It is very easy to love a God whom you believe will bless you and keep you safe from all harms, but this is not the Biblical God. Can He bless you? Yes of course. Can He keep you safe? Yes of course. But, there is nothing safe about the genuine Christian walk. There is nothing guaranteed other than He would never leave us nor forsake us. We have been called to the battle-field and not the playground.
Multiple millions of saints before us have been martyred and God was faithful to them all. God was faithful to His Son as He hung on the cross. God was faithful to Paul in the depths of the dungeon. God was faithful to Peter as he was crucified upside down. God was faithful to Stephen as cruel stones rained down on his body and he had a vision of heaven. God was faithful to me when my own son died. He was faithful to me when my other son was burned over 60% of his body. He was faithful to me when my other son was born with Down Syndrome . He is faithful, despite all the circumstances of the world , He is faithful.
The love of the saints for the everlasting God is not based on the circumstances of life, it is not as fickle as that. Our love for Him is not some whimsical thing. It is rooted and grounded in our encounter with the Truth. We are taken by it, it becomes a fire that burns in our bones and no force in all the universe can cause us to let it slip from our grasp. This confounds the enemy of our soul. Look how he tried to buy the devotion of Jesus by taking him to a high tower and give Him all the nations of the world if He would only bow to Him. Jesus, by-pass Calvary, he says. You dont need to suffer, there is another way.
There is no other way, It is by Calvary we walk and it is because of Calvary that we pick up our crosses every day and die to this world and live for Him and follow Jesus. It is a narrow path and few there are that find it for the broad path leads to ease in this life and death in the next as opposed to death here on earth and eternal life in the next. Who can not only bow to the cross but embrace it in the midst of it all? It is not natural brothers and sisters, it is supernatural.
There has been a lot of talk about Nazis in the last couple of days. The hypocrisy makes me feel quite sick. Most will know that one of my sons has Down Syndrome, he is now 24. What many will not know is that the Nazis first victims were the mentally handicapped. It was not just the Nazis, it was an accepted program through-out Germany, carried out in hospitals by doctors and nurses across the land. CBS recently tweeted out congratulations to Iceland because they have almost a 100% rate of identifying and killing Down Syndrome children in the womb. Now, will the real Nazis please stand up, the rest pale in comparison to the genocide that these people are carrying out throughout the world.
A Call To The Remnant 