Why RTM? Watch This Video And See

Please take a few moments to watch the video below. It shows the reason for Real Truth Matters, as countless millions are taught a false gospel message. I was in the situation as these four dear people were and the Lord allowed me too, to see the His TRUTH.

Also take a moment to look at the newly redesigned Real Truth Matters website. Click on the conference banner on the homepage to see another video with information about this years conference. Also if you are planning on attanding, please sign up through the website form as well, seating is limited.

Can the Gospel be Saved? from Real Truth Matters on Vimeo.

Praise God For The Furnace

I just read over once again an excerpt from A.W. Tozer's book "The Root of Righteousness" (chapter 39) called "Thank God For The Furnace". I have posted below the manuscript for this and am sure that if you too read it you will be blessed. It needs no explanation - just a few minutes to read and a lifetime to digest.

I have read Tozers "Attributes of God" book and will be adding this book to my stack shortly. May this be a blessing to you.

Praise God For The Furnace
It was the enraptured Rutherford who could shout in the midst of serious and painful trials, "Praise God for the hammer, the file and the furnace."

The hammer is a useful tool, but the nail, if it had feeling and intelligence, could present another side of the story. For the nail knows the hammer only as an opponent, a brutal, merciless enemy who lives to pound it into submission, to beat it down out of sight and clinch it into place. That is the nail's view of the hammer, and it is accurate except for one thing: The nail forgets that both it and the hammer are servants of the same workman. Let the nail but remember that the hammer is held by the workman and all resentment toward it will disappear. The carpenter decides whose head will be beaten next and what hammer shall be used in the beating. That is his sovereign right. When the nail has surrendered to the will of the workman and has gotten a little glimpse of his benign plans for its future it will yield to the hammer without complaint.

The file is more painful still, for its business is to bite into the soft metal, scraping and eating away the edges till it has shaped the metal to its will. Yet the file has, in truth, no real will in the matter, but serves another master as the metal also does. It is the master and not the file that decides how much shall be eaten away, what shape the metal shall take, and how long the painful filing shall continue. Let the metal accept the will of the master and it will not try to dictate when or how it shall be filed.

As for the furnace, it is the worst of all. Ruthless and savage, it leaps at every combustible thing that enters it and never relaxes its fury till it has reduced it all to shapeless ashes. All that refuses to burn is melted to a mass of helpless matter, without will or purpose of its own. When everything is melted that will melt and all is burned that will burn, then and not till then the furnace calms down and rests from its destructive fury.

With all this known to him, how could Rutherford find it in his heart to praise God for the hammer, the file and the furnace? The answer is simply that he loved the Master of the hammer, he adored the Workman who wielded the file, he worshiped the Lord who heated the furnace for the everlasting blessing of His children. He had felt the hammer till its rough beatings no longer hurt; he had endured the file till he had come actually to enjoy its bitings; he had walked with God in the furnace so long that it had become as his natural habitat. That does not overstate the facts. His letters reveal as much.

Such doctrine as this does not find much sympathy among Christians in these soft and carnal days. We tend to think of Christianity as a painless system by which we can escape the penalty of past sins and attain to heaven at last. The flaming desire to be rid of every unholy thing and to put on the likeness of Christ at any cost is not often found among us. We expect to enter the everlasting kingdom of our Father and to sit down around the table with sages, saints and martyrs; and through the grace of God, maybe we shall; yes, maybe we shall. But for the most of us it could prove at first an embarrassing experience. Ours might be the silence of the untried soldier in the presence of the battle-hardened heroes who have fought the fight and won the victory and who have scars to prove that they were present when the battle was joined.

The devil, things and people being what they are, it is necessary for God to use the hammer, the file and the furnace in His holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.

Without doubt we of this generation have become too soft to scale great spiritual heights. Salvation has come to mean deliverance from unpleasant things. Our hymns and sermons create for us a religion of consolation and pleasantness. We overlook the pace of the thorns, the cross and the blood. We ignore the function of the hammer and the file.

Strange as it may sound, it is yet true that much of the suffering we are called upon to endure on the highway of holiness is an inward suffering for which scarcely an external cause can be found. For our journey is an inward journey, and our real foes are invisible to the eyes of men. Attacks of darkness, of despondency, of acute self-depreciation may be endured without any change in our outward circumstances. Only the enemy and God and the hard-pressed Christian know what has taken place. The inward suffering has been great and a mighty work of purification has been accomplished, but the heart [knows] its own sorrow and no one else can share it. God has cleansed His child in the only way He can, circumstance being what they are. Thank God for the furnace.

The Purity Of What You Consume

I was out mowing my yard, thinking about a big glass of ice water as the sweat was dripping from my brow. I knew that the water I had was clean, I knew it was pure and I knew it was good. Good not only in taste, but also good for my body. I knew that it would refresh and quench me. I also started to think about our need for water, that our bodies are in fact 60-70% water and we must replenish that when we lose some from our bodies.

I then started to think of the purity of water that we consume. Does our bodies need unpolluted water? Yes, I think that goes without saying. If we drink polluted water we will in fact have adverse reactions to it. In some worst-case scenarios one can even die from toxins in water. So pure water is essential for life, not just human life, but all life.

Now take a look at the picture above. I labeled the 2 glasses #1 and #2 for clarity (no pun intended). They both look pure, why they may even taste the same at first. If you give it a moment to make it through your body, maybe even a day or so, you would soon find out that glass # 2 had a single drop of pure botulism toxin, one of the deadliest known substances in the world. If you knew that, would you still drink it?

It still looks the same, it still is very palatable, it still quenches your thirst but most importantly it will now kill you. An excruciating death would ensue and with just a single teaspoon being lethal enough to kill 1.2 billion people. Yes, Billion with a B But it looks as pure as the other glass.

“So Jeff, are you saying that we need to all get chemistry degrees and carry around the correct items to assure that we are drinking pure water?”

That's not my point. I would like you to turn this to the spiritual realm. Look at all of the preaching going on in the world today. I would like for you to listen to your preacher, the guy on T.V., the person on the radio and whoever else or wherever else you are partaking in things of a spiritual nature. Now take those sermons, TV show and messages you are reading and put them under the microscope of God’s Word, see if they are poisoned by man’s words and agendas. Are you receiving a message that is 99% pure and 1% poison? Does your preacher say all the right things, align with the bible in 9 of his 10 points, but turn to a man centered theology to increase his numbers and lessen his empty pews? Is there something not quite right with the TV preacher, when he tells you that you have to send him “seed money” in order to be blessed by God? Those are drops of botulism in his message and it will cause spiritual death as it seeps through your mind.

Personally I try to discern what goes into my body, albeit I often come up short on the amount that I consume, I am fairly conscience of what goes in. Also, and more importantly, I am aware of what goes into my ears and my mind at an even more heightened state. God has been good to me and allowed me to see how putrid a false message can be, how it corrupted my theology and how it caused me to be spiritually dead for 2/3 of my life. The Lord was merciful to me and allowed me to taste of His Pure Word and let me see how nourishing It is, how It gives life and feeds my spirit. He gave me a taste for His Word that can now discern impurities in a poisoned message. Praise Him for that, because He would have been just as good if He would have allowed me to die in my ignorance. He did not have to save a wretch like me, but loved me instead and showed mercy on me.

Have you been shown that mercy? The mercy that only the Father can give, through His Son Jesus Christ? Has the Holy Spirit worked on you, leading you toward the Savior? Are you still held captive by silly words? Are your ears being tickled with a false message that tastes oh so good, but is poisoning you with each drop that enters your body? Are you deceived into drinking from a glass that holds hell and destruction, a message that sounds so much like the truth but is actually a lie from Satan that has you deceived?

I pray that you seek God through His Word. Seek Him and you will find Him. That is promised in Jeremiah 29:13 And you shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart. Search His Word and make sure the things going into your body aren’t poison.

One last thought is on Botox. This is derived from the botulism poison and is used to make ones appearance different from what it actually is. It paralyzes the nerves in a persons face and makes the wrinkles not as noticeable, making them appear younger. For some reason this is desirable to some people, but is also very deadly. People are paying a lot of money to be poisoned….. on purpose. Whatsupwitdat? But if you in turn look at most churches the same holds true there too. People are paying to be poisoned by impure messages. Things like “A Purpose Driven Life”, Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now” and books like “Velvet Elvis” and “The Shack” have all topped the best sellers list, but are in fact poison in diluted form. Products use the guise of being Christian literature, but are full of just enough truth to send a person to hell.

Pray for discernment, pray for Truth, pray for God to save you. Repent of your sinful life and turn to God. He does love you, but He is also Holy and can not stand the sight of your sin. He must judge in righteousness and He will send the unjust to hell. I pray that you seek His Word and His forgiveness.

Independence Day 2009

I've set back today and heard the accolades for the USA. It is the greatest nation in many ways, but in the biggest way it falls very short.

What way is that? The downward spiral away from God. Is this the great falling away that is spoken of in 2 Thes. 2:3? There does seem to be many falling away from the Faith, actually a lot more than you may think. I say this because so many are being deceived by a different gospel (Gal. 1:6-8) and a different Jesus is being proclaimed (2 Co. 11:4). I am not talking about the LDS or the JWs either. I am talking about most professing evangelical churches in our nation.

These churches (and I use the term very loosely) have created a god that is similar to the God of the bible, but oh so dangerous. See it has just enough truth in it, mixed with lies to be sending countless millions to hell. Satan is very crafty and has indeed counterfeited the Gospel with a very dangerous one. Many people raised in churches now think that they are all right because they made a single profession of faith and never truly repented of their sins. They do not know that repentance is actually turning from your sinful life and toward Jesus and never looking back(Luke 9:62). Turning from the sins that you covet and toward the God that you hate. This idea seems so radical now, but was the true biblical gospel up until less than a century ago, when numbers started to matter more than actual conversion, becoming a new creation through the redeeming power and love of Christ.

If a person now tells someone that they need to repent and be born again, become a new creation and shun the sinful lives they are leading, they are deemed as wackos, cults or modern Pharisees. The scripture is immediately quoted "Judge not least ye be judged" (Matt 7:1). This verse is probably the most taken out of context in the bible. Just keep reading through Matt 7 and you will see that judgment is to happen. How could you know not to cast your pearls before swine if you have not discerned that they were swine in the first place.

The U.S. has created a brand of Christianity that is man centered, which makes it false. Any message that says a man must first do something to gain eternal life is no different than any other pagan religion out there. "Say this prayer and ask Jesus into your heart"? Where is that in the bible? That is a works based theology that is not biblical, but man centered.

So what can we do? We can pray for our leaders, that they will come to a true repentant faith in the God of the bible. When and if they do, then there will be a marked change in our country.

Do pray for the country and its leaders. Not just the political, but the supposed spiritual leaders as well. This goes for the Osteens, Warrens and Hinns. The ones that have a huge following because they make earthly promises for God and skew scripture to fit their agenda. Pray also for the true followers of Christ that preach the truth and stand for the True God of Scripture.