No add ons

I have just come across this quote in my drafts, unfortunately, I didn't put where it come from, or who said it. 

In this age of add ons, I thought it would be good for Christians to muse on this....

“The next word is basicality. I do not think there is such a word; I made it up. But if there is not such a word, there ought to be. What I mean is that Jesus Christ is basic to the church. He is underneath it, and the whole redeemed company rests on the Lord Jesus Christ. I think I might be able to go around the world and simply cry, “Christ is enough.” 

What weakens us in evangelical circles is that we put a plus sign after Christ. Christ plus something else. It is always the pluses that ruin our spiritual lives. It is always the additions, or the additives, as we say now, that weaken the church. 

Remember that God has declared that His Son, Christ, is sufficient. He is the way, the truth, and the life; He is wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. He is the wisdom of God and the power of God that gathers onto himself all things, and in Him all things consist so that we do not want Jesus Christ plus something else, or Jesus Christ and something else. We must never put an end after Christ, waiting for something else, or Christ with a dash, leading to something else. We must preach Christ, for Christ is enough. 

We of the evangelical faith—which is, I believe and have always believed, to be the faith of our fathers and the biblical faith—should not put Christ plus science or Christ plus philosophy or Christ plus psychology or Christ plus education or Christ plus anything else, but Christ alone. 

These other things may have their place and be used, just as you can throw sand into vats where they are making glass and it will all melt. We can use all these things, but we are not leaning on any of them. We are resting on Him who is basic to the faith of our fathers."

The only add ons Christians should use are the ones that are in Scripture, 

which are for our whole spiritual well being,

and the well being of the church.

Dr Too Late and the Great Physician

Dr Too Late, dreadful words from the lips of this one “you should have come earlier, you should have come when you first had the problem, you’ve left it too late.” And folks, desperate, desperate man I am with an awakened conscience “Lord God, is there no one who can help me?”

All of the physicians in the entire world are useless and worthless, vain is the help of man “Sweet, Christ Jesus to you I come, will your blood avail for me Lord Jesus? And I find then the Great Physician, hallelujah, “Will Your blood avail for me, all the worthless physicians have failed me.”

Isaiah 26:3 

You will keep him in perfect peace, 

whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You,

and all the comfort of heaven comes to my soul in a still small voice that’s says to me.

And what the worthless physicians couldn’t do the Great Physician does it, He alone, only Him, rest, peace, inner peace, this priceless thing called peace given to us by the Great Physician. What an interesting question to consider when you are talking to some troubled soul to see if you can ascertain “Who’s your Dr?” you may not have to put it like that, you may not have to ask that question just listen to what they have to say and you will find out who the Dr is, and I tell you if it is any Dr other than the Great Physician then he is a worthless physician and he’ll do no good and we just need to be reminded of these things folks. And what about you, having come to the Great Physician don’t let us be deflected and start trusting in something else or someone else, trust Him. You can seek help from all sorts of sources there is no problem in that but the one to trust is the Lord Jesus, He’s the only one, He will never let you down ever, let us be ready to recommend the Great Physician to others. Let us be ready to assess ourselves and keep guard of ourselves that we will always turn to Him whatever the circumstances.

Where it says there, you will keep him in perfect peace, the translators have said perfect peace because if they translated it literally it doesn’t appear to make a lot of sense in our English because what it would actually say is, you will keep him in peace peace, the Hebrew is, shalom shalom, the Hebrew word shalom for peace means an entire well being and God will keep us not just in shalom which would be wonderful but he keeps us in shalom shalom, there is an intensity about it, praise the Lord that sounds wonderful to me, so he is talking there about an absolute fullness of wellbeing and it comes only from the Great Physician. Only from being in a right relationship with God which is only possible through the Lord Jesus Christ, and what He has done for us on the cross at Calvary, there is no other way, we are trusting in Him. But notice as well that this peace, this shalom shalom involves both the mind and the heart, the head and the heart you can’t leave the one out you have to have them both. Whose mind is stayed on You, what’s he talking about there? He’s talking about the thoughts, it might be the imagination, don’t let your imagination run off on some kind of weird trip, think about the Lord, think about the One whose arm is not shortened to save. Whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You, so the mind, the thought processes stayed on Him and the trust is a heart condition, can you see that? The mind and the heart they are both together and the result is peace peace, shalom shalom.

Isaiah 26:4

Trust in the LORD forever, 

For in Yah, the LORD, 

is everlasting strength.

Yah that’s an interesting name for God, and it’s talking there about Jehovah God, in the special sense of having become our salvation, it is He who was, and is and is to come, the All Becoming One, it’s talking about Him, Yah. Everlasting strength literally means, Rock of Ages, let us be encouraged, there is no other physician anywhere, any place at any time who could do this for us only this one, only this Great Physician and let us be ready always to recognise as we talk to people. So easily it comes out of their mouth,

Matthew 12:34 

For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,

you have only got to be around people for such a short time, and you realise what is in their hearts, and you recognise the worthless physicians, probably you can categorise them, you can find out who it is. Let’s be ready always to share with them the Great Physician. Who He is, what He has done for us, what He can do for them, and how He and He alone can impart perfect peace, peace with God and the peace of God, peace to your soul in the midst of the turmoil of a fallen world, shalom shalom I don’t know of anything folks more priceless, praise the name of Jesus, blessed be the name of the Lord, amen.

Pastor Philip Yendle

Dr Do Better and Dr Time Enough

Here is a physician who is really talkative as well, they have all had a lot to say just like Job’s comforters, chapter after chapter they had a lot to say and Dr Do Better says he can help me, and he says “it is quite true that you have done some bad things but you can’t help the past, the past is the past and you can’t change it, it’s gone now, so what you must do from here on is turn over a new leaf and you must do better in the future than you have done in the past, if you try to do better in the future you will be comforted by that and all will be well.” That’s what he says, but you know Dr Do Better the answer to him is that even when I do well there is something still bad with me, even when I am doing my best I am conscious that things are not quite as they should be with me, and actually my very best efforts seem to be filthy rags, problem, problem, problem. And besides how can a better future blot out a guilty past? Even if I could do better in the future what about all the mistakes I’ve made and all the bad things I have already done, “I am so miserable Dr Do Better and you are no help to me you are just like all the others, another worthless physician.” Can’t somebody help me? 

 At this point there is a knock on the door and it is Dr Time Enough, “Don’t worry” he says “there is no immediate cause for concern, this condition can be controlled. You are not wrong to consider your present state and your eternal destiny but just relax, eat drink and be merry” and click, click, click goes my mind and I realise that he has left the end bit of that off because it says eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, but he’s not mentioned that bit and he continues “relax, don’t worry about it because there is always a death bed conversion to fall back on” “but what if I don’t have a deathbed, what if suddenly something happens and there’s no deathbed, what then?” and he is no better than all the others, another worthless physician as Job would put it. I am getting desperate and suddenly I am confronted by somebody who is called Dr Too Late. 

Dr False Peace and Dr Good Enough

Here is a sweet oily faced quack if ever there was one and he says “peace, peace” when there is no peace folks and he says this when all the time my conscience is nagging away at me and I know there is something wrong and he is trying to soothe me with his smooth words but on the inside I know that I am in turmoil and my hungry soul needs bread, I need substance and not what he has got to offer he says “peace, peace” when there is no peace, what miserable comfort there is from this man Dr False Peace to a condemned man, another worthless physician and I am getting desperate now at this point and I don’t know what to do. It is good to keep these things in mind because I know I am personalising this but I am telling you these are the ones that are out there and this Dr False Peace he turns out to be worthless but here comes another one and he is called Dr Good Enough.

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of My people slightingly, 

saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. 

Jeremiah 6:14 

 He has a perfect bedside manner to try to put you at your ease, he seems almost angelic, a real smooth talker. “Dr Good Enough can you help me?” and he says “What seems to be the trouble?” “I have this terrible sin problem Dr” “Well we’ll soon have you right, don’t worry too much about it, let’s see you’ve never really done anyone any harm have you, and you’ve always paid your way and done more good than harm in your time what more could you do? Just carry on being good and nice and all will be well. “And that’s all he’s got to say folks, another useless diagnosis and another useless physician because he has missed the whole point. It may well be that I am nice so far as man is concerned, it may well be that man’s assessment is “yes indeed he’s a nice chap” man isn’t my problem folks it is God we have to deal with, my conscience tells me that there is a problem in my dealing with God not in my dealing with man. 

You see we all have faults and sometimes we see each other’s faults sometimes we may get upset with one another but for the most part we can overlook one another’s faults because we all have them but God is not like that, He is perfect, He is holy. From man’s assessment I might be doing fine but from God’s assessment not fine and apart from the Lord Jesus, without His help I stand condemned, no hope, how can I be right with Him? And I shrink back in terror in the knowledge of all this and how hopeless it all is and this man Dr Good Enough how useless he is, a worthless physician just like the rest of them and I tell him “Dr Good Enough you are just no help your diagnosis is useless” and Dr Good Enough is deeply offended folks by what I have had to say about him, he is deeply offended by my assessment of his skills but he decides at this point that he will refer me to his colleague who is known as Dr Do Better.

sermon by Pastor Philip Yendle

Dr Atheist and Dr Agnostic

There is Dr Atheist, now this man that I was speaking to in Derby that was his doctor, well he changed doctors while I was talking to him actually but to start with he was relying upon Dr Atheist, if you split the word up theist means God and the prefix A it means no, so it means that he believes that there is no God, the Atheist says there is no God and Psalm 14 says holding to that view categorises him as a fool,  

Look around you where do you think it all came from? Look at the stars in the sky where do you think it all came from? And I was just talking to this man and I asked him “do you think it just happened, do you think that something just came out of nothing, what do you think?” and of course then he was backed into a corner but the atheist is comfortable in part with 

2 Peter 3:4 all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation."  

He doesn’t like that bit about creation because he doesn’t believe in creation but he is very happy about, oh everything continues as it was its called uniformitarianism and you leave God out completely and they are very comfortable with that and Dr Atheist says there is no hereafter so you don’t have to worry about anything like that but then the anxious soul with a conscious awakened, you see this man must have his conscious awakened somehow to have engaged me in this conversation and folks we need to recognise this in people when they are talking to us. He must have had a conscious awakening otherwise he would not have engaged me in the conversation that he engaged me in and the awakened conscious says to this Dr Atheist 

“how do you know there is no God, do you have total knowledge, have you searched every corner of all the universe so that you can say that there is no God? You arrogant puny man you to say such a thing, worthless physician if ever there was one,"

and my friend changed his mind and he turned at that point to another one called Dr Agnostic.

The word agnostic is also split into two parts the prefix a at the beginning means no and the next part,  you may be familiar with the Gnostics the knowing ones, well agnostic means we don’t know, no knowing and all is uncertainty amongst the agnostics. Now let me personalise this, I’ll put myself in the position of an unsaved person for the sake of illustrating this because here I am in need of something folks I have just suddenly become conscious that I have got a problem in my conscience it is troubling me, I know there is something wrong, I know I am not right and I am conscious of something that the bible calls sin and I am trying to deal with this and I am trying to deal with it and this was the position that this friend of mine was in he wouldn’t admit it but that is where he is coming from and Dr Agnostic says 

“Well we can’t know, we can’t be sure, we can’t really know anything” 

and do you know you find out what a useless Dr he is and it is so tragic because so many people are listening to him 

“Don’t worry, never mind I’ll introduce you to another Dr he can help you his name is Dr False Peace."

To be continued

Dr False Peace and

Dr Good Enough

Pastor P Yendle

Useless Physicians Part one

I was speaking to a friend in Derby on Tuesday and he said he didn’t believe in God when I told him I was a pastor, and I thought about this, when you are speaking to people it comes home to you the awfulness of being lost and what it means to be lost and how lost people are, they’re just floundering, and wherever you go you can speak to anybody and in no time at all you start to discover that they’ve got problems. We all have problems don’t we it’s just that we have a wonderful helper but there are problems, problems wherever you go, I don’t know ifyou have ever read the book of Job but Job contains a revelation of what Satan can do to a person and really what is in the nature of Satan to do to a person if God permits him to act, there is a wonderful comfort there because when you read the book you realise that he can’t do anything unless God lets him but within that you see the nature of Satan. All the things that happened to Job to that extent that God permitted him, Job suffered dreadfully but the Lord wonderfully restored him. When you consider his before and after state the contrast is such a stark one before all this happened to him there he was he had children, riches, good health I suppose all the things that most of us would ever hope to have, he had them, in his day folks he had them all but when Satan had done his work Job lost his children, his wealth, and his health and here was a man stripped of everything that seemed to make life worth living for him. At the end of the book it says that the Lord restored everything,

Job 42:10 And the Lord restored Job's losses when he prayed for his friends. Indeed, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before;

He had double the number of sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys all the hallmarks of being exceedingly affluent in the society in which he lived. But the same number of children as he had before, God said I will give you back double but he had the same number of children, now you may agree with me or not but my understanding is that he had double the children as well because he had the same number of children born again to replace on earth the ones that he had lost and in the hereafter the one’s that he’d lost as well, God doubled everything folks I so believe.

I want us to consider that huge aspect that he was stripped of everything and it just made me think talking to this friend of mine last Tuesday so many people with problems of one sort or another and every single one of us we all have this in common, we all have needs like this when we suffer some loss of some kind it is a wonderful help if we can find the comfort of some good words from somebody now unfortunately in Job’s case his comforters were miserable comforters and they weren’t really up to the mark, they weren’t the comforters that Job hoped they would have been. Properly understood his comforters comforted from, now it wasn’t their fault they did the best that they could it was just that they lacked knowledge, they didn’t know and there is a revelation at the end of the book but that doesn’t answer all the questions as a matter of fact but they answered from three different stand points so closely related, they answered from the stand point of human experience, human tradition, and human merit. It is so easy to look at something from the stand point of human merit and to think to yourself well I know what he deserves and what he doesn’t deserve because look at what sort of person he is and when you look at the sort of comments that his comforters made they dealt with everything from the point of what we experience as people, the tradition that we pick up along the way and what we think we might merit or not merit because of the way that we have lived and all of those things fell short really to explain the situation that this man was in. Here was a man for a time that experienced every human comfort and every hope just absolutely cut off he lost everything folks, there isn’t a person in this room who has experienced the sort of trauma that this man Job went through now some of us I know have had dreadful experiences and I am not making light of that but this man folks, experiences multiplied on multiplied and I don’t know anybody who has had quite his experiences.

Just imagine being that utterly destitute, utterly helpless, utterly in need and not knowing really where to turn for help, when I was thinking about this in some small measure every single one of us, all the people that we meet they have all got problems and you listen to them and one of the things is the lack of help and comfort, there is a remarkable little verse in Job when he is describing these comforters, these friends that have come to him 

Job 13:4 But you forgers of lies, You are all worthless physicians, lousy doctors all of you and this is what I started thinking about, you know the world is full of worthless physicians, useless doctors and we have all met them every single one of us and I felt it would be useful and instructive to identify some of the useless physicians that there are and you are familiar with them you have met some of them yourself.

To be continued

Dr Atheist and Dr Agnostic......

 Pastor Philip Yendle

I am Not Ashamed, are You?

I recently attended the funeral of a sister in Christ. She was a godly woman, and very gracious, who loved to speak of Jesus at every opportunity. People testified to how the Lord had used her for His glory, and to how His Light and truth manifest in her life. when she had to go into a residential care home, she continued to testify to the love and grace of Jesus, and she spoke to the other people there be they staff or residents.

She sang, read the Word, and prayed. In the evenings as the staff got her ready for bed she would pray, especially for them.

And when it came to the point where she could no longer speak, the staff would kneel at the side of her bed and pray. Such was the influence of this Christian lady, in this non-Christian home.

At the same time of this funeral, I read on the internet of the imprisonment of Pastor in China. He asked for prayer, what did he ask for? Ease and comfort, pleasant guards, decent food, his release? No, none of these requests came from his lips. He asked that we would pray for him to be a light in that dark place, and that he would be able to share the gospel, and show to the prisoners and the guards the love and mercy of God and His Son, Jesus.

Neither of these wanted to be in the position and place they were in, but they didn’t grumble and complain, rather they rejoiced and praised God in their circumstances and prayed in humility of heart that God would use them where they were. No matter what our circumstances, no matter where we are, God can, and does use us if we are willing to be led by His Holy Spirit, and not seek our own ease and comfort.

We should all be one of the same mind in Christ, our lives should show His love, our lips should sing His praise. And we should not be ashamed of the gospel.

I am not ashamed
Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir

Luke 9:26

For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.

True Teasure

Old Humphrey's Gems Taken from Gleaning for the Young 1882, 

page 2

We all love to pluck the fairest fruit, and to gather the sweetest flowers; but put this down as a truth worthy to be graven on a pillar of brass that more enjoyable fruits and flowers grow by the wayside of the path of duty than in all the wilderness of wilful inclination.

We all set a value on riches; but Mexico is a long way off, and it’s gold is hard to gain. The Bible which has a far richer source of real wealth, is at hand. I will point out two texts that are worth a hundred Mexico’s:

“God is love”

1 John 4:8

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

“Christ died for the ungodly”

Romans 5:6

For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

The Word of God is full of treasure, and it is as relevant today in 2020 for the young (the old and the in between)  as it was in 1882. There is not a person on the planet that has not sinned, and is therefore a sinner. And all sinners need the saving grace of God, who is willing to be your Father when you repent of your sins, and leave your old life behind to follow and believe in the Lord Jesus. Oh, the joy of knowing your sins are forgiven and that you are a child of God, and all the treasures of God's Word are there for you to discover for your own life. And to know that all the treasure of heaven is yours for now and eternity. Don’t wait, today is the day of salvation.

Repent

Believe

Receive