Category: Uncategorized

Established 1999

August 24, 2018 by ChristianHolinessDaily

The oldest business in the USA is not the Hartford Courant Newspaper, established in 1764, 254 years ago. It is not the Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Roller Mill in, established 293 years ago in 1725. The oldest business in the USA is not even White House Tavern established in 1673 in Newport, Rhode Island. 345 years old. The oldest business in the US is found in Charles City, Virginia.

Established in 1613, the Shirley Plantation has been run for 405 years by the same family. The beautiful farm, the childhood home of Robert E Lee’s mother, is today an National Historic Landmark. The bottom floor of the home is used only for tours. The Hill Carter family occupies the upper floors.

We are discussing the word established today on Christian Holiness Daily.

This week and next we are looking at salvation and how Good changes the lives of those who are saved. We’ve been drilling down into Colossians 2:6-7, which reads

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

We’ve talked about being rooted, deep and wide, like a tree. We’ve talked about being renovated or built up. Today we look at the word “established.” Established in the faith.

What does it means to be established? Notice I’m not asking how one goes about establishing something – a business, for example. To establish something is the active sense of the word. The Greek word translated established here in Colossians – like the words translated rooted and built – is a passive word. We were established. It is something imparted to us.

It is saying, “The Hartford Courant was established in 1764” as opposed to saying, Thomas Green established the Hartford Courant.

Paul, a gifted Greek writer choose three tenses for this verse, something we would normally not catch. If it was important to Paul, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to choose three tenses, then we should try to figure out why. The first clause, “As you received Christ Jesus the Lord is past perfect tense. It is done. It is a fact. It is over. We received Him, the Lord. It was a one-time event that need not redoing because He never leaves us or forsakes us.

As I said already, the words rooted, built up, and established are passive, and they speak to us about sanctification. Because they are passive, we know that Paul does not imply that the Colossians Church rooted themselves. They did not build themselves up. They did not establish themselves. Rather God rooted the in faith. God built them up. God established them in faith. And He established us, roots us, and builds us up in Christ, as He explains that it is God who established us in 2 Corinthians 1:21-22.

So what does the Greek word mean that is translated here as established? It can also mean to be attested.

So, God has given us Jesus as Lord. He had rooted us so that we may not be toppeled or fall. He has built us up, perfecting our love and our faith. And he has established us, attesting that we are His.

Do you see a trend. These verses speak to our salvation and the sanctification that follows, but it is all about Him. Our job is only to allow Him to work in us.

__________

__________
Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

Caution Christian Under Construction

August 23, 2018 by ChristianHolinessDaily

Beverly Sinclair was a spinster heiress who lived in a mansion of enormous size during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is the main character in a short story I wrote a few years ago. She was considered eccentric by folks who knew her, a spooky old witch by children, and foolish by most. Foolish because she – who never married and had no close family – lived with her three cats alone in a 42-room palatial home.

What made her eccentric was that the home wasn’t always so big. When she inherited her fortune from her father, the home was a impressive Victorian-style home with five bedrooms, a parlor, kitchen, dining room, basement, and three bathrooms. Over the years, she added two more wings to the home, including a gymnasium, indoor pool, sunroom, library, two additional kitchens, three formal dining rooms, two more parlors, ten more bedrooms and eleven bathrooms. She would build something one year and tear it down the next. She was never happy with the work, and always improving on it.

It was said that old lady Sinclair, as she was known, kept the same general contractor employed her entire life and that she would never hire anyone else to do the work. She hired him first in 1889 and he was still working on the place when she died in 1943.

Long after she died a girl from the local historical society discovered in her journals that Sinclair had been in love with the contractor but had never told him because she was married. He was the reason she had never married. Hiring him to renovate the home was the only way she could see him. Renovations continued until the day she died.

I did not write the story as an analogy of the Christian life, but when I read Colossians 2:6 and thought of the word built this story came to mind. Our walk with Christ is much the same as this story. When Christ saves us he goes to work on us, tearing out the old and building the new, adding a room here and testing down a room there. He loves us too much to allow us to live a dark, putrid life and we love Him enough to let Him enough to keep working.

Colossians 2:6 reads this way:

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith

The word built in that verse is passive, we do not go build ourselves. Christ builds us and perfects us and does not stop working on us until death. Why? He is building and perfecting His body, His home, die He dwells in us, according to Acts 17:24. We are the temple not built by human hands. What then are we to do in this whole process? Allow Him to continue to work in us. Do not quench the Spirit of God (1 Thessalonians 5:19, Ephesians 6:30).

Besides, how can we, mere humans, expect to improve on what God builds?
__________

__________

Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

For I Am Meek and Lowly – by Phineas Bresee

August 19, 2018 by ChristianHolinessDaily

Welcome to Christian Holiness Sunday, where we post messages from old-time holiness preachers and writers. Today’s abridged message is from Phineas Bresee, and it called

Blessed are the Meek.

Meek – We are to find the term by its application to character. We find there is no one thing that is so exalted and so insisted upon, or so held up as the crowning glory of Christian life as meekness. Perhaps it is because it is not simply one thing but a blending of many things.

Jesus Christ applies it to Himself as making up much of His character, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.” Paul in writing to the Corinthians said, “Now, I Paul myself beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ,” and in writing to Titus, He makes a very touching appeal to the church. There were many things they should not do, and many things they should do, in the trying condition in which they were placed, the sum of which was that they should show of all meekness and to all men.

One of the elements of meekness is humility. Humility is essentially a Christian virtue. It is not simply an absence of pride and arrogance, but an adjustment of our feelings toward others which comes from having been made a partaker of the Spirit of Him a who regards every human being as of infinite value.

Humility is not an underestimate of self. No one who properly values others can fail to feel and be thankful for his own relation to God, and for God’s thoughts of him. He realizes his own infinite value in the site of God, that he is one of this great family, all of whom he knows are anxious to serve Jesus.

Gentleness is also an element of meekness. That sweetness of spirit, of touch, that reverence for established usages, a readiness for every good work, speaking the evil of no man.

Meekness is the ability to bear and to endure. That great passive quality by which a man pursues his way regardless of difficulties. It receives the opposition of the enemies without becoming their enemy. It receives the blows of this world without resentment. This does not mean that a meek person is never to contend against the wrong, nor that he is never to resist personal violence. It means that back of all is faith in God, and love to all men.

Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth. The earth here means “land” and as reference to the promised land. What the land was to Israel, what it prefigured to the Church of God, is the meaning of this promise. The histories of the Old Testament or full are spiritual lessons for the New. In all of them there is a meaning far deeper into other than what appears on the surface. God has intended that it should be so. He has intended that that these histories should be types of human life and that through them He should be able to pour the light of His love.

Have you ever looked with earnest longing into the Word of God to see if there was a better way? Have you heard the clear statement of God’s Word in reference to the hear being mad holy and even commanded to be holy? Have you heard, “For if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Do you wait in the attitude of desire and expectancy? Can you say, with Charles Wesley:

Lord, I believe a rest remains

To all Thy people known,

A rest where pure enjoyment reigns,

And Thou are loved alone.”

Does the hope looking up in you as you wait sing out with these words:

Oh glorious hope of perfect love!

It lifts me up to things above,

It bears on eagles’ wings;

It gives my ravished soul a taste,

And makes me for some moments feast

With Jesus’ priests and kings.

______________

______________