I am Free and I am Home – Purity 905

 I am Free and I
am Home –  Purity 905 

Purity 905 12/03/2022 Purity 905 Podcast

Purity 905 on YouTube: 

Good morning,

Today’s photo of the pink and purple clouds of
sunrise from the point view of the backyard of my countryside home in Easton NY
comes to us from TammyLyn Clark who was tending to her pets when see looked to
the right to see this beautiful sunrise. 

Well It’s the first Saturday of December 2022, and
it is my prayer that all who read or hear this message will not be so busy in your
holiday shopping and preparations for Christmas that you miss out on  the beauty of the season.

I don’t know what it is about December but just last
night I was marveling over how I was just over come by peace and love just
sitting at the dinner table in the presence of my wife preparing dinner while Christmas
music played.  December, for me anyway, brings
with it a sense of things wrapping up, or things coming to an end, of a sense
that “we made it through another year”, and that we are in the “home stretch”.
And this culmination of the year and Christmas celebration brings with it an
emphasis on the things that are important: Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
and the love that we enjoy with our loved ones that are reflected by songs like
“I’ll be home for Christmas” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or “The
Christmas Song”, you know, the one with “chestnuts roasting on an open fire”. So
last night I was feeling like an old nostalgic, sappy mess, as I was just “feeling
the love” pour out of me as I listened to the music and stared at my wife.

I am so grateful for my wife and this morning I was
reflecting on our lives together and just got that Michael Bublé Song: Home that
ends with: 

“… you always believed in me

Another
winter day
Has come and gone away
In even Paris and Rome
And I wanna go home
Let me go home

And
I’m surrounded by
A million people I
I still feel alone
Oh, let me go home
Oh, I miss you, you know

Let me go home
I’ve had my run
Baby, I’m done
I gotta go home
Let me go home
It’ll all be all right
I’ll be home tonight
I’m coming back home.”

 

As much as I absolutely
adore my place “down by The River” in Stuyvesant, my home is wherever TammyLyn
is and the reason I can say that is because no one, other than God, has loved
and accepted me as much as she has.  And
most importantly, she loves and accepts me for who I am in Christ and
encourages me in my walk of faith, even though it was contrary to the way most
of the world walks.

 

It increasingly pains my
heart to see how most of the world is enamored with the things of this world
and how all of us, before coming to Christ, build up our identities around our
preferences, activities, and hobbies, and thus separate ourselves from the Lord
by living independently of Him.  

 

My decision to follow the
Lord has not been without its costs. I have been rejected, insulted, abandoned,
and betrayed because of my faith. I always have accepted the losses because I
know that the value of the things I have lost or the relationships that have
been broken pale in comparison to the immense value of my relationship with God
and my eternal destiny with Him, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t hurt.  However, regardless of the pain, that
suffering makes the decision to follow the Lord to be even more compelling.

 

“I didn’t suffer all of this, to walk away from the Lord now!”

 

Plus, the Lord delivered
me out of so much darkness, that I simply can’t imagine ever going back to the
ways things used to be in my life. Occasionally, I’ll be tempted to “give it a
rest” or to second guess some of the choices I have made on the path of Christian
Discipleship but when I honestly evaluate the situations I faced and the
outcomes that have resulted on this faith walk, 
I quickly dismiss those thoughts because I simply can’t imagine an
alternative road that would have been any better.  

 

Part of that journey is TammyLyn.  The Lord revealed to me that there was simply
“no other” woman for me and that her coming into my life was a result of my faithfulness
to follow Him and that our coming together as man and wife has elevated my life
to heights of joy, love, and purpose that I simply could not have
imagined.   

 

And it is because of our
faith in Christ that we have a “home” in each other.  

 

It was my decision to be
faithful to launch a discipleship ministry, and her decision to seek the Lord
in her life that brought us together. 

 

And it was only with the
understanding that this decision to follow the Lord would define the rest of our
lives, that we became man and wife. 

 

And now we are just doing
it. 

 

Last night, after dinner
and spending time together, I felt the pull of sleep coming on hard but was
reminded by TammyLyn that we hadn’t read the second chapter of the gospel of
John yet, as our plan is to  read through
that book before Christmas.  

 

So we opened up our Bible’s
and read it.  That might not seem like much,
but it displays the reason why there was “no other” for me but TammyLyn.  Simple faith, dedication to follow the Lord,
come what may, is what I needed in a wife and the Lord gave it to me in TammyLyn.  

 

After emerging victorious
over my addictions and all the brokenness of my past because of the Lord’s
presence in my life, there was simply nothing and no one that I would allow me
to compromise my decision to follow Him. 
I was prepared to go the rest of my life alone rather than stop being
the person God wanted me to be. 

 

In TammyLyn, I don’t have
someone to support me in my decisions to follow the Lord, I have someone to
actively encourage and inspire me to be faithful and to be bold and courageous
to pursue all that the Lord has for me.  

 

I am free and I am home,
in Christ of course, but the Lord was gracious to send me a woman to share this
life of freedom, peace, and joy with.  

 

SO to anyone out there who
is alone, let me encourage you not to ever compromise your relationship with the
Lord by becoming involved with someone who doesn’t know Him or who isn’t
actively seeking to obey Him.   Paying
the Lord lip service doesn’t cut it for a life partner.  It’s better to walk alone rather than to walk
through life with someone who is just pretending to love God and who is
actually consumed with themselves or the things of this world.  

 

The Counting Crows song “A
long December” is a melancholy song that reflects the winding down spirit of
the year, where we might be suffering pain, exhaustion, or loneliness causing
us to “laugh a little slower”, or “talk a little lower” but it also speaks the
hope that the next year will be better than the last.   

 

I don’t know if you really
know who you are in Christ. I don’t know how free you are. I don’t if you have
a “home” where you can authentically live out your faith and experience all
those things, but I can tell you without a doubt that if you keep walking and
talking with God, this year can be better the last because the longer we walk
according to His wisdom and ways and stay in His presence, the more we leave
the darkness of our old lives behind and the further we step into the plans
that He has for us.   

 

So rejoice and take some
time to “feel the love” of the season and pour out the love God has given to
you to all the people in your life.  It
is a “wonderful life” only when we acknowledge it as a gift from God and fully
realize the value of it when we are redeemed in Christ.

——————————————————–

Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise
Book for Men”.

This morning’s meditation verses are:

Mark 10:42-45 (NLT2)
⁴²  So Jesus called them
together and said, “You know that the rulers in this
world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over
those under them.
⁴³  But
among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be
your servant,
⁴⁴  and
whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else.
⁴⁵  For
even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his
life as a ransom for many.”

 Today’s verses show us that
the power and authority we receive through Jesus, is best used in the service
of others and that our greatness in His kingdom will reflect what we give
rather than what we receive.  

Teachings like this from Jesus, I believe, are met with the highest
levels of skepticism imaginable because they are so counter intuitive to the way
our world system operates.  

The corporate world will occasionally try to adapt the principle
of being a “servant leader” by encouraging managers to invest in their team
members and to develop the people on you “team” but generally the higher levels
of corporate power are accomplished by Machiavellian ends justifying their
means and some cutthroat power moves.  

One of the men from a Freedom In Christ course that I lead
testified of his corporate success being cut short when he rose through the
ranks up to a certain point only to discover that he was determined to be “too
nice” for upper management and was fired, leaving him feeling betrayed and
utterly disillusioned with the business world.  

He rebounded eventually but his testimony revealed that he was
quite shaken by the experience of learning the truth of how things “really were”
in the world.   

“Nice guys finish last” isn’t a phrase I just made up and there
are lots of people who can testify of their experience where this seems to be
true.  

But Jesus says otherwise.  Why?
Because He is the Truth, He knows the Truth about final outcomes. 

There are tons of verses in the Bible about this paradox of how
the wicked seem to prosper but other verses show us that the wicked will
receive justice: like

Deuteronomy 32:35 (NLT2)
³⁵  I will take revenge; I
will pay them back. In due time their feet will slip. Their day of disaster
will arrive, and their destiny will overtake them.’

 

And

 

Romans 12:19-21 (NLT2)
¹⁹  Dear friends, never take
revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, “I
will take revenge; I will pay them back,” says the LORD.
²⁰  Instead, “If your enemies
are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In
doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their heads.”
²¹  Don’t let evil conquer
you, but conquer evil by doing good.

So we overcome evil
by doing good and as today’s verse teach us we will be considered great in God’s
kingdom through being a servant to others like the way Christ was a suffering
servant for us.

___________________________________________

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 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
“Discipleship”, also known as “The Cost of Discipleship”

As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Bonhoeffer’s books for your own
private study and to support his work.  This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.

The
Church of Jesus Christ and Discipleship

Chapter Eight

Preliminary
Questions, concludes

 

All this makes it
abundantly clear that we cannot play off the narrative of the calling of the
disciples against other parts of the gospel account. It is never a question of
our having or taking on the same identity as the disciples or other people in
the New Testament. The only issue of importance is that Jesus Christ and his
call are the same, then and now. His word remains one and the same, whether it
was spoken during his earthly life or today, whether it was addressed to the
disciples or to the paralytic. Then and now, it is the gracious call to enter
his kingdom and to submit to his rule. The question whether I ought to compare
myself with the disciple or with the paralytic poses a dangerous and false
alternative. I need not compare myself with either of them. Instead, all I have
to do is to listen and do Christ’s word and will as I receive them in both of
these biblical accounts. Scripture does not present us with a collection of Christian
types to be imitated according to our own choice. Rather, in every passage it
proclaims to us the one Jesus Christ. It is him alone whom I ought to hear.^[9]
He is one and the same everywhere.

Thus, when we ask the
question of where we can hear Jesus’ call to discipleship today, there is no
other answer than this: listen to the word that is preached, and receive the
sacrament. In both of these listen to Christ himself. Then you will hear his
call!^[1]

—————————more tomorrow————————

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, “Freedom in Christ” series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!

at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts

(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available
on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and
Audible.com. 

These teachings are also available on the
MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MT4Christ247

Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
to be encouraged.

My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship