Mat 17
20 Jesus replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

2Cor 12:9
But Jesus said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

From the two pieces of scripture mentioned above, we are able to deduce that the act of overcoming our trials, is in thinking less of ourselves and focusing our lives more on the Son of God “Jesus Christ”, through whom God creates and restores life in all its holistic essence. It is in counting all we have achieved in the flesh as loss (Phil 3:8) and dying to ourselves and living for the Lord Jesus Christ (Jn 12:24-26) that we enjoy life in all its fullness. Have you ever noticed that people who show-off, put on the poorest show? The thing is we were not made for the purpose to glorify ourselves but to live for the glory of God, and am speaking of those who have been saved by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation is not about what we have done but about finding refuge in Jesus, learning His precepts & be empowered by His Holy Spirit to exercise His commandments with a new heart that beats for God (Ezek 36:26-27).

Mat 22
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment.

Psalm 2
11 Worship the Lord with reverence
And rejoice with trembling.
12 Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled.
How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!

Remember how God tells Israel in Deut 7:7 that He did not choose Israel because they were great but because they were the least of all peoples. You know, God is so Sovereign and Mighty that His enemies exists simply because He raises them, like fattening a cow for the slaughter (Rom 9:17, 22). Even Satan does nothing more than further God’s agenda in this world. You might ask, so if everyone is doing the will of God, why are people going to hell? Good Question… well, unlike the serpent in the garden of Eden, we who were made in the image of God are warm blooded, so as to indicate that we won’t adapt to our environment to the extent of succumbing to it. Take Simon for example, whose name means “a reed that sways with the wind” but after his confession concerning Jesus’ true identity as the Son of God, Jesus named him “Peter” meaning ‘rock’ (Mat 16:18), a testimony which cannot be shaken and upon which Jesus shall build His Church. It is said about God that He is immutable (there is no shifting shadow [James 1:17]) and this is how we are to be… holy as God is Holy, that even in an environment of a fallen world we shall be as saints empowered by grace to serve the Lord (Phil 3:14 & 4:13), like the lotus that grows in the marshes. So it is, that from the fall, all men are sinners (Rom 3:23) left with the self-righteousness they chose in Adam to saves themselves while the Saints are God’s elect in whom God overcame sin by the power of Jesus’ blood and reconciled them to Himself (1Jn 2:2). So, the reason people are going to hell is because the righteousness they chose for themselves in Adam doesn’t save them from sin, especially when you consider how self-righteousness blatantly differs from the righteousness of God, revealed to us in Christ.

John 1
18 No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed Him.

Rom 5
17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

The counterfeit religions of the world have a very misleading view of piety, because their righteousness is not revealed to them through Christ, the only mediator between God & men (1Tim 2:5). As a matter of fact, these religions are driven by the people’s self-righteousness in their wasted attempt to please God on their own terms but truth be told the only god they serve is themselves because if their righteousness is their own, then these fools are a law to themselves & wise in their own eyes. Following Jesus (true Christianity) on the other hand, calls for a piety where the precepts we are to obey are moral (Mat 28:18-20). I really don’t think God is really concerned with the people’s sadistic take on religion, who beat themselves silly, grow an unkempt beard or walk long distances barefoot to the Mosque, temple or monastery. If you think your zeal to not eat pork or drink wine pleases God (Mat 15:17-18), guess what… it doesn’t. What pleases God is seeing you obey His Moral Law, where you first love the Lord with all your strength and second that you love your neigbour as you love yourself (Mat 22:36-40). The religions of the world believe in putting on a show of humility with their attire for all the world to see, while by way of self-righteousness they magnify themselves before God concerning how they merited/attained their jannat/nirvana with their sadistic religious routines. However, the truth is Salvation is about being put right with God… aligning your desires with His by the redeeming merit of the unblemished lamb of God: Jesus, by whose blood we have forgiveness of sins. Salvation is not naturally possible for any person, until the irresistible grace of God converts the person from being self-centered to being God centered. This is true conversion and is only possible by way to repentance, where after God brings the person to realize the futility of his/her self-righteousness, that person submits/lowers/prostrates himself/herself to God, that in truly admitting his/her weakness, he/she may find comfort & refuge in God, through Jesus Christ.

Mat 5
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

2Cor 7:10
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

To conclude, if we were to look at Eph 2:8-10 and Luke 17: 10, we understand that we are saved by grace through faith and the evidence of our salvation is in the fruits but the merit is of Christ and so if we are to boast, we are to boast in the Lord (Jer 9:23-24) & think less of ourselves to the extent of boasting in our weakness, which is spiritual prostration in revealing how much we really love the Lord our God who is worthy of true worship (Rev 5:8-14 & 7:10). It is therefore in earnestly seeking the Lord concerning the obedience He requires of us, that we can see beyond ourselves and beyond our apostate totalitarian environment, only to realize as Paul did, how helpless we are as sinners (Rom 7:24) and how great the mercy of God is for those who seek Him that where our sin abound, His saving grace abounds all the more (Rom 5:20).

Hello people, how are you doing today? It’s been a long time since I have written and I will however be writing more frequently now as I am back home for good in Mumbai. Today I would like to write on the Sovereign will of God and free will of man.

In the world today, even the mostly godly of people consider that their free will is outside the Sovereign will of God. It seems that either they are subconsciously trying to protect God from the blame of all the bad stuff that happens in the world or may be these people consider their lives as times when they meet up with God and let his will be done in worship and other times in their everyday life where they feel they have the choice to follow God or not. The sad thing about this kind of thinking is that man raises himself above God without knowing it. Man feels insecure about God’s Sovereignty and so man tries to seemingly defend God saying that God has no hand in the bad stuff that is happening in the world and this same man will also feel that man has the power to choose God’s will in his life.

Let’s read; Romans 9:10-16, 18-24
10 And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; 11 for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, 12 it was said to her, “THE OLDER WILL SERVE THE YOUNGER.” 13 Just as it is written, “JACOB I LOVED, BUT ESAU I HATED.”
14 What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! 15 For He says to Moses, “I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.” 16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.
18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.

19 You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21 Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel [l]for honorable use and another [m]for common use? 22 [n]What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23 And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, 24 even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.

If you need any more convincing then here is more scripture to show you that God’s people are not God’s people by the peoples own so called free will but by God own unconditional Sovereign will.

John 1:12-13 (Him refers to Jesus)
12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

The reason we have trouble understanding this is because, the world considers God as something isolated from creation. Creation has come from God and the very reason creation exist is because it is sustained by God. So creation acts as God decrees. However what is right and wrong applies to man not to God, because the Law was something God gave to man, with which sin was made known but sin does not apply to God because sin primarily comes from disobedience to God and that can only apply to man but never to God and that is why we have Romans 5:19-21.

Romans 5:19-21
19 For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. 20 [o]The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

You see time and the effects of time comes from God and so when a man dies, in most cases we say that God has taken him away but we don’t apply the term murder to this because in the case of man when man takes away what is not rightfully his, even if it is his own life, he stands convicted because he is a tenant in his own body and the creation around him and so as accountability deals generally with responsibility of what man is a steward of. So the accountability that applies to man cannot be applied to God because everything is from God and belongs to Him exclusively (John 1:3). What I am trying to say from all this is that the right and wrong that is applied to us cannot most certainly apply to God. You see God gave man the Law so that man’s nature of sin/disobedience may be made known to man and that was precisely the purpose of the Law. Even though the Law came from God, it cannot be applied to God (Luke 6:1-11) because God has no sin; and disobedience does not apply to God. The difference between the actions of man and the actions of God is that the actions of man are based on current situations and a resolution that emerges from his own/derived knowledge but in the case of God, He is knowledge Himself, He foreordains situations, He builds rebellions and tears them down (Romans 9:17). He is like an ecosystem from which his creation is not separated. There is no transgression if a lion devours a zebra but instead it works towards and not against the purposeful ecosystem.

Isaiah 45:6-7
6 That men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun
That there is no one besides Me.
I am the LORD, and there is no other,
7 The One forming light and creating darkness,
Causing well-being and creating calamity;
I am the LORD who does all these.

Yes man is made in the image of God but man practices humility before those whom he considers superior but humility does not apply to God because he is the first and last in Superiority and Authority. Do you know, what is the ultimate purpose of man according to the Bible? It is glorifying God and delighting in Him forever. You see man is called to be humbled and God is to be glorified.

In the case of Jesus, He is fully God and fully Man, His humility, tiring and hunger were as much his human aspect as is His glory, granting Salvation and forgiveness of sins aspects of his Deity.

John 10:7, 11 (Jesus’ Humility – Man)
7 So Jesus said to them again, “..I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep…

John 17:1 (Jesus Glorified – God)
Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You,

Glorifying God comes from obedience to Him and I am not talking dietary restriction or appearance regulation, I am talking about fulfilling God’s call in your life and if God has called you to do something then he will also give you the exciting desire to get it done. Fulfilling God’s purpose and delighting in it will make you feel the very essence of God’s pleasure in your being and that is what will take you on a high.

God’s will is done by those who are for Him and even those who are against Him. Consider the atrocious penalty that came against Jesus on the Cross, God made that too work in His favor, resulting in the Salvation for mankind. In fact you will see the extent to which God is in control that even the rebellion that comes against Him, cannot happen unless He raises it against Himself (Rom 9:17). Consider this, you and I know that it was man who severely tortured and crucified the Lord of Glory (Jesus) (1 Cor 2:8), yet the Bible says that it was the wrath of Father that Jesus consumed, the wrath which was due unto the world (John 18:11). As I said earlier creation is not separate from God, which goes to the extent that even Satan works, probably unknowing but surely hateful, towards fulfilling the purpose of God. Though Jesus was sinless He bore the sins of the world that the Father may punish sin for which Jesus paid the price. Do you see what am getting at, the Bible alone show God is such control that what is for God is from God and what comes against God is also from God, which all works to fulfill His eternal purpose.

If you would like some more scripture that shows God using the people against Him, to fulfill His purpose, then you should read Isaiah 10:12-15. The difference between God’s will carried out in God’s people and God’s will carried out in those who are against Him or don’t even believe in Him, is that only in the case of God’s people, only they can feel God’s pleasure in their actions, as he grants them what it takes to do what He has called them to do (Eph 2:10) and that is why with compassion He calls them as His people.

Psalms 34:8
O taste and see that the LORD is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!

Do you see any room for free will in all this? The concept of free will in a person’s mind only shows that he is inclined towards Dualism, which is more cultish in thinking about the world as battle ground for good and evil, God and Satan. If there was any truth in this popular school of thought, then this so called god would never be able to tell the outcome of such a battle because being able to tell/make the outcome in his favor means he controls the battle but then that does not leave much room for free will does it? The concept of free will actually inhibits a person from seeing God in all His Splendor and Majesty.

Hello people, how are you? Hope you are all doing well. It’s been quite sometime since I have been able to come home to Mumbai and so I spared sometime to write something for you wonderful people. I will be writing on freedom today as Indian Republic Day is just round the corner.

So what is freedom and what really is the essence of being called a free people? Allow me to give you an idea, when you are doing something out of your free will and not because you have to or you must that is called being free. My country India has lost many dedicated lives for her freedom and yet the most prominent freedom fighter of them all is Mahatma Gandhi, who was inspired by the teachings of Christ in regards to winning the freedom struggle using the fundamentals of Non-Violence.

If you look at the concept of God that the religions of the world are pursuing, it seems a free people are seeking bondage to some polytheistic gods or a monotheistic god. Somehow people find bondage good, it seems being caged up creates an outlook that you are abstaining from things created out of religious requirement. Religiosity dictates quite a list of things to people among these a few are dietary regulation, attire and personal appearance, prayer schedules, fasting regimes, pilgrimages etc.

The world is so busy doing what it is doing, that it sometime does a few things that makes a statement of a total absence of mind. What the world knows of God is what death knows about life, absolute ignorance from which comes absolute religion. The enlightenment that comes from God is missing in the world, the world is dead (Matthew 8:22), dead but free. Sometimes however people get inculcated with a notion that there is something far superior to them and this is probably where people get the notion of UFOs, super-beings and advanced alien technology. Well I do agree that creation has a Supreme Being but unlike most of world, I feel that if coming to Him is a good thing then I shouldn’t be going from the freedom of world into the bondage of this god. When unfortunate people have such religious encounters they don’t go from being dead in their being to being alive, they go from being dead and free to being dead and in bondage. Do I need to tell you which is better?

Religion does not really solve problems be it monotheistic or polytheistic. It is created with an intention to make society seem better but a religious solution brings its own set of problems into the picture to which religious people seem to turn a blind eye. What religion does is that it suppresses freedom of the people from doing quite a lot of what is actually a part of life, which makes the religious followers feel like they are doing quite a lot but the truth is they are only doing quite a lot of NOTHING. This suppressed freedom is vented out by these same religious people into true wickedness and the funny thing is that these religious people feel totally justified to act wicked because they have given up their freedom to act that way.

Religion and God are like oil and water, they don’t mix. Belief in God is about taking hold of the hope that He offers you and you don’t see this in religion, which is more of people being made subject to regulations; power hungry politics if you ask me. There was never a hope in bondage and the sooner the world comes to terms with this the better because hope in God is far from bondage in religion.

So my friend do you know where to find this hope? The answer is in letting a relationship in God take root within you, then you will go from being dead and free in the world to being alive and free in God. However the freedom of the world is subject to external factors which in turn are subject to God. So the freedom that is in God is far superior to the freedom of the world, in fact it makes the freedom of the world seem like bondage. I hope you are seeing how advanced this line of thinking is. Do you want to know where this comes from? It comes from the teachings of Christ.

Romans 3:24
But by the free gift of God’s grace all are put right with him through Christ Jesus, who sets them free.

Knowing Jesus is knowing you are a sinner and accepting Jesus is accepting that He took upon Himself this inequity of your being. If you say you know Jesus Christ and that you don’t need Him because you think you are doing OK by yourself or you feel you have an alternative then my friend you ought to know that the only reason you are doing ok by yourself is because he is enabling you to do so and you seem like a person who just knows he ought to fuel his car and run it, Christ’ workings in the life of this person is as oblivious to this person as is the engine running his car. As for the alternative, that alternative would only be hell, would Christ sacrifice His Life if there were ever an alternative. Is life so cheap, even if that were the life of just a man? For those who deny Jesus died and rose again, they may not admit it but in their hearts they have turned into the enemy that is against the Salvation offered by God the Father and worked out through God the Son. God has already spoken to people like these, it is like God saying he is going to pour out His wrath on them at His set time and in the mean time these people are free to act on their own. And this is precisely what the religions of the world teach, self empowered action to save yourself; this is also what Atheist Ideology is about. One can clearly see that the Atheist and the Religious see themselves as different as leopards with different spots. They may identify themselves uniquely but in essence they are the same rebellious being against God.

This is a rebellion which pushes away in bitterness the Salvation worked out by God because the Spirit of God has not stirred them. There is a Latin idiom “Stagnant water can poison you”and so these people who are not stirred by God the Holy Spirit turn contagious and ravage the world. This rebellion is made so dull in their thinking that their work to save themselves is unknowingly a work to seek to save themselves from God. But who or what can save a person from God? This is precisely what God is to them: a God of wrath not a God who saves because separated from deliverance that is in Christ, this is the message of Judgement that has been made known by God Himself unto them.

John 3:16
16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

You can see from the above scripture that there is no self empowered gate crashing into eternal life with God. It is on the basis of invite for those who believe in Christ, that is how it is because that is how He wants it to be. After-all a person ought to know that this Heavenly House belongs an Entity that calls the shots in everything that exists.

Cheers!!