THE HAMMER

If you walked the length of North Earl Street and Henry Street in Dublin yesterday you would have encountered 4 different groups of Christians sharing the gospel. We were the eastern most of the 4 and the message, delivered by my favourite street preacher, was about the cost of sin..to God, in the crucifixion of His beloved son. A few props were employed but it seemed to be the hammer in her hand that gripped the attention of many! There was stong reaction to the idea that God can't simply forgive with out a price being paid. I reckon about 30 or 40 people gathered to hear the message and I believe it is a foretaste of what is to come as we continue to bring the undluted gospel to the people. Pray for Dublin and Ireland. We are in need of a great awakening! The photo is of Jim on O'Connell Street with Wayne Rooney trying to make his mind up!

BANKRUPT...IN HEAVEN!

At last I remembered to actually record some street preaching. It seems like I'm shouting but that's because the street was noisy and I wanted to be heard!
Ireland was nearly bankrupt recently but guess what: Heaven was bankrupted when the Father sent the Son to this earth. Listen to the message on the right....and enjoy!

BE READY FOR THE NEXT RECESSION

What a shock this one is! No need to go into detail but it was certainly:
* a surprise
* beyond man's control
* Scary
So we got into debt, with everyone egging us on like banks, marketing, peer pressure and our own ego. Now we dearly wish we had no debts. All of this, although vividly real to us, is only a mirror of what is REALLY going on.

We all have a debt before our creator God which can't be paid off...or can it? God knew our hopeless state and sent Jesus His son to be crushed on the cross for our sin. If we get on our knees and ask His forgiveness we can have A NEW START with a CLEAN SLATE! ...not based on our "goodness" (boy what a myth!) but based on His blood paying the price of our rebellion against Him.

It's appointed to a man to die once and then comes judgement. Why not be ready this time!

THE BLOODY GOSPEL

"With many other words he warned them and pleaded with them" Acts 2:40. How few do that today! Most preaching is of the variety which is scared to warn and plead. What's the root of this? Is it rampant humanism in the body of Christ? Is it compassion turned sour and into "devil petting" or is it a lack of faith and knowledge of the fate of the unconverted? I'm all for compassion...genuinely!. I'd be lost without God's compassion but if we decouple compassion and love from the bloody message of the cross we immediately are in heresy. John 3:16 and 17 shows God's love manifested in the crushing of His only Son...the only way the Justice of Holy God can be satisfied. When I was recently preaching on Grafton Street about this "Bloody Gospel" someone spoke to me after, one to one, and was offended by such mention of violence. He thought this was similar to a radical islam message. I explained that the only blood this referred to was the innocent blood of the Lamb of God and that other human blood was useless as it was unholy and a worthless currency for redemption before Holy creator God.

Who ya lookin at?

Adam and Eve were God focussed before sin and then after sin they became self focussed, becoming aware of their nakedness and hiding from God. What Gospel are we bringing to people today? Is it the message about the holiness of God, the depravity and lostness of man and the sufficiency of the death of the spotless Lamb of God, Jesus Christ...or...is the message that they are beautiful and need only to realise it! I first heard this message from my brother about 25 years ago when he was a Hare Krishna and spoke of the need for "self realisation" that we are in fact gods!! Sadly I am hearing this message again in Christian circles when I should be hearing the gospel!

We are all made in God's image but boy has sin corrupted all and seperated all from Holy God. That's why all religions utterly fail. They all deal with "self improvement" but what improvement to imperfection can produce a holy person whom could live with a Holy God for a second or eternity? Sin has a price and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin. The justice of God must be satisfied. I truly deserve eternal hell. Why? Because I broke the perfect law of God! The last unholy guy in heaven got turfed out and took a third of the angels with him. Since that day no more unholy are getting in. We don't need to be telling people they are "good" when they are in fact monstors of iniquity whose only hope is a humble sorrow and repentance and turning toward God in faith in light of Calvary...Anything else is Humanism.

CANT DUMP ADAM WITHOUT DUMPING JESUS!

The Creation moments website had a fab article today. Look lads..wake up and smell the coffee!! We have let the athiests and humanists whip the foundation from under our noses as we have let them put Genesis on the same footing as Santa Claus! Lord have mercy on them but they are in for some awful shock when Truth is revealed in person in the clouds!!
“All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:3)
What does the Bible's teaching on creation have to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ? Well, let’s see what happens to Christ's work of salvation if creation is untrue and God actually used evolution. Death in the animal kingdom must have come into the world long before the first man and before sin. If death is not a result of sin, why did Christ have to receive the penalty for sin by death on a cross? So, in challenging man's origin, evolution challenges the origin of sin and its effect on man. Thus, evolution challenges the very heart of Christ’s work! The Bible tells us that all Scripture was given to make us wise unto salvation. That includes Genesis. John's Gospel tells us that all things were created through the Word Who became flesh.

We see that Word in action in Genesis One when we read, “That Word Who made us and everything is the very same Word Who came and purchased our salvation.”

So Genesis, right from the very first words, is actually the beginning of God's revelation to us of the Person and work of the Son of God - our Savior, Jesus Christ. If we reject God's revelation about His Son in Genesis One, we have only part of a Savior - and only part of Christ is no Christ at all!

And the photo... The woodpecker hits the tree so hard and fast that if he didn't have amazing shock absorbers he'd crush his skull. If he didn't have special claws on this feet he couldn't stay on and ...wait for it...if he didn't have an amazing long tongue wrapped around cavities in that amazing shock absorbing skull he couldn't lick up the prey through the newly bored hole!! Now O Evolutionist tell me which awesome bit of these 3 evolved first!! What a designer our God is! Have a fab day. Ant

God's Gig

Temple Bar Square 1am Sat 14th June 08: "Ahh go on let me play your guitar and sing a song" the lady asked. "NO" I firmly said. "She's brilliant...go on let her" the friends asked. "This guitar is only for Jesus...Do you know Amazing Grace?", "I do she said". So I played 4 verses of the awesome hymn and she had a great crowd stopping voice. It must have been around 50 people who were standing by the time she sang the last verse...I knew what was next...but noone else did! Before the applause cut in at the end I raised my voice and spoke of Grace: "God's Riches At Christ's Expense". I spoke for about 3 minutes on how valuable each person was...Value being determined by the price one is willing to pay. I told of how God bankrupted heaven by paying His beloved son for YOU (pointing at a person in the crowd) and you (at another!). He shed his blood to pay the high price for us to come back to the Creator forever. As I began this message at least 2 people tried to stop me. They liked the performance but not the preaching. They thought it was their Gig but they were wrong... it was God's. Only eternity will tell if someone heard the truth that night...For Jesus I'll gladly make an eejit out of myself..Hallelujah! Ant

Truly Innocent and Truly Guilty

"Who is the most important person in your life?" I asked the man after him spending the last 15 minutes forcibly telling me that the message of the Gospel is "Loooove". "My mother" he answered. "That's idolatry...It's good to love your mother but to put her before God is to break the first commandment!". Earlier in the evening I asked another chap "Do you think there was ever a time that Jesus sinned", "Sure he sinned" replid my friend. I then looked him in the eye and with pointed finger said "That a lie and the the devil is the father of lies. He was the innocent lamb of God who was slain for your sins and mine".

When I consider the incredible power and simplicity of the gospel (the innocent dying for the guilty) I realize that we need to make sure that people understand that Jesus was truly innocent as we are all truly guilty. As long as souls are separated don't stop outreaching! Ant

Why Genesis matters

I read today about a debate held years ago in a liberal Catholic school, presided over by a Benedictine monk about God's existence. It read " The evidence was decidedly in favour of the view that there was no God; the arguments went far beyond the obvious: If God was all powerful, he would not have stood by in the face of Auschwitz, Third World Hunger, Hiroshima..." I thought to myself how common this view was but also how Unbiblical and therefore unsound.

After God created He said it was Very Good. Did this involve the Lions savaging the young Roebuck or the horror of a diseased death to man or animal?..I think not. The world we see today is not the world God created but a corrupted version of it. Death is normal in an abnormal world. Yes the beauty does shine through in many ways but the contamination or corruption is the result of man's sin and the resulting entrance of death and decay of behaviour and environment. Many Christians are soft on Macro Evolution. They believe that God used evolving generations to get to Adam and Eve. If this was so then death and decay already existed when God warned man of death being the result of rebellion. It also means that GOD MADE DEATH in the same way he made life.

God is no liar and when he said in Genesis 2:1 "Thus the Heavens and the Earth were created" He meant it. He created the world perfect and he did it before he made the sun, moon and stars. He made the birds before the land animals, and the whole creation in 144 hours. True science supports this as does true application of His word. Denial of this leads to a view of God as the creator of evil who rightly deserves blame when things go wrong. The Gospel is "The innocent (Jesus) dying for the guilty (us)" . the incorrect modern view is that we are innocent and He is guilty....Wake up guys and smell the coffee!