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Hi!
I'm
Bruce Collins. I am an evangelist and teacher of the Bible. I
became a child of God by faith in the person and work of the Lord Jesus
Christ on November 24, 1963 and have tried to serve the Lord in various
capacities since then. I am presently an itinerant minister of
the Gospel. I do not work for an organization but I try to
serve the Lord in the best way that I can wherever He leads. That
means that my wife and I have our financial needs met by the Lord as we do
not have a salary from any church or organization. We believe
that the Gospel is free so we have never made a charge for our services.
I
am available for Bible studies, conferences, Gospel meetings, children's meetings
and camp work. I have traveled throughout much of the United States
and Canada in my service for the Lord. My wife helps me, and
we attend the Bethany Bible Chapel in Cedar Falls, Iowa. They have encouraged us
by commending us for this work.
My
wife, Geneva and I live in Waterloo, Iowa. We have four children.
One of them is married and has provided us with two grandchildren.
This
web site has a weekly meditation that I hope will encourage you. It
has links to literature and organizations that I think are helpful.
You can also listen to my weekly radio program here.
Yours
because of Calvary,
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Meditation--updated
weekly
If
you would like to comment go to
http://bdcministries.com/
Moving
Mountains
So
Jesus said to them, "Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say
to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this
mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will
be impossible for you.”
(Matthew
17:20 NKJV)
Can
We Move Mountains?
The
answer to that question is yes! But
in order to move mountains we need to understand the conditions required
for the prayer to be answered and we need to understand what the Lord
meant by mountains. This
verse is not meant to make us feel guilty for our lack of faith but it
is intended to give us confidence that if we pray the way the Lord wants
us to pray for the things that He has told us to pray about, we can be
sure that our prayers will be answered in the affirmative.
What
is Faith?
Faith
is always confidence in something or someone.
In this case faith is confidence in a promise that the Lord had
made to his disciples. He
had sent them out with power over demons.
In Matthew 10:8 we read his commission to the twelve apostles,
“Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons.
Freely you have received, freely give.”
So the twelve had been given a promise and power and yet when He
and three of the disciples came down from the Mount of Transfiguration,
they found nine of the apostles (which included Judas) powerless when it
came to casting out this particular demon.
For some reason, they didn't have the ability to exercise faith
in the promise that the Lord had given them in this case.
So we need to make sure that the Lord has given us the authority
to move a mountain which in this case involved casting out a demon.
What
is the Mountain?
The
Lord spoke in parables at times. That
is He often used a story to illustrate a spiritual principal.
I believe His miracles literally happened but that they too teach
us lessons in a figurative way. We
know that the Lord spoke in figurative language so that those who wanted
to understand could understand and those who didn't want to understand
could find fault. In this
case, He has just come down from a mountain and that would tend to make
us believe that mountains could represent the coming powers in the final
battles between good and evil just before the Lord sets up His kingdom.
It would give the Jews assurance that even though powerful men
would arise to try to deceive and control the world, they should be sure
that their faith in the Lord would be rewarded.
They would be able to make a difference in the world conditions
of that day. A faithful remnant will be saved for the coming Righteous
Kingdom.
The
mountains could also represent literal mountains but frankly I don't
think that is what the Lord is teaching here.
So in the context, the mountain was the problem that the
disciples were experiencing. They
couldn't do what the Lord had told them they could do.
And that is a mountain that many of us experience.
Sometimes, we simply need to wait for an answer, but we get
impatient. Sometimes, Satan
is attacking us and trying to get us to lose confidence in promises that
the Lord has fulfilled in our lives many times.
In those cases, we need to resort to prayer and fasting.
And we need to bring the problem to the Lord.
That was the cure here. The
disciples were told, “bring him here to Me.”
And the Lord did for them what they had been commissioned to do.
Faithless
and Perverse (Obstinate )
The
disciples were called faithless and perverse.
Are we like that today? How
many times have I heard teachers of the Bible tell us that the New
Testament principles connected with the church do not work today.
They say we need new practices for a new generation.
I wonder when I hear these things if we should be able to depend
on the way of salvation as presented to us by the Lord and his apostles
or has that changed as well? Did
the Lord who made heaven and earth provide us with a blue print for the
building which is His church that doesn't work today?
In
addition, we have
conferences on how to keep our young people which is one of the
mountains we are facing today. Perhaps
we need to bring them to the Lord and perhaps we need to realize that
the problem is with those of us who claim to be Christians.
The problem is not with the instructions that the Lord has given
us and the problem isn't even with the young.
The problem is with those of us who have lost confidence in the
simple truth that the church is the house of God, it is His temple, it
is His garden and we don't have the right to make it our church when it
is His. We might also ask
ourselves if we are presenting the Gospel the way it is presented in the
New Testament or are we presenting it the way the religious world
presents it? Do we still
believe in the “repent and believe” Gospel or are we presenting a
“sign up for a good time” type of Gospel?
We
can move mountains when
the Lord gives us the authority to do so.
When we can't seem to move a mountain that we should be able to
move, we can and should bring that problem to the Lord.
He is faithful even when we are faithless (2nd Timothy 2:13).
Meditation
for the weeks of October 7and October 14, 2018
Archived
Meditations
If
you would like to be on the email address list for these meditations
write to me at
mail@bdcministries.faithweb.com
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