkness!
Listen, do you know God? Because, those who know their God will be strong, they will carry out great exploits.
In Bible times, to carry out a great exploit is to attack the fortress of your enemy, to capture that fortress and to defeat your enemy by putting him to public shame. A fortress is a stronghold, and unless you really know your God you cannot carry out any daring raid upon the enemy’s stronghold. You will be defeated, you will be put to shame! Hence, you must know God in order to be strong, in order to carry out great exploits.
There are three basic strongholds you will capture and tear down, if you know God:
(1) The stronghold of sin. Sin has ruined many lives, it has a ferocious power to destroy those who love sinning, to render them useless for the kingdom of God. If you truly know God, the bondage of sin will be broken in your life!
(2) The stronghold of Satan. Perhaps, you are wondering why so many people reject God despite the fact that God stands for everything that is good, noble and decent. Why do people choose darkness and evil rather than light and good? They are in the grip of Satan, they are in his stronghold. If you truly know God, you will destroy the stronghold of Satan in your own life. Satan will have no power over you. You will laugh him to scorn, you will publicly humiliate him!
(3) The stronghold of self. You yourself must know that many, many people are simply selfish. Perhaps, you are selfish too. A selfish person doesn’t care to hurt, to steal, to backbite, to lie, to spread malicious rumour, a selfish person does not care at all about the needs of other people or their sensitivity. A selfish person is well-known everywhere, you cannot depend upon them unless it gains them something! Listen, if you know God, you will capture and tear down your selfishness!
The depth of God’s love amazes me all the time, if you do not know God, there is a promise from Him for you: “I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart.” (Jeremiah 24:7) Do the decent thing: ask to know God, He is waiting for you…
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