“This is revolutionary!” So exclaimed, wonderingly more than radically, a young college student at a coffee shop Bible study I was leading a few years back.

To this young lady, meeting Yeshua/Jesus through an exploration of the Gospels was revolutionary. It was her own personal revolution in which truth was dethroning error in her belief system. The Gospels were taking her uninformed misconceptions about the Lord and His teachings and causing them to be radically and suddenly transformed. Scripture can, and should, trigger these personal faith revolutions in all of our lives.

I’ve been blessed to have had a number of such revolutionary experiences resulting from new encounters with Scripture. I’m not referring to that insight that comes, flashing or unfolding, through regular Scripture reading and study. That kind of encounter with God causes us to grow progressively more confident and proficient in our faith and practice.

What I’m talking about here is encountering God’s Word in a way that dramatically bring about a “paradigm shifting” revolution in our faith.

Here are a few that I found meaningful. Perhaps you can find your own spiritual “revolution” by adapting or adopting one of them to create your own radical encounter with God’s Word.

Each of these Bible encounters was intended to be faith building. They ended up faith changing. Changing not in the sense of gaining different beliefs, but as in gaining a different quality of belief.

1. Read the Gospels to study Jesus in action. Pay attention to His word and actions and interrelationships. Look for themes and then categorize the entire Gospels according to these themes.
2. Read the entire book of Romans (16 chapters) through once each day for thirty days.
3. Read one chapter of the bible (typically only a few minutes) everyday. Increase the number of chapters read daily as you are ready to do so.

These three projects have brought tremendous new insights to my faith and practice. I’m sure there are many more of these “revolutionary” experiences as I continue to approach the Bible from different angles.

If one of them sparks and idea or interest, give it a try or come up with a project. None of those projects was related to school or ministry, they were for personal growth. Go ahead and give yourself a fun and challenging Bible project. I hope you too find many mind-blowing and faith altering revolutions in your own experiences with YHWH!

Everyone wants to find, build, and/or attend the Perfect Church. The catch, of course, is that “perfect” is in the eye of the beholder. One person’s perfect is holiness while another person’s perfect is libertinism. And almost everybody else falls in the middle somewhere.

The Perfect Church is in fact a worthy goal for us to pursue. Why would we pursue an imperfect church? But the pursuit of perfection is only worthy in so far as the definition of perfect we use is consistent with biblical calls, commands, principles, and possibilities.

And who could provide us with that kind of definition better than the Messiah Himself? Happily, we can deduce the Lord’s definition of the perfect church from a few different places in scripture. One place we find such a definition is in the book of Revelation.

If we analyze carefully a series of “progress reports” the Lord gave to seven churches in Asia a while back, we can see very clearly what kind of church the Lord wants us to pursue. He actually tells us, over and over again, even verbally underlining, the one key bottom-line quality that He is seeking in a church. We know He wants us to be that type of church because that’s the type of behavior He promises to reward.

The progress reports for the seven churches can be found in chapters two and three of Revelation. Read them later if you like and see if you agree with my conclusion. Right now, though, let me clear away a whole bunch of details specific to the churches involved in order to clearly point out the one key detail that defines what the Lord wants from His church. We can then seek to apply that one key detail to our own church in order to build it to the Lord’s specs. This one key detail fits any type of church, in any age. Take a look:

1. To the church of Ephesus:

   He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give…[reward]… (Revelation 2:7)

2. To the church in Smyrna:

   He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; He that overcometh shall …[reward]… (Revelation 2:11)

3. To the church in Pergamos:

   He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give …[reward]… (Revelation 2:17)

4. To the church in Thyatira:

   And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give … [reward]… He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. (Revelation 2:26-29)

5. To the church in Sardis:

   He that overcometh, the same shall be …[reward]… He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. (Revelation 3:5-6)

6. To the church in Philadelphia:

   Him that overcometh will I make …[reward]… He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.
   (Revelation 3:12-13)

7. To the church of the Laodiceans:

   To him that overcometh will I …[reward]…He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. (Revelation 3:21-22)

Did you catch what the Spirit was saying to the churches? It’s the churches that OVERCOME that get the reward. That’s what the Lord is looking for in His church: a church that overcomes.

Overcomes what? Challenges to its faith and practices. Which faith and practices? Depends on the situation of each individual church. Like the seven Asian churches it could be sexual sin, heresy, persecution, idolatry, indifference, even success that leads to haughtiness. The details for those churches are not as important as the details for your church.

What challenges to biblical faith and practice exist for your church? It is important to identify them and then commit to overcoming them. (I’m sure I don’t have to point out that we are to overcome in the name and power of the Lord by His Holy Spirit.)

We would do well to develop in our church body the mindset that challenges to our faith and practice are not a sign that something is wrong. We should remember that they are the canvas upon which our faith and practice take shape and develop relevance. Indeed, challenges are a sign that something is right because the Lord puts them there for us tackle! We need to embrace our challenges as overcomers in Christ’s name. That is the perfect church for us to aspire to become. May we all overcome everyday to the glory of God and His kingdom!

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Meet Demas. Perhaps you recognize his name as a footnote in a few of the shorter Pauline epistles. Scripture tells us very little about Demas. Nevertheless, a sliver of his story peeks out at us from between the lines of Paul’s final greetings in three epistles. This fleeting glimpse of Demas carries a simple message offering an important reminder to servants of Messiah Yeshua.

We are first introduced to Demas at the conclusion of Paul’s letter to the Colossians:

Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas, greet you. (Colossians 4:14)

The date and place of writing for Colossians is said to be about AD 60 or 61 during Paul’s house imprisonment in Rome. Paul’s letter to Philemon is placed in the same time period. Paul mentions Demas to Philemon also:

There salute thee Epaphras, my fellowprisoner in Christ Jesus; Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, Lucas, my fellowlabourers. (Philemon 1:23-24)

From these two brief mentions we can conclude that Demas, at that point of the story, was traveling in the same circles as such notables as Luke, Mark, and Aristarchus, not to mention the apostle Paul himself. We also know that Paul considered Demas to be a “fellowlaborer.”

How many others during that day rubbed elbows with Paul and were considered by him to be fellow laborers? Far more than ever made it into Paul’s farewell greetings. But Demas made it. He must have been very influential, involved, and important to Paul during that time.

But not all stories that start well end well. And therein lies the cautionary lesson of Demas to us. Fast forward 6 or 7 years to the writing of Paul’s second letter to Timothy:

For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia. (2 Timothy 4:10)

Demas had by that time defaulted on his status as a fellow laborer with Paul. What happened? Paul tells us: Demas had loved the present world more than sticking with Paul.

At that point, as I understand it, Paul was again imprisoned in Rome anticipating his death and communicating to the world through an 18-inch square opening in the ceiling of his dungeon. How disappointing to be abandoned by a fellow laborer at such a time. What a stark contrast to Paul himself, who just a few words before wrote:

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith…(2 Timothy 4:7)

Perhaps a mental image of Demas came to Paul’s mind as he wrote:

No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier. (2 Timothy 2:4)

How disheartening and sad it can be to realize that those who serve in the kingdom faithfully by our side today may forsake us tomorrow when the Lord calls upon us to undertake the really rough assignments. Besides being disheartening and sad, it can also be scary.

It’s entirely possible that we too, like Demas, may forsake someone who was able to rely on us in the past. How far away are we from being the lovers of this world that can forsake those who rely on us in their hour of greatest need? Will we be found faithful when we face times too hard to stay the course with a fellow kingdom laborer? Or will we be tempted to take the more appealing walk away, thus forsaking a servant of the Lord who may be at the point of needing us most? Before answering these questions we would do well to humbly remember Paul’s words:

Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. (1 Corinthians 10:12)

The lessons learned in Demas’ example are simple but can have profound implications in times of testing for us and for others. First, we must remember that ultimately it is in the Lord we place our trust. We trust in the Lord to remain faithful to His promise and His call to us no matter who abandons us. Second, if the Lord places someone in a position of relying on us in their hour of need we would do well to be found faithful. We must humbly trust in the Lord to provide the strength, mercy, and grace necessary for us to remain faithful even when it is costly or difficult. This is especially true when there are options open to us personally that are more attractive or easier to face.

We must remember the message of Demas. We must keep faith in the Lord as we labor in His kingdom, and we must stay faithful in the Lord to our fellow kingdom laborers.

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Sure, Sodom was a bad place. But you may only know the half of it. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? That other practice that merited God’s annihilation that is always left unmentioned. Not sure you know what I mean? It’s important.

We all remember how wicked Sodom was just from the brief glimpse of events at the Lot household on the eve of the city’s destruction. The wicked townspeople mobbed Lot’s house demanding that he hand over the two visiting strangers who were spending the night under his roof.

Do you remember being troubled that Lot would offer his two virginal daughters to the despicably wicked townsfolk in order to spare the two visiting strangers the intended abuse of the mob? As unimaginable an offer as that might seem to us, even that extreme measure was not enough to appease the mob. In fact, it only served to inflame the crowd to more violence.

As a stunning testimony to the depth of their depravity, when the two visitors interceded by “smiting” the mob with blindness, the wicked were still not belayed from their pursuit of evil. They were stopped only because “they wearied themselves to find the door” in their blinded condition. That’s a mob on a mission! See Genesis 19 if you need a refresher on all the gory details.

Anyway, the brief glimpse of Sodom’s evil in Genesis sure paints a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. Imagine the impression the actual events must have made on YHWH! Interestingly enough, the perverted depravity of Sodom was only a part of what didn’t sit right with Him. The prophet Ezekiel sheds some light on what else really made a bad impression on Him:

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)

Can this be? Sodom’s abominable behavior is mentioned last in YHWH’s grievance list here. What sins ranked right up there with all their depravity? Alas, the unmentioned other sin of Sodom:

…pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

Sodom might have been morally depraved, but its people were not materially deprived. The town apparently had an abundance of material goods. According to the quoted verse, the people generally had all the food they wanted, an abundance of leisure time, and even reason to boast and be haughty.

According to Ezekiel here, a part of the reason Sodom was charged with iniquity and subsequently destroyed, was that they failed to help the poor and needy among them with a “hand up” in spite of the fact that they had an abundance of resources at their command. And that, as the late great radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say, is the rrrresssssst of the story!

How about that? Wicked Sodom brought down, in part, because they stopped up their ears to the cries of the poor. They had resources to overcapacity and yet they did not use some of those resources to help put the poor in better standing by “strengthening” their hand.

YHWH sent the hard-headed and set-jawed Ezekiel (see Ezekiel 3:8-9) to point out very clearly that His people had reached the point of making Sodom look sainted in comparison.

And now we have the Holy Spirit pointing these words out to us. So how about us? We might have our eternal “p’s and q’s” in order, but what about our earthly “dollars and cents?” Beware the Other sin of Sodom. It runs rampant in our own society today. Let it not be said of Messiah’s people in this generation: “They gave Sodom a run for the money.”

Are you building on a shifty or a shiftless foundation? Hopefully not on either! That’s a trick question because “shifty” means “tricky or untrustworthy” and “shiftless” means “lazy.” It does not mean shifting vs. stable, as it might appear at first glance.

Unfortunately, many are unwittingly building their faith and lives in Messiah on a “sand” foundation because of either shifty or shiftless teaching of a simple but important “foundational” principle in Messiah’s kingdom. This can be observed in a classic mistake in the teaching of a classic parable.

You’ve heard, of course, the parable of Yeshua in Matthew chapter 7:

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24-27)

You have probably heard, as I have, a number of sermons that misapply what Messiah is teaching here. The dangerous result is that hearers of these, at worst, “shifty” or, at best, “shiftless” teachings on this parable may end up not hearing the vitally important point of the parable. They may very well end up building their house on shifting sand because of the wrong understanding of these verses.

Let’s not make that mistake ourselves. Let’s look first at the error, and then we’ll look at the very important detail often missed that allows for a correct interpretation and application of Messiah’s teaching here.

You may have heard this parable taught, often in missions-oriented messages, as demonstrating the difference between building on Christ (the solid Rock, after all) versus building on “all other ground, which is shifting sand” as the famous hymn reminds us. The meaning assigned to this passage is that belief in Christ is solid, belief in anything else is not so solid.

Okay, I can go along with that concept as true. But it is not what is taught in the parable here. And the danger is that the “true-but-not-taught-here” message will cause us to miss the more important message for followers of Messiah that is taught in this parable.

A moderately careful reading of the text here plainly shows that the issue here is not a solid foundation of Christ versus a shifty foundation of non-Christ. What separates the wise from the foolish here is something else. Let’s look at the key detail in the text:

whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man…every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man

See it? If not, here it is again with emphasis:

whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them[=]wise…every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not[=]foolish

As you can plainly see, the issue here is not having Christ’s teachings versus having some other teaching than Christ. Both the wise and the foolish here have Christ’s teaching. So what’s the problem? Everything for one of them! The wise man is the one who DOES Messiah’s teachings, the foolish man is the one who DOES NOT DO Messiah’s teachings in spite of the fact that he has them. The issue around Messiah’s teachings here is “doing” versus “not doing” rather than “having” versus “not having.”

And that leaves a whole lot of “Christians” with beach homes rather than mountain cabins. How many of us who claim the name of Christ hear his teachings weekly, even daily perhaps, but don’t do them? Very very foolish indeed.

It is the doing of Messiah’s teaching that is the “cement” that makes the “sand particles” of individual scriptural teachings bind together into a cohesive whole, or solid “rock,” for us to build our lives upon wisely. If we leave out the doing, we have no experience with disconnected teachings to solidify them in our thought and actions. We would shift, shudder, and ultimately washout when the forces of sinful nature (ours and others) hit us with any amount of fury.

To further emphasize the point Yeshua makes here, let’s place this parable back into its context by looking at the immediately preceding teaching that leads Yeshua into telling this parable for illustrative purposes:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7:21-23)

Very serious words for all who claim to follow Yeshua HaMashiach! Notice who is in trouble here: the ones who know the right name (saying “Lord, Lord”) and the religiously active (who have prophesied in the Lord’s name, cast out devils in the Lord’s name, and did “many wonderful works” in the Lord’s name).

Not only are they in trouble here because they will not enter the kingdom of heaven, but they are rejected of Christ (“I never knew you: depart from me”) and they are charged with being “workers of iniquity.” Imagine the shock that awaits some. No, wait, not just some. Yeshua said “Many will say to me in that day…”.

The parable of building on the rock and building on the sand illustrates the clear teaching of Messiah to His people: hear my words and do them. One day many followers of Messiah will find that they have deceived themselves by being hearers of the word only and not doers. Those are the words of the Lord’s half-brother, James:

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. (James 1:22-25)

As James says further, the blessing of the word is in the doing, not in the hearing.

The teachings of Christ are at our fingertips. There is no issue for us of having or not having them. We might need to read, study and meditate on them, but we have them if we pursue them. The issue for us, as taught in Matthew 7, is whether or not we are doing the teachings of Christ.

That is what separates the wise from the foolish, and also those who know they are saved from those who only think they are saved. The stakes are eternally high. Now is the day for us to secure the foundation we build on. Study and learn, yes we must. But then it is imperative that we actually apply what we have learned to our everyday life. Anything else is shifting sand.