Hey, this is the only month of the year with a command: “March Forth!” So let’s do it! We can be assured that The Captain of our Salvation will lead us to victory, if we get up and follow him.
Remember that TLTF stands for The Living TRUTH Fellowship, and our motto is, “Magnifying Jesus Christ, The Living Truth.” Did you know that the word “truth” and its derivatives appear 185 times in the Greek Scriptures? Fifty-four of those are in the Gospel of John, e.g., “I am the truth.” Jesus perfectly internalized the written Word of God to the end that he could make that statement. Now he lives within you and me to help us do likewise. All we need to do is be true to Truth.
According to the leprechaun I insulted, the Greek word for “truth” means, “the revealed reality lying at the basis of, and agreeing with, an appearance.” We today might define it as, “What you see is what you get.”
We must understand that God’s writtentruth defines all biblical concepts, including love. Without the truth regarding a particular subject, we are adrift in a sea of speculation, and the answers we make up do not serve us. What we must desire is, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and God will help us know it!
A believer friend of mine recently wrote me: “The older I get, the less sure I am of anything other than that I am loved by God and Jesus and will have an eternity to reap the benefits of loving them back now.” With all due respect, this is typical of an all-too-pervasive mindset in many brethren who once heard biblical truth to the end that “they knew that they knew that they knew.” Is that not how the Word says it should be, or does it say that the longer we walk with the Lord, the less sure we should be about the truths expressly written in His Word?
A curious phenomenon in today’s post-modern society is the absurd celebration of ambiguity, as in “HUH?” Dictionary.com defines it as: “doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention; an unclear, indefinite, or equivocal word, expression, meaning.” Really?! Is it something to celebrate that one has no idea what the heck is going on? How does ambiguity work for you on your job, or at the bank, or while you are doing brain surgery? How sad. I wonder if such vacillating people actually believe what Jack Nicholson, aka Colonel Nathan Jessup (A Few Good Men), said: “You can’t handle the truth!”
As per the title of this FOD, the word “dearth” means, “an inadequate supply; scarcity; lack.” Notice the root word “dear,” as in “costly, precious.” You and I must never underestimate the precious privilege of having had the golden words of God’s Truth presented to us on a silver platter. SERIOUSLY! Perhaps you are not aware of how little biblical truth—proportionate to how much God wants us to know—is being taught to Christians today. Jesus said that knowing the truth makes one free, and the converse of that is that believing error puts one in bondage. Let me give you two poignant examples.
A news report dated 1/18 stated that Pope Francis was moved to embrace a tearful, abandoned girl at a university in Manila after she said to him: “Many children get involved in drugs and prostitution. Why does God allow these things to happen to us? The children are not guilty of anything.” The Pope said: “She is the only one who has put forward a question for which there is no answer, and she was not even able to express it in words but rather in tears.”
First of all, that girl is only one of billions of people since the dawn of humanity to have asked that exact question, and most of them got just what she got from the Pope: NO ANSWER. Why? Because those whom they asked the question simply had no idea what the Bible says about it. Why not? Because the majority of biblical truth revealed in the Church Epistles between about 50-68 A.D. was quickly thereafter buried in a sea of religiosity, and for the next 1800 years only a miniscule percentage of dear Christians had access to it. In regard to this particular doctrinal issue, would to God that Don’t Blame God were required reading for humanity. Do you have a copy? Can you answer the girl’s question for those in your world?
Thanks to Beth Schmitz from Wisconsin for tipping me off to the second example of the dearth of truth, even among Christians! She sent me an article saying that in January, Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher, announced that it will stop selling The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, by Alex Malarkey and his father, Kevin Malarkey. Not to be snide, but something written by someone named “Malarkey” might have tipped them off. (Yes, I roared with laughter while writing that sentence.)
The best-selling book, published in 2010, and which has sold more than a million copies, purports to describe what Alex experienced while he lay in a coma after a car accident when he was six years old. The coma lasted two months, and his subsequent spiritual memoir, with its assuring description of “miracles, angels, and life beyond this world,” became part of the popular genre of “heavenly tourism.”
But now Alex has publicly recanted his testimony about the afterlife. In an open letter to Christian bookstores, he stated flatly: “I did not die. I did not go to heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.” Hey, it worked! Apparently Alex’s own mother, along with some leading evangelicals, had criticized the book as inaccurate for quite some time, but it was a bestselling book, and nobody in the industry wanted to kill it.
Here’s my question: Did those critical of the book voice their disapproval by boldly stating the biblical truth that “death” means “the end of life,” that everyone who has died is dead, i.e., they no longer exist, and that there is no one in heaven but God, Jesus, and angels? I doubt they did, because Satan’s original lie of Genesis 3:4 (“You shall not surely die”) is “alive and well” in Christianity today, and anyone who rebuts it is ostracized.
Surely we should also ask, as Beth did: How could this book have been printed by a Christian publisher? How did it get that far? Why would more than a million people want to buy it? These are good questions. “And the answer is…” because of the dearth of God’s Truth in Christianity. What if those one million folks had read Is There Death After Life? or watched Segment 25 of One Day With The Creator? They could have saved their money!
These glaring examples are only two among a number of other bondage-inducing untruths that 99% of Christians believe, to their detriment. Most of our readers know that these include such myths and fallacies as the “Trinity,” Jesus is God, God is in control, what Jesus said in the Gospels pertains directly to Christianity, a Christian can lose his salvation, speaking in tongues is a gift, healing is not always God’s will, and Christians will live forever in “heaven.” The degree to which Satan has blinded Christians to the Truth of God’s Word through the centuries is simply unbelievable. Another well known movie line, from Ghostbusters, is appropriate: “Who ya gonna call?” MYTHBUSTERS! That would be TLTF.
And that is to say nothing about the rest of the world: several billion people ensnared in demonically inspired “salvation”-by-works systems of error such as Atheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, and many other mythological fallacies. How the heart of our heavenly Father must bleed for these people whom He so loved that He gave His only begotten Son so that they might have life everlasting.
So, do we have a story to tell?! Yes!!! Let’s do what the angel of the Lord told the first-century believers in Acts 5:20: “Go, stand, speak to the people all the words of this life.” If not now, when? If not I, who?
I do hope you will tune in at 8 p.m. EST on Wednesday, March Forth, for my monthly live teaching, which is titled, As They Went, They Were Healed, and sub-titled, “Going, Going, Gone.”
