Last week we began to consider the first sentence of “The Great Commission”: “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (see Matthew 28:18). This is probably much more than we can even comprehend in this life. Even so, it is the foundation upon which the rest of the mandate is based, so we should seek to not only understand it, but to let it be a guiding principle of our lives.

In Matthew 6:24, the Lord explained, "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." As Christians, we should be absolutely committed to using our lives to serve God, not money. However, if we do not use some basic financial principles, we are likely to spend our lives serving money and being too entangled in it to serve God. Our goal should be to make money our servant, instead of spending our lives serving it.

     We continue to cover the period represented by the prophetic church at Thyatira (538 to 1798 AD)—the darkest period in church history. It is crucial to understand this period because the roots of the “great falling away” are common to individuals backsliding or churches and movements departing from the way.

When the Lord fed the thousands with just a few fish and loaves, what made this miracle so great was that so much was done with so little. The Lord gets more glory when we have less in our hands to do His works with. One of the greatest hindrances to our seeing the miracles of God is when we have too much.

The first strategy of the devil to seduce mankind was to get our first parents to doubt the Word of God—“Did God really say that?” Once he got them to doubt what He had said, it was just a short step to getting them to doubt God’s intentions for them. From there, his ploy was to get them to feel rejected by God because He was holding something back from them. Christians who have been caused to stumble often go through this same pattern.

The New Age Movement has become a powerful force in the devil’s strategy to blind the world to the gospel of Jesus Christ. One reason why this movement has been so effective is because many New Age teachings closely mirror the great truths of the gospel, but then carry them to conclusions that are in conflict with the most central of all Christian truths—the cross.

We are continuing to address the following three questions in relation to world events:  

1) What is happening?

2) What is not happening?

3) What can we do about it?

Leonard Jones has been our chief musician and main worship leader since the beginning of our ministry. Sometimes he gives a one or two-minute teaching while leading worship that can be as profound and important as any sermon. He also writes a daily blog for our website that I read every day because they are either profound or just timely truths. Recently, he talked about how agitated he gets when he sees musicians using worship to practice, rather than using practice to worship. I know Leonard lives this, too.