This week we begin to address the Lord’s message to the seven churches:

         “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: The One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this:

       Much confusion and wrong teachings exist among believers and non-believers in relationship to judging and God’s judgments. This must be sorted out if we are to go on to maturity, because God’s judgments are a basic reflection of His nature and character. So also are our judgments. Therefore, we want them to be in harmony with God.

In our study of the equipping ministries listed in Ephesians 4:11, our next ministry is the pastor.

For more than half a century there has been a river of powerful faith teachings sweeping over the earth. This has come because we will need much more faith to make it through the times ahead. Some will always carry what God is saying to extremes, and this has happened with the faith teachings as well. Peter wrote in II Peter 3:16 that the unstable and untaught will even distort the Scriptures to their own destruction.

On February the 16th, 1995 I was given a dream in which I saw a great army from hell that had been released against the church. Two days later I was given a vision in which I saw this diabolical horde again, but in much greater detail. This is an abbreviated version of the first part of that vision. The second part will appear in the next edition of The Morning Star Journal.

With the recent passage of the “hate crimes” bill in Congress, the persecution of the church in America by its government has begun. We can expect it to begin slowly, but we need to prepare for an onslaught because it is coming. 

Last week we began addressing some of the basic military strategies and how they relate to where the church is headed in our times. Again, much of what I am sharing is a generalization, and generalizations are never true in all cases. That being said, the church has tried to fight too many battles at once, resulting in little or no success in spite of a huge expenditure of effort and resources. We have also, at times, taken ground that we were not able to hold, ending up ultimately in a worse defeat. 

Immediately after His victory on the cross and His resurrection, Jesus had legal authority to cast the devil into the lake of fire and to establish His kingdom on the earth. He did not do this at that time for several reasons, which we will look at briefly. In them we can perceive some of the things which must be completed before the end of this age. In Genesis 15:13-16, we see three of these reasons in relation to Israel. We know from I Corinthians 10:1-11 that this was a type of that which would come at the end of the age:

We are told in II Corinthians 3:17, "Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." This is one of the great distinctions between the kingdom of God and the domain of the devil. The devil seeks increasing control and dominance over his subjects, while the Lord sets His people free. Everywhere that the Word of the Lord goes forth, increasing liberty will always be a result.