God’s Gifts to the Faithful Purity 944

To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of a large sunflower being bathed by a brilliant— brilliantly shining sun under blue skies comes to us from Tammy Lynn Clark, who shared this photo along with a Bible verse on social media a couple of days ago before the launch of her new blog. At tammylynask.blogspot.com, which she created to have her own space where she could archive her previous messages and to share her photography, Bible verses, and new messages. Uh, 2022 proved to be a busy year for Tammy Lynn, as she will be using 5 W-2s for this year's taxes as she was moved through a series of 4 different full-time jobs and had a part-time job. She will be sharing that testimony soon, so I'll let you read all about it on her new blog. Tammy Lynn's story will undoubtedly demonstrate how God blesses those who are faithful to follow him, although there may be many a dark valley we may be called to go walk through when we decide to come and see all that the, the Lord has for us. The Bible verse that she shared with today's photo was Jeremiah 29:11, which says, "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope, hope and a future." While there are many a snarky Bible scholar that would point out that this word was given to the nation of Israel as they were facing dark days with the Babylonian exile, and that if we are— if we try to apply this verse to our lives as Christians, we are taking it out of context. I would challenge them by asking, so God doesn't have plans for us? God doesn't have plans to prosper us, to not harm us, or to give us a hope and a future? Sometimes it seems learned Christians like to be right and appear intelligent rather than being being encouraging. As far as I'm concerned, the context that we as Christians should most be concerned with when it comes to the Word of God is how can God's Word help me to love Him more and to be faithful to follow Him. So as far as I'm concerned, if Jeremiah 29:11 or any verse in the, of the Bible, um, encourages you to seek the Lord, to trust Him, and to follow Him with the way you live your life, I would say you got the message the Lord was sending you. As much as we want to know the proper context of Scripture historically, we should also be concerned with applying God's Word to our lives to empower us. As Christians, I am sure that God has plans to prosper us, to not harm us, and to give us a hope and a future. Christ said as much to his apostles, which they felt encouraged to share with us in John 14:1-2. Where Jesus said, "Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." That sounds like a plan to not harm us and to prosper us to me. That sounds like a hope and a future to me. But just like a salesman with an amazing offer, I would say, uh, that's not all that God has for us. The Word of God is filled with precious promises, and I am sharing a link on the blog to openbible.info, uh, if you want to look some up. But I would point out that these promises, these gifts from God, are for the faithful. So be sure to make Jesus your Lord and Savior and be faithful to follow him to redeem those promises, to receive God's gifts. For you. My walk as a Christian has not always been easy. I've had some deep valleys to walk through after coming to Christ. I had to overcome all of my ignorance concerning the gospel and walking in the Spirit, which is probably the biggest struggle— renewing your mind. But I also had to emerge from struggles of broken relationships and addiction too. That was no walk in the park, but I received my victory and freedom because I remained faithful to the simple directive to surrender in seek the Lord and his will in all things. I'm still on that path of Christian discipleship, of course, and still have more to learn, I'm sure. But this morning I wanted to point to how the Lord blesses the faithful and really set you guys up. I have shared the story before of how God literally brought my wife Tammy Lynn into my life direct by directing her path to the Community Freedom Ministry I was doing at my local church back in 2021 because God put it in me to start the M.t. for Christ 24/7 podcast. Through a friend, she heard about the classes I was teaching, listened to the podcast, and then faithfully answers God's call to travel an hour to start attending the classes in person, where we met, became friends, were engaged, and were later married on January 21st, 2022. 2022. As my computer freezes, anyway, uh, I thoroughly believe that Tammy Lynn, my wife, uh, was the answer to my prayers for a faithful Christian wife. She was and continues to be God's gift to me for my faithfulness. I was originally going to call today's post The Box of Love because on our first anniversary, uh, Tammy Lynn surprised me with a gift that will continue to bless me and humble me for all of 2023. I'm sharing photos of the Box of Love that Tammy Lynn gave me on the blog today if you want to see it. It is decorated with sweet sentiments about, uh, the love of a married couple, and inside the box, Tammy Lynn included a message a day or so for each day of the year of our marriage during 2022. Unbeknownst to me, each day she was putting in a Bible verse, a message, or a photo into an envelope, sealing it with the date and putting it into the box. So for this year, I have an envelope to open each day that will remind me of how much my wife loves me and how truly blessed I am by God, who has gifted her to me. Today's message from Tammy Lynn from January 18th, 2022 stated, one day someone will walk into your life and get it right where everyone else got it wrong. One day you're— one day you won't have to wait for a call or a text back. One One day you won't be the only one giving your all. One day you'll finally meet someone who wants to help you grow in life. One day you will finally meet someone who isn't afraid to give love another chance. One day you will finally meet someone you can trust with everything. One day you'll have your best friend, your biggest supporter, and your teammate all wrapped up into one person. Thank you for being my one person. I am so grateful I found my one day. That's what my wife wrote. Uh, with notes like that, uh, she can— you can see why I believe that Tammy Lynn is a gift of God to me. As much as I am humbled and grateful for Tammy Lynn's unbelievably kind words, I would like to point out that the one person who meets all of these criteria is the the Lord God Almighty. I have and undoubtedly will continue to disappoint my wife from time to time, but the Lord is the one who meets all of those criteria perfectly all the time, and he truly blesses those who are faithful to follow him. Before Christ, my life was a fruitless search for meaning and satisfaction, but then my one day came. I heard the message of God's love that saved my soul and put me on a course to know the one who would be my best friend, biggest supporter, and teammate all wrapped up in one— the Lord. He will never leave me or forsake me. He plans— he has plans to prosper me, to not harm me, and to give me a hope and a future. And he knew that it was not good for man to be alone, and so the Lord brought Tammy Lynn into my life, to give me someone to love and to walk through life with. After a meandering path of confusion in 2022, the Lord has blessed Tammy Lynn with a new job as a special education teacher that will likely be her career going forward. She was faithful and God had a plan to prosper her. Tammy Lynn and I are reasonably intelligent and have some skills and talents, but before we both made the decision to follow to faithfully follow the Lord, I think we would both admit that our lives were somewhat of a mess. But after we both individually decided to live by faith, the Lord's plan to prosper us became clearer and led to our marriage. So let me encourage you: God has gifts for you. God has plans for you. God has the ultimate hope and future for you that should fill you with joy and peace. Eternity with him. But let me also encourage and assure you that if you are faithful in making the daily decision to seek the Lord, to know and love him more, and to follow where he leads, he will give you the peace that goes beyond all understanding here in the land of the living, regardless of circumstances. And you may very well see the goodness of the Lord here on earth as he works all things together for good. So keep walking and talking with God and see what plans he has for you. Today's Bible verse comes to us from the New Living Translation Bible Promise Book for Men. This morning's meditation verse is 2 Timothy 1:7, and it says, for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and a sound mind. Today's verse reminds us of the nature of the spirit that God has given to all those who put their faith in Christ. When we walk in the Spirit, we pay attention to what we think and how we feel. If we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, we should notice a big difference in terms of what we feel emotionally and what we think about. The Christian mindset would be one of contentment, gratitude, biblically based reason, and love. You notice, uh, fear is not on that list. Um, God's love, which is shown for us through Christ's sacrifice, death, and resurrection, cast out all fear. In Christ, we have victory over death and sin, so there is nothing to be afraid of. Uh, death is the worst case scenario for those on Earth, but if we have Christ, we have eternal life. Nothing to be afraid of there. As for sin, if we are afraid of making mistakes, we are covered by God's love there too. Through God's grace and faith in Christ, we are forgiven of all our sins, even the ones we haven't done yet, so we don't have to fear punishment. But we also have been given true power over sin when we abide in Christ and let him live through our hearts Through us, our hearts will be on living in his peace and not violating God's love and acting out of character of our new life in Christ. God's love will work in and through us to make all things new. And even though the world may say that living for God is crazy, his word assures us that the spirit that leads us to follow the unseen God is of sound mind. So do not fear and choose to stop the insanity of a secular life by choosing to live by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit. As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we continue sharing from A.W. Pink's Sovereignty of God, and today we're continuing in Chapter 4, uh, The Sovereignty of God and Salvation. Um, with the second section of that chapter, which is The Sovereignty of God the Son in Salvation. So if you want to read the first part of that second section, you can go to mtforchrist.org and see what A.W. Pink has to say about that. Um, as always, we also encourage people to check out our discipleship, uh, classes that we share via the M.t. Clark 247 podcast and our— on our YouTube channel. For Victory Over the Darkness, The Bondage Breaker, and Freedom in Christ. Those studies are all based on the work of Dr. Neil Anderson and the, um, the Word of God. And they just teach— they teach you about who you are in Christ and how you can experience your freedom in Christ. And so we highly encourage you to check those out. We also encourage a study of God's Word so you can find those precious promises and apply them to your life. We do that through our Bible study that we do once a week with Arthur and Susanna Sincotti. You'll find all our Bible studies on the podcast and our YouTube channel, and we invite you to check them out. Um, and all the outlines are on the mteforchrist.org blog as well. So if you wanted to read the outlines and watch or listen to us as we discuss them We would encourage you to do that. Why? Because we discovered that God has many gifts for us and he has many plans for us. What they all are, we're not sure, but when we walk in the Spirit, we can have peace as we approach them. And right now we're, you know, we're on the cusp of a new, you know, that we're in a new year and we have plans for this year. Things we know what we're going to do. My schooling of Deeper Walk International's Prayer School of Ministry— or Prayer School of Prayer Ministry— begins tomorrow evening, and that'll last throughout the year. So that's a plan. And my Freedom in Christ course that I'm doing for Freedom in Christ Ministries for men On Tuesday nights, uh, begins on the 31st. If anyone wanted to register, go to ficm.org and find out, you know, the Freedom in Christ course. There's other courses there. I'm not sure when registration closes, so with the classes starting in 2 weeks, it's time to, you know, make sure you get her done soon, uh, if you want to experience, you know, an online class, um, with Freedom in Christ Ministries. Those are available to as well. Well, it's Wednesday and, uh, we have to work, so we, we should pray. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. We thank you so much for the precious promises and the plans you have to prosper us and to not harm us. And we know that those promises were for the nation of Israel, but through Christ we know we have those same promises for us. And we can, we can use that verse out of context because we know your love just like the nation of Israel knew your love. So, Lord, we just thank you for that. We just pray for anyone listening today or reading the message today that they'd be blessed, that you'd come alongside them in their prayer request. My prayers go out to my brother Michael, who just had emergency surgery on his throat. Um, he was a faithful state trooper for New York State and a faithful— so it was a faithful servant to our community. And we pray for— we thank you for his successful surgery. We pray for his healing. Um, today we also pray for Bob Griffin and Fred Dimmick, who have their medical issues as well. My father's, who's still recovering. Although he seemed pretty chipper, uh, last time I saw him. So we pray for all those, those healings, um, and, uh, we pray for the people out there, um, that you would bless and heal them as well. Um, as always, Lord, we just pray for you to go before us today, open our eyes to the things you want us to see, and lead our paths into the things you want us to do. Because, Lord, all we want to do is best represent you on the earth and to go out and make disciples by our, by our pointing to you, Lord. So we just pray for all these things. And Lord, we love you, we thank you, we praise you. We pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.