The Cross and the Victory of God

I really only have one application this morning. Be a person of the cross. Be someone who loves it, who meditates on it, who has in utterly central in your life and your beliefs. Be someone who adores and praises God for it, someone who bows the knees of your heart before it. Delight in the fact that the blood of Jesus shed for you on the cross delivers you from sin and protects you ultimately from the evil one. When you are facing trials rejoice in the cross, rejoice that you are being counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus, because is means that you are being given the privilege by God of being caught up in the way that Jesus achieved victory. God doesn’t let wimpy Christians face too much by way of persecutions, only cross-centred, cross-saturated, cross-obsessed ones. My friends, the devil is real, Christ’s victory over him is real. The dragon’s rage against us is real. Our victory over him is real. But the only way it comes is by the blood of the lamb, the word of our testimony that he hates so much, and by not loving our lives so that we shrink from death. So love the cross, bear witness to Jesus and his cross with all your heart and decide to do so with your dying breath. And you will overcome.
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Rahab

In this crucial episode, Rahab is going to be the teacher of God’s people. Every time she gets a mention in the New Testament it is as an example of outstanding faith. So let’s never fall into the trap of assuming that life in the kingdom should have a certain nice middle-class suburban character to it. If Rahab tell us anything it is that God likes to have in the church people who aren’t like me. Rahab is a big challenge to my expectations of church life, and to yours. Rahab says to me “Marcus, don’t you go putting limits on who God wants in his people.” God says “I love bringing Canaanite prostitutes to myself.” If you have a past that means you can relate to this and you sometimes find church life stiff and starchy, God says to you “I love bringing people like Rahab to myself. And people like you.”
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Prophecy and Teaching

Why does the claim persist that prophecy and teaching are one and the same? What is to be gained through that argument? By far the most important argument is that were prophecy to be anything other than teaching, it would constitute additional special revelation on a par with scripture as regards authority. I can understand people being worried about that. Another argument might be that in places where there is definite lack of experience of prophecy, Bible teaching is the closest category available for understanding those passages that speak of prophecy. Another argument might be that when people have seen excess, counterfeit or claims for prophetic revelation that dismiss or claim to go beyond scripture, they are justified in writing the whole thing off because the negative is so damaging. Another argument might be that scripture is by far the normative means of God ruling his Church (correct) and that therefore anything that seems to fall outside that norm is a challenge to God's rule over his Church(logically not necessarily correct).
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