HE IS ALIVE! 

This proclamation has thundered a message of hope across the centuries.  He is risen as He said He would!  Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up  (John 2:19).  He is faithful to His Word.  In all things, Jesus can be trusted to keep His Word. He said He came that we might have life and that we might have life more abundantly.  For your life and for my life, Jesus has regard for it’s preservation, protection, perpetuity, provisions, punishment, and ultimately it’s perfection glory.  Because He lives, we can have life in it’s fullest measure.  As the people of God, we have resurrection power.  We can (and we should) experience His resurrection power in every facet of our lives.  That power will keep us and deliver us out of life’s difficult circumstances.  If it is a dying relationship, He is able to resurrect it.  Be it, husband and wife, parents and children, neighbor and neighbor, most of all, man and his God, fractured relationships are not the will of our heavenly Father.  It does not matter how foreboding we might feel, we have His resurrection power in us.  Let Him live in your relationships.  He is alive and we enjoy His protection.  I know what the Chronicle, and Time magazine has to say about terrorist and terrorism, but I choose to let the Word come alive in my spirit.  The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear Him, and delivereth them.  (Psalm 34:7)

 Dear Ones, Easter is Christ raised from the dead for our justification.

•  Easter is, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
•  Easter is, God has made Jesus to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.
•  Easter is, because He is ALIVE, salvation is provided for “whosoever,” that’s you and that’s me folks.

 H  A  P  P  Y       E  A  S  T  E  R.

 Pastor J. Amos Jones

Dear Ones,

Please join this Pastor during the month of March and become part of “March Gladness.”

We will turn the tables on the Evil One and use a term taken from the lexicon of the sports world.  Whereas Satan perverts, we shall glorify.  By definition, glad is “feeling, or characterized by pleasure or joy; happy; pleased.”  With that definition in mind, during the month of March, every day, think about what makes you glad, then praise God for your “gladness.”  The Psalmist says in Psalm 70:4:  “Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee:  And let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.”  God’s deliverance of His servant will give joy (make him glad) to all who trust in the Lord, because they see in it the assurance of their own salvation.  Moreover, one can be glad because His saving help is sure and it is effective.

 This Pastor is glad he is saved and that he has a right relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are glad that God sent this preacher to FMBC as it’s Pastor.  On today, I am sure you can join the Psalmist and this Pastor in trusting in the Almighty God.  He who is both deliverer and sustainer.  I am glad that He is mine and I am His.

 “Let God be magnified” in “March Gladness.”

 Pastor J. Amos Jones

Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto the Lord glory and strength.  Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.  (Psalm 29:1, 2).

 What an awesome assertion of God’s holiness and the exhortation to His people to be holy.  The Psalmist says “Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength;” know that God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

 We know that our Heavenly Father is everywhere, that is to say, He is Omnipresent.  Think of Omni-presence this way:  Everything everywhere is immediately in His  presence.  We know that the awesome God is Omniscient.  He has infinite knowledge.  God’s knowledge does not increase or diminish as He knows when the temporal events of His redemptive program take place.  He eternally knows what He has known in the past and what He will know in the future.    Moreover, He is Omnipotent; having the ability to do with power all that power can do, and controlling all the power that is or can be.  “Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name.”  Holiness is regarded in the Bible as His central ethical character.  Please hear this, Dear Ones:  “Basic ethical principles are revealed by the will of God, and derived from and based upon the character of God.  Ye shall be holy; for I am holy.”  (Lev.  11:44)

 The idea of holiness originates in the revealed character of God, and is communicated to things, places, times and persons engaged in His service.  Its ethical nature grows clearer as revelation unfolds, until the holiness of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, of the Church as a body, and of individual members of that body, fills the New Testament horizon.  Holiness is equated with purity and the means of purification is the truth of the Word of God (John 17:17).  In your robe of righteousness, acknowledge the Divine perfections of the Creator of the universe.  Glorify Him in your mortal body.

 Be blessed as you worship Him in sacred garments of uprightness.

 Pastor J. Amos Jones

The grace of our God is beyond comprehension. The Word of God declares: “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:29). Nowhere is this more vividly demonstrated than in the life of the patriarch, Abraham. “And Abraham journeyed from thence toward the south country, and dwelled between Kadesh and Shur, and sojourned in Gerar. And Abraham said of Sarah, his wife, she is my sister: and Abimelech, King of Gerar sent, and took Sarah.”

Dear ones, this sordid story from the life of Abraham and Sarah is found in Genesis, chapter twenty. Light is cast upon Abraham’s fall by the thirteenth verse of the chapter—“And it came to pass, when God caused me to wander from my father’s house, that I said unto her, this is thy kindness which thou shalt show unto me; at every place whither we shall come, say of me, He is my brother.” Clearly, the evil compact which Abraham made with Sarah was due to the feebleness of his faith in God’s power to take care of them. The intent here is not to sit in judgement of Abraham, but rather, to draw from the scenario a picture of ourselves.   Abraham did but illustrate what is all too sadly common among the Lord’s people—that which might be termed what Arthur W. Pink calls, the inconsistency of faith.

 How often those who are not afraid to trust God with their souls, are afraid to trust Him with regard to their bodies. How often those who have the full assurance of faith in regard to eternal things, are full of unbelief and fear when it comes to temporal things. We have believed in the Lord and it has been counted unto us for righteousness; yet, how often, like Abraham, in the matter of the practical concerns of our daily life, we too, have more confidence in our own wisdom and scheming than we have in the sufficiency of God. And how did God act? Did He lose patience with Abraham, and cast off one so fickle and inconsistent? Yes, Abraham had dishonored the Lord in acting as he did, in setting such an evil example before these heathren. Yet, behold the grace of Him with whom we have to do. Instead of casting him off, God intervened and delivered Abraham and his wife from the peril which threatened them.

 The gifts and calling of God are “without repentance” And why? Because they are bestowed altogether without respect to any worthiness in the recipient, and hence, because God’s gifts are free and we do nothing to merit them, we can do nothing to demerit them.

 Be blessed as you walk in Him.

 Pastor J. Amos Jones