JHOPSD Articles

Dear Friend in Christ:

As we move into yet another election cycle, the subject of politics is in the air, and our nation is polarized. Is there a way forward that will yield peace and progress? Yes, there is, if we will seek God; He has already provided a solution. We are steadily proving that there is no other path to peace and progress.

Our nation’s founders understood something long-forgotten by contemporary society: laws alone will not produce a desired result. And today, one “simple” law will contain more provisions and work than our entire Declaration of Independence and Constitution combined. Our government seems desperate to find laws and more laws that will somehow fix our problems, and the tyranny of laws only grows. How long before we awaken to the fact that more human government is not the answer to human problems?

THE POWER OF IDEAS

Our founders came to North America to escape tyranny and establish liberty for the individual. Many, if not most, were believers in the Sovereign God and understood the limitations of human government. They borrowed ideas from men like Adam Smith, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Montesquieu, and William Blackstone; men who lived under tyranny. These men were Bible scholars and students of the Christian faith. It was their ideas, drawn from Holy Scripture, that found fertile ground in the hearts of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and a host of others who thirsted for liberty and the kind of government that would preserve and propagate it.

MY FATHER’S HOUSE SHALL BE A HOUSE OF PRAYER Matthew 21:6-7

The Conquering King, who is about to overcome all the powers of hell, comes in peace riding on a cold the foal of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). The crowds understood Him to be “the Son of David”, the promised Messiah. The Messiah had come in the name of Jehovah “the Redeeming Lord” offering redemption. He is also the judge of all those who refuse His reign.

Jesus entered the temple, which was the center of the Jewish Government, the place where “heaven and earth met”. He found it corrupted, not being used for its dedicated purpose for which David and Solomon had intended, so He, The Messiah, cleansed it and judged it and judged those religious leaders that rejected God’s chosen anointed one. Jesus established seven principles of the house of He would build:

The secret place is not the place of public praise and worship – here is just another expression of the secret place of praise and worship to God that we cultivate elsewhere. The secret place is not the corporate prayer meeting – here we meet in agreement sharing the belief that the Holy Spirit has given us answer in due season; but it is in the secret place of prayer where we apprehend the gift of belief and faith for covenant agreement. The secret place is not the house of prayer on Tuesday nights – the house of prayer is a force to be reckoned with because at this moment, each person brings their secret place into the open, and the measure of blessing and faith for prevailing prayer skyrockets as it were out of this world’s orbit and lays hold of the divine realm of heavenly expectation.

There's nothing more transfiguring than prayer. People often ask, "Why do you insist on prayer so much?" The answer is very simple - because Jesus did. You could change the title of the Gospel according to St. Luke to the Gospel of Prayer. It's the prayer life of Jesus. The other evangelists say that Jesus was in the Jordan and the Spirit descended on Him as a dove - Luke says it was while He was praying that the Spirit descended on Him. The other evangelists say that Jesus chose 12 disciples - Luke says it was after He spent a night in prayer that He chose 12 disciples. The other evangelists say that Jesus died on a cross - Luke says that even when He was dying Jesus was praying for those who persecuted Him. The other evangelists say Jesus went on a mount and He was transfigured - Luke says it was while He was praying that He was transfigured. There's nothing more transfiguring than prayer.

The Scriptures say that the disciples went to bed, but Jesus went to pray - as was His custom. It was His custom to pray. Now Jesus was the Son of God - He was definitely anointed for His ministry. If Jesus needed all that time in prayer; don't you and I need time in prayer? If Jesus needed it in every crisis, don't you and I need it in every crisis?

The story goes that a group of tourists visiting a picturesque village saw an old man sitting by a fence. In a rather patronizing way, one of the visitors asked, "Were any great men born in this village?" Without looking up the old man replied, "No, only babies." The greatest men were once babies. The greatest saints were once toddlers in the things of the Spirit.

It is true that grace is free. But beware of any message about grace that does not lead you to true discipleship.

I have learned by hard experience to be thankful for consumer reports about products offered on the Internet. Reading the customer reviews can save a potential buyer a lot of grief and money. Nowadays, because of the usefulness and availability of these reports few people would consider making a purchase of even something as small as a cell phone or an MP3 player without doing some due diligence in the form of research.

In today’s "marketplace" of spiritual messages, how much more careful should a Christian be about the words he or she allows to guide the inner person of the heart? Paul told his spiritual son Timothy, "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Tim. 2:15, NKJV).

The old message of cheap grace is experiencing a resurgence today among newer Christians who are not acquainted with its sad history or its downside and hidden costs. Cheap grace is a message that lowers the standards of God’s laws or casts scorn on the value of divine law as the way God governs His eternal kingdom.

Love Your Neighbor
Romans 13:8 "Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law."

The most important commodity in the Kingdom of heaven is love. The commodity is a sacrificial love, a servant love, a covenant love. The currency of heaven is love. There is a labor of love that far surpasses the labor of the dollar bill. Imagine a community that stopped and helped those broken on the side of the road not because of what they were going to get out of it, not because of what that person could do for them, but because of compassion and love. This is what Jesus modeled. This love is what was turning the world right side up in the early Church. It was the Ekklesia, the city whose builder and maker is God. This love is what was crushing the government’s financial tyranny and massive taxation; this love is what was liberating the Jewish people. Jesus, the King of Kings, came to bring an entirely different economy on the earth that was far superior to the economy of Caesar.

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man

The Conflict
Everyday I feel the pressing temptation, the overbearing seduction to settle for the ordinary, to domesticate my soul and anchor my hopes, my identity, my dreams in the here and now, the kingdom of man. What is the ordinary? The ordinary is gaining the entire world, yet forfeiting my soul. Even if I should indeed gain the whole world--the fame, money, power, status, and the glamor and glory of man that accompany treasures and accomplishments of the kingdom of man, I will have remained ordinary, for to forfeit my soul is to lose everything. Indeed, it would be to not have truly lived at all. I was created for the purpose of knowing God, and to be known by Him. Everything else pales in comparison. I was created to love God--the highest pleasure of eternal measure. I was created to be loved by the infinite, personal God, who is the creator and the embodiment of love. I do not need to gain the whole world. That desire is far from my soul. I desire a King, whose desire is to give me His kingdom. I refuse to settle for anything less.

The Kingdom of God is glorious and majestic beyond all comprehension. However, seen through the lens of the value system of the kingdom of man, it lacks the prestige, glamor, and the worldly beauty that would draw those deeply embedded in the principles of this world.

Editor’s Note: Excerpted, in shortened form, from Dr. Brown’s recent book What Do Jewish People Think About Jesus?

Why have Jewish people been so hated and persecuted through the centuries?

I devoted much of my book, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood, to the subject of anti-Semitism, and on several occasions I have delivered lectures on the question of why anti-Semitism exists. Out of all the hatreds in the world, anti-Semitism is unique.

At the invitation of Christian campus groups, I spoke on this topic at both Yale and Columbia universities, two of America’s most prestigious centers of learning, each time fielding questions from the listeners for better than an hour. My challenge was simple: I have a supernatural, biblical explanation for the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, one which even includes the devil himself—not the most popular theory on a university campus! “Do any of you have a better answer?”

After each lecture, I listened carefully to proposal after proposal, and despite the educational background of many of those in the audience, which included students and graduates of these universities, not one proposal could fully explain the “why” of anti-Semitism. In fact, the best theory that anyone offered was that, perhaps, anti-Semitism was due to aliens! (For more on “alien anti-Semitism,” stay tuned. I’m actually going to address that shortly.) What then makes anti-Semitism such a unique hatred?