Bill Gehm retweeted
Imagine LeBron James retiring at 27 at the peak of his career and giving all of it up to serve Jesus Christ.
That's essentially the story of C.T. Studd.
When someone asked him why he did it, he gave a response that still hangs on my wall today 🔥
Bill Gehm retweeted
On #preaching: “The listener will always know when a man believes intensely in what he says, and even if the listener does not agree, even if he thinks the speaker is misguided, he respects the accent of conviction.” – William Barclay, Autobiography, p. 76
Bill Gehm retweeted
The sound of Northern Nigerian Christian’s worshiping Jesus through the murderous persecution.
Bill Gehm retweeted
Why did God create evil? The answer struck me to the core of my soul!
A professor at the university asked his students the following question:
Everything that exists was created by God?
One student bravely answered:
Yes, created by God.
Did God create everything? - a professor asked.
"Yes, sir," replied the student.
The professor asked:
If God created everything, then God created evil, since it exists. And according to the principle that our deeds define ourselves, then God is evil.
The student became silent after hearing such an answer. The professor was very pleased with himself. He boasted to students for proving once again that faith in God is a myth.
Another student raised his hand and said:
Can I ask you a question, professor?
"Of course," replied the professor.
A student got up and asked:
Professor, is cold a thing?
What kind of question? Of course it exists. Have you ever been cold?
Students laughed at the young man's question. The young man answered:
Actually, sir, cold doesn't exist.
According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is actually the absence of heat. A person or object can be studied on whether it has or transmits energy.
Absolute zero (-460 degrees
Fahrenheit) is a complete absence of heat. All matter becomes inert and unable to react at this temperature.
Cold does not exist. We created this word to describe what we feel in the absence of heat.
A student continued:
Professor, does darkness exist?
— Of course it exists.
You're wrong again, sir. Darkness also does not exist. Darkness is actually the absence of light. We can study the light but not the darkness.
We can use Newton's prism to spread white light across multiple colors and explore the different wavelengths of each color. You can't measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into the world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you tell how dark a certain space is? You measure how much light is presented. Isn't it so? Darkness is a term man uses to describe what happens in the absence of light.
In the end, the young man asked the professor:
Sir. does evil exist?
This time it was uncertain, the professor answered:
Of course, as I said before. We see him every day. Cruelty, numerous crimes and violence throughout the world. These examples are nothing but a manifestation of evil.
To this, the student answered:
Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist for itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is like darkness and cold—a man-made word to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not faith or love, which exist as light and warmth. Evil is the result of the absence of Divine love in the human heart. It's the kind of cold that comes when there is no heat, or the kind of darkness that comes when there's no light.
The student's name was Albert Einstein.
Bill Gehm retweeted
I used to think Halloween came straight out of hell.
I had charts. I had printouts. I could trace a demon family tree back to Samhain.
Then a man asked me one question in his kitchen, and I had no answer.
I grew up an Army brat on bases worldwide, and Halloween was one of the best nights of my year. My brother and I put together costumes from the thrift store, and my mom walked us through the neighborhoods. Sometimes my dad came too, when he wasn't deployed. He was an Army Ranger, and he was overseas a lot.
October meant school parties, friends, and Disney Channel marathons. Later it meant The Worst Witch and Hocus Pocus on repeat.
Then I met some Christians who told me Halloween came straight from the pit.
Satan himself might ride down your street on Pee-wee Herman's red bicycle and snatch your kids. You might accidentally sell your soul while handing out candy. Or worse, your youth group would shun you, and you'd turn into Marilyn Manson.
I was young in the faith and insecure, so I went all the way down the rabbit hole. Full Alex Jones on Halloween. Celtic paganism, druid sacrifices, the occult taking over America. I was convinced.
Then we got to know a family near us. Homeschoolers like us. Soul-winners. They'd been at it longer than we had, and we respected them.
One October day I gave the husband my whole presentation. He let me finish. Then he asked me one thing.
"Adam, what other time of the year do lost people come to our house?"
I stopped.
He said You get Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormon kids. A church canvasser once in a while. But when do the lost walk up to your door and ask you for something?
I had nothing.
So he invited us over for Halloween.
It felt like getting ready for the Super Bowl. Tables covered in candy. Five-gallon Menards buckets lined up on the floor. Stacks of gospel tracts. We sat around the kitchen table with a full house of people and wrapped a tract around every piece of candy until the buckets were full.
Then we opened the blinds, turned on the porch light, and waited.
Great Pumpkins came up the walk. Snoopy. Ninja Turtles. A few Minions.
Each one left with candy and the gospel. A tract, sometimes a New Testament, sometimes the book of John. We gave out hundreds that night.
The parents stopped on the porch to talk about church and God. A lot of them seemed surprised a Christian house had the light on at all.
The next morning my wife and his wife hit Walmart for half-price candy and costumes for the kids' dress-up boxes.
I walked into that house with a binder full of druids. I walked out wondering why I ever kept my porch light off.
The Pharisees had the same complaint about Jesus that I had about Halloween.
"And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them." (Luke 15:2)
He kept doing it anyway.
"And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." (Luke 5:31-32)
You don't have to celebrate Halloween. Paul left room for conscience about days.
"One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." (Romans 14:5)
But one night a year your neighbors walk up to your door and hold out their hands.
Halloween is Saturday. Get the tracts. Turn on the porch light
Bill Gehm retweeted
Today on a long drive I worked through a four-part series on the life and martyrdom of William Tyndale. The more I listened, the heavier it got.
Tyndale was hunted, exiled, and betrayed for the “crime” of translating the Bible into English so ordinary people could read it. He was eventually strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. His dying prayer was, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” He never lived to see the English Bible widely available. Yet his work shaped the language of the King James Bible and countless translations that followed.
A few hours later we pulled into a Pilot station. I’ve seen the Bible racks in those stores a hundred times, but after hearing what Tyndale endured, it stopped me cold. There, in a truck stop in America, sat copies of the Word of God that anyone could buy for a few dollars. No stake. No exile. No threat of death. Just a shelf by the coffee and the donuts.
We are still living off the blood and courage of that man. The same Book he died to give us is so common in our culture that it can sit unnoticed next to the jerky and the sunglasses. That should not go unnoticed.
Do not treat lightly what others paid for with their lives. Open it. Read it. Obey it. And do not let the ease of access breed indifference. The English Bible is not an accident of history. It is the fruit of a martyr’s obedience. Honor it.
Bill Gehm retweeted
This week, listen to yourself talk. Take note of how natural it is for you to employ words for selfish gain. Be aware to the powerful vocabulary at your disposal. Grieve and confess how you threaten, manipulate, accuse, guilt, or slander others with words.
But take hope. The Word came to release us from the power of sin. We can experience a new direction with our words!
Bill Gehm retweeted
There is only one place in the entire Bible where God describes Himself as doing something with all “His heart and with all His soul”.
It is not an emotional metaphor. It is the deliberate reversal of the greatest demand ever laid upon humanity.
To any ancient reader, that phrase belonged to untouchable ground. It was the vocabulary of Deuteronomy, the ultimate demand laid upon human beings to offer undivided allegiance to their Creator.
Yet the entire prophetic record is a catastrophic post-mortem of how thoroughly humanity failed that test.
Israel proved utterly incapable of loving God with an undivided heart. Jeremiah himself spent decades diagnosing the problem, famously concluding that the human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. The covenant demanded perfection, and Moses admitted in Deuteronomy 29:4 that the Lord had not yet given Israel a heart to understand.
Then comes Jeremiah 32:41, where the logic of the Shema is completely inverted.
Facing a ruined nation on the brink of total annihilation, God takes the very demand humanity shattered and turns it upon Himself.
He promises that He will rejoice in doing them good, and that “He will plant them in the land with all His heart and with all His soul”.
In Hebrew thought, the heart is the seat of executive intellect and sovereign will, while the soul is the throat, the breath, and the living vitality. God invests His entire sovereign purpose and living delight in their restoration.
God effectively resolves the failure of Sinai by taking up both sides of the covenantal ledger. In the Old Covenant, the human party carried the burden of faithfulness, and they broke it. In Jeremiah 32, God eliminates the single point of failure.
On His side of the ledger, He binds His own heart and soul to relentless goodness. On the human side, He declares that He will put the fear of Him in their hearts so that they may not turn from Him. (Jer 32:40)
The eternal security of the covenant no longer hangs on the fragile thread of human willpower, because God Himself renovates the human interior from within, securing an everlasting covenant in the blood of Christ so that the promise belongs irrevocably to His people.
Interestingly, God gave this prophecy while Babylonian siege ramps were banked against the walls of Jerusalem, while famine raged inside, and while Jeremiah sat locked in a royal prison, a long way from Solomon's golden temple at the peak of national prosperity.
Moments before this declaration, God had the prophet spend seventeen shekels of silver to purchase an ancestral plot of land in Anathoth, territory already given into enemy hands. It was an economically absurd investment in a doomed country. Yet the deed was sealed in an earthen jar because God was looking straight through the coming fire to the harvest on the other side.
Most people move through life under the quiet, exhausting suspicion that God merely tolerates them through clenched teeth, as if grace were an awkward administrative concession. Jeremiah 32:41 dismantles that caricature entirely.
The God of Scripture holds back no part of His nature in the work of redemption. The security of anyone who belongs to Him rests on the scandalous reality that God has committed His mind, His breath, and His infinite joy to never letting them go.
Bill Gehm retweeted
In my many years of studying the Bible and counseling people, I have come to realize the significance that God places on words, and the lasting impact they have on us and on others.
First, our God-given ability to communicate makes us unique in all of creation. Unlike the flora and fauna, we are designed in his image (Genesis 1:27) and can share our thoughts, desires and emotions with one another through words.
Second, the first words human ears ever heard came from the mouth of God (Genesis 1:28-30). The Creator of the universe unlocked the doors of life to humanity using words as his key. To this day, there is nothing we depend on more than our ability to give and receive communication.
Third, sin has radically distorted our words, resulting in much hurt, confusion and chaos. Just like Adam and Eve denied guilt, accused one another and blamed God (Genesis 3:12-13), our words often ignore God's design and are employed for selfish gain.
Finally, the Bible teaches us how to get from where we are to where God wants us to be with our words. And in Christ Jesus, we find the grace that provides all we need to speak as God intended for us to speak.
While those four principles about words may seem elementary, don't take them for granted. I must confess that on many occasions, I forget the weight God puts on words and am careless with how I communicate.
I would encourage you to take extra time today and reflect on the questions below. Words belong to God, and he has lent them to us so that we might know him and be used by him.
How seriously do you treat that blessing and calling?
Bill Gehm retweeted
Why do we study the Bible all the time?
Why is every service focused on the Word of God and a Bible study and teaching the Word of God?
Why the Bible, the Bible, the Bible?
It’s the only thing that will last.
Everything else is fading away as Isaiah said, “But the word of our God stands forever.”
Bill Gehm retweeted
“He wants to burn in you until you look like Jesus. He wants to empower you. He wants to love you. He wants to gift you. He wants to use you.” —Pastor Bill
Read the Devo: bit.ly/4zlvNzA
#HolySpirit #Jesus
Bill Gehm retweeted
One reason to believe Christianity is true is that no one could have thought it up.
Bill Gehm retweeted
🔥🇺🇸 I’VE BEEN SAYING IT: PASTOR PHILIP ANTHONY MITCHELL IS A VOICE CALLING AMERICA BACK TO REPENTANCE! 🙏🔥
I believe Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell is a man of God with a prophetic calling to awaken the Church, confront spiritual complacency, and call America back to repentance. 🇺🇸📖
We don’t need another performance-driven church. We need TRUE REPENTANCE, THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, AND A GENUINE MOVE OF GOD!
🔥 Revival is more than a packed sanctuary.
🔥 Revival is hearts turning back to Jesus Christ.
🔥 Revival is sin being confronted, lives being transformed, and the Church returning to biblical holiness.
As 2 Chronicles 7:14 declares, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways…”
AMERICA DOESN’T JUST NEED POLITICAL CHANGE — WE NEED SPIRITUAL AWAKENING! 🇺🇸🔥
May God raise up voices that preach repentance, proclaim the Gospel, and point this nation back to Jesus Christ!
🙌 LORD, SEND TRUE REVIVAL! LET IT BEGIN IN YOUR CHURCH!
#PhilipAnthonyMitchell #PastorPhilipAnthonyMitchell #Revival #Repentance #HolySpirit #JesusChrist #AmericaNeedsRevival #SpiritualAwakening #Prayer #Christianity #EndTimes #Gospel
