Walking down the main street of Ephesus today in western Turkey is an amazing experience, as you are able to view the ancient well preserved ruins of two thousand years ago, but it was not always such a peaceful city.

Disturbance and tumult hit Ephesus as the whole economy was challenged.

Paul’s prolonged dynamic preaching, teaching and healing ministry caused uncontrolled confusion, from one section of the city. There was a riot. Why?

Why should there be such disruption, when Jesus Christ was radically transforming and changing lives for the better?

The silversmiths, who made their money making idols, began to lose trade as people turned to the living God. They had been on to a good thing, but Paul’s influential and effective presence had touched their pockets. Sin was being challenged in a new surprising way and there was a fierce reaction. That is quite normal.

When a man comes to faith in Jesus Christ he has no need for idols, nor does he have any desire to worship objects.

Demand for silver trinkets fell. Business was bad. Income was down. Anger boiled. Tempers flared.

Ephesus witnessed two hours of uproar, with incessant shouting and chanting slogans.

As long as faith is confined to a building or kept personally, private, and quiet, others might tolerate it, and smile sweetly at you, but when the power of Jesus Christ challenges a community, making society examine its morals, and in a way that touches the accounts, there can be an explosion of rage. The record of what actually happened is accurately recorded in Acts Chapter 19 in the New Testament part of the Bible.

The city clerk sought to deal with the disorder. He had some job on his hands, pacifying the citizens, calming down the commotion, and struggling to disperse the demonstrators.

It is comparatively easy to pray for revival or renewal, but when God answers these prayers and moves so authentically, some become sufficiently furious to fight.

Writing about this incident later on, Paul described it as like fighting wild beasts. Now that is strong but only goes to indicate how violent the opposition was.

God kept His servant safe on this occasion, but Paul was never able to return to Ephesus.

Sandy Shaw

Sandy Shaw is Pastor of Nairn Christian Fellowship, Chaplain at Inverness Prison, and Nairn Academy, and serves on The Children’s Panel in Scotland, and has travelled extensively over these past years teaching, speaking, in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, making 12 visits to Israel conducting Tours and Pilgrimages, and most recently in Uganda and Kenya, ministering at Pastors and Leaders Seminars, in the poor areas surrounding Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu.

He broadcasts regularly on WSHO radio out of New Orleans, and writes a weekly commentary at http://www.studylight.org entitled “Word from Scotland” on various biblical themes, as well as a weekly newspaper column.

His M.A. and B.D. degrees are from The University of Edinburgh, and he continues to run and exercise regularly to maintain a level of physical fitness.

Sandy Shaw

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Can I Get To Heaven If I’m A Good Person?

Will God let me into heaven if I’m a good person? I decided to ask this question on a popular forum to see what responses I would get. I received a lot of responses but decided to share 5 that represent the rest. Which of these responses do you think are correct according to the bible?

1. As long as you do Gods law.
Church, confession, ectŅ..

2. Yes, all people of good nature in every faith will reach heaven before the bad in every Faith.

3. Since I am not God I do not know. I would think it is a fair assumption.

4. I don’t believe in a god, but I believe if there is he will accept us if we are good no matter what our religion.

5. In the book of Romans, the Bible teaches us that we are all sinners and that none of us is good (by God’s comparison) enough to enter heaven. Therefore, God sent His Son Jesus Christ to cleanse us from all sin so that by trusting in His Sacrifice on the cross we will be able to go to heaven. Ephesians 2:8,9 tells us that it is by faith and not our works that we are saved. We must trust Jesus to enter in.

If you choose the last answer you would be correct. Let’s look at the above answers and compare them to what the bible says. The answer, “As long as you do God’s law, church confession, etc.”, is incorrect because in order to get to heaven you would have to obey God’s law perfectly. God’s standard is that He doesn’t allow any sin. Habakkuk 1:13 says, “Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, And You can not look on wickedness with favor”. God’s standard is high and no one is able to keep God’s law perfectly.

Answers 2 and 4 are similar in that they both believe that it doesn’t matter what religion you belong to because if you are good you will go to heaven. But Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” We can find salvation with no other. The reason for this is that Jesus is the Son of God, the third person in the trinity. To not worship Jesus is to not worship God.

The other issue is that the bible says that there are none who are good, none who seek for God (Romans 3:10). Now someone may disagree and say, “I’m a good person because I treat others with respect, I do unto others as I would have them do unto me, and I give to charity”.

But James 2:1
1000
0 says, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.”

How is this possible? How can you be guilty of all sins if you have only stumbled on one thing?

Well consider this, if you have broken the law, what does that make you? It makes you a law breaker. In God’s eyes that’s enough to send you to hell. God is Holy and He never sins. He will not tolerate or allow any sin in His presence in heaven. And of course the reality is that no one has only sinned once.

If we are honest with ourselves we must admit that we have sinned countless times. No only in action or deed, but in wrong attitudes of jealousy, anger, hate, bitterness, impure thoughts, or wrong intentions. Not only are we guilty of what we HAVE done but we are also guilty of what we HAVE NOT done. That includes the many times we have overlooked doing good because of selfishness on our part.

Romans 3:20 says, “because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin”. The law actually points out our sin and shows us where we have gone wrong.

So, if we understand that we can’t keep God’s law perfectly, and we recognize that following the law is not enough to justify us before God….then how is it possible to get to heaven?

It is only possible because Jesus took our punishment on the cross. When Jesus was on the cross the Father poured out His wrath for all of our sin and Jesus bore that sin for us. He was the ultimate sacrifice. He paid the price for our sin so that we could be saved. But we must believe in Him and trust Him for salvation.

The bible says that we are saved by faith alone. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” No one can feel proud that they earned their way to heaven. It is only by God’s grace that we can be saved and it is only through believing in Jesus Christ that we are made right before God.

Galatians 2:16 says, “know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.”

Titus 3:5 says, “he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit”. The Holy Spirit does a work in the life of someone who puts their faith in Jesus. The Holy Spirit renews the heart and creates a new person on the inside. Galatians 2:20 says ӔI have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” and 2 Corinthians 5:17 says that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”

By: Jeanine M

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For more information on how to have a right relationship with God, check out Jeanine’s blog, Walk in Light at www.walk-in-light.com

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My Father is a pastor. In 1975, He had accepted an invitation to be the dean of students for a private Christian prep school. He was thrilled with the prospect of a new and very different challenge. But before the moving van was packed, but after the church said its warm good-bye, the school had some form of difficulty and removed the job offer. Therefore, my father was not only deeply disappointed, he was unemployed. It was a very low point in my Dad’s life.

The job search ended in Lancaster California where he because the senior pastor of a great church. I was a freshman in college. That summer I went to my new home in Lancaster forvacation. It was there that I was quite taken by the beautiful church pianist who was a senior in high school. A couple years of friendship with Kay turned into courtship and later marriage. I had never connected the dots until I recently was talking to my dad about that difficult time of unemployment. My kids were in the room. You would not believe the look on their faces as we suddenly realized that if that school had not removed the job offer, they would not be here.

In 1978, after recieving his MBA, my brother David was working for a small and rapidly growing software company in the Seattle area — yes, it was Microsoft. The owner called him (guess who) to let him go. He quickly landed a job with Exxon in Houston Texas. As he was preparing for the move, David’s wife Vivian was given the news that she had cervical cancer that needed to be removed as soon as possible. They chose to postpone the treatments until they settled in Texas. A few days later, they were at a specialist’s office in Texas who said; “I do not know anything about cancer, but I do know that you are pregnant.” The ‘cancer’ that was to be removed by the Seattle doctor is named Gregory. He recently graduated from UCLA with a double major, married and moved to Japan to spend his first year of marriage teaching english. God works all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His name.

As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of this ministry we have looked at our history. There were countless events that happened, that from our earthly eyes, were absolutely necessary precursors to the start of this ministry. I will share just one of those event as told my Warren Christie, who is writing our history:

The movement of Christian youth rallies that started in the thirties expanded further with the millions of soldiers and sailors encamped in cities around the country. In 1944 many of the Church and Christian youth leaders who were leading independent youth rallies and clubs met at Lake Winona , Indiana for an annual Bible conference. There these men prayerfully deliberated how to best coordinate this evangelical effort to young people. They agreed to cooperate in this great movement of the Spirit. Later that year, at in meeting in Detroit , Torrey Johnson, a Chicago area Pastor was elected Chairman of a temporary organization to oversee the work. Torrey had been the organizer of the Chicago Youth Jubilees ably aided by many including a dynamic, recent Wheaton graduate and Chicago radio evangelist, Billy Graham. (A complete copy of Warren Christie’s work can be found at http://LIYouthmentoring.com.)

Little did anyone who was at that meeting, dream that this would be the birth of Youth for Christ which has contributed to or birthed countless other ministries like Dr. Graham’s ministry and even Long Island Youth Mentoring. It was just one meeting. ‘Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the apples in a seed.’

One day Ed came home from church and told his wife he had signed up to be a mentor to a fatherless boy. Fifteen years later, that boy is a policeman keeping order in the aftermath of 9-11. He is also a sixth grade Sunday school teacher and now a mentor to a boy with a story very much like his own.

It was just a decision made at church. He volunteered to get together with a boy for two hours a week.

What God will do with that pebble of faith that was thrown obediently into the pool of the will of God will reverberate for generations and onto eternity.

Please know that we rest only in the very capable hands of Almighty God. The God who can use a lost job to enable me to meet my Kay and to be blessed with our three children, and who blessed my brother with his first born son, is quite capable to lead and provide for Long Island Youth Mentoring (http://ChristianMentor.com) that He loves so much. Our question is only to know His call of what we should do, weather seemingly large or small and to know that the Lord of the universe has chosen to bless us by enabling us to be apart of His blessing work.

About The Author

John Cragg has been the director of Long Island Youth Guidance (http://christianmentor.com) for the last 15 years. This ministry is a Christian big brother/big sister program. The success of this ministry has sponed dozens of other groups around the world to use John Cragg’s methods successfully reach at risk children.

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