FROM YOUR PASTOR’S DESK:
December
YEAR END 2021 MESSAGE FOR ALL BIBLE-READING CHRISTIANS
The year 2021 is ingloriously winding down, lugging with it a gargantuan mixed bag of hope and desperation (with everything in between, both probable and impossible, absolutely vital and grossly unconscionable, saintly and demonic, heroic and villainous, genuinely prophetic and provocatively conspiratorial, running the whole gamut of their respective scale and magnitudes).
The now historical specter named Covid 19 and its virulent variant relatives, may be said to be responsible for packing this “mixed bag,” or if you wish, “stuffing” this global-sized bulging “stockings” styled by the devastating hands of what is myopically-diagnosed as the man-made “climate change and global warming,” mysteriously leaving out the real causes, purposes of its diabolical mastermind in the spiritual conflict of the ages!
However, instead of summarizing the highlights of prophetic perspectives and import of eternal consequences of what has thus transpired and what it forebodes in the days ahead, (which I plan to do later at the other side of incoming new year, God willing), I am sharing with you one of my favorite passages in my KJV Bible from Paul’s epistle to the church in Ephesus.
In it the apostle lifts up and magnifies an all-encompassing CAUSE that transcends all other worthy causes of and for mankind. And what is it? In her book The Great Controversy, Ellen G. White wrote that here the apostle “presents to the true believer the height of Christian privileges, opening before them in the most comprehensive language the most marvelous power that they might possess as sons and daughters of the Most High.”
Even before discovering this amazing verse-specific Testimony, I had already begun committing this passage to memory because when first encountered it in my Bible readings way back, I believe, in the early 1990s, it immediately captured my attention.
Many years after, I now know much better as to why! It encapsulates so succinctly like no other, what the ultimate goal of the plan of salvation of the gospel is—for the individual believer, the church at large, and the family of God on earth.
I find it even more profoundly timely now as my staging ground, as it were, from where I can look by clear-eyed faith, beyond the temporal trials, tribulations, and disappointments of the hopelessly uncertain present to the certainty of the promised glorious triumphs of tomorrow’s eternity—that begins the moment Jesus returns in His second advent bringing His reward of eternal life to all who remained faithfully obedient to the truth to the end of their earthly lives. Now read on and tell me what you think!
Ephesians 3: 14-21: “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ might dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God. Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us. Unto Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.” Eph. 3: 14-21, KJV.
God bless all of you, NMF.