Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
These are the things from Revelation, chapters 2 and 3, that Jesus promised to the saints of God who are faithful to him until the end:
A. To him that overcometh
will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise
of God.
B. He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second
death.
C. To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna,
and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.
D. And he that overcometh,
and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations.
And he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as the vessels of a potter shall they
be broken to shivers, even as I received of my Father. And I will give him
the morning star.
E. He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in
white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I
will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.
F. Him that
overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go
no more out. And I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the
city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my
God. And I will write upon him my new name.
G. He that overcometh
shall inherit all things, and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
Jesus promises these extraordinary blessings to believers who are faithful to God and who overcome the world. What do you think Jesus will give to believers who are not faithful to God and do not overcome the world? We don't have to guess; he told us. He promised that he would give them their portions with the hypocrites and the unbelievers (Mt. 24:51 and Lk. 12:46). In other words, those members of the body of Christ would be rejected by the Father and cast into the Lake of Fire to be tormented forever.
Too much is made at times of the more pleasant "promises of God". You have seen the cute little inspirational books in Christian bookstores about the promises of God; fleecy clouds, little lambs skipping across a meadow, and floating hearts adorn the pages. But there needs to be a balance in our discussions of the promises of God. Wise Paul exhorted the saints to "behold both the goodness and the severity of God"; but who is willing to do that? Not all the promises of God are promises of blessings; some are of grievous curses. The Father has promised to save every one in the body of Christ who obeys Him, but He has also promised to condemn forever those in the body of Christ who do not.
One of the great men of God of the twentieth century was Brother Oral Roberts. Beginning in the late 1940's and over the next thirty years or so, his gift of healing and his faithfulness to Jesus turned more people's minds toward God than any man has done since the days of the Apostle Paul. He encouraged people all over the world to have faith in God. He knew that God loves people, and he loved people the way God does, with power. I am alive because of Oral Roberts. He healed my father of cancer a few years before I was born. Many thousands of people world-wide have a similar testimony concerning Brother Roberts.
On the half-hour Sunday morning television programs he once had, Brother Roberts would always begin the program by looking directly into the camera and saying with a huge, loving smile, "Something good is going to happen to you!" He very much wanted people to believe that God loved them deeply and that they could trust Him to supply all their needs, no matter what their need was. Those who loved God never grew tired of seeing Brother Roberts' beaming face and hearing his encouraging words. Oral Roberts was a prince in the kingdom of God in his time.
Something good is going to happen to you. Brother Roberts was absolutely right about that. Still, that is not the whole story. Bad things are also going to happen to you. Bad things happened to Brother Roberts himself. Whether good and bad things are going to happen to you is not really even the issue, for good and bad things have happened to every person who has ever lived. Life's challenge is, how are you going to deal with the good and bad things that happen? Brother Roberts was trying to lift people up above doubt and unbelief, and it was good for him to do that. He wanted people to have faith in our living and loving God; he did not do evil by telling people that good things were going to happen to them. At the same time, we would all be wise to recognize the fact that sometimes bad things are going to happen, and we need to prepare our hearts to overcome those bad things.
God tries the hearts of men. The Bible tells us that many, many times. God has promised to test us. He puts us in difficult situations, not to torment us, but for us to learn faith and patience and to train us to trust in Him at all times. And if we love God, everything that happens to us, whether pleasant or unpleasant, will eventually work for our good (Rom. 8:28). Believing that, those who trust in God can rise up every day and say to themselves, "Something good is going to happen to me!"
Solomon made the statement once that "There shall no evil happen to the just." He must have possessed Brother Roberts' kind of faith in God's power to turn all things into good for those who love God. After Oral Roberts healed him, my father even spoke of the cancer that had nearly killed him as "that blessed cancer" because through his suffering he learned to obey God more perfectly. God chastened him with cancer, and then He healed him of cancer when he repented, and my father was thankful for both the affliction and the deliverance.
"To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven", said Solomon (Eccl. 3:1). There is a time for sorrow and a time for joy, a time for weeping and a time for dancing, a time to gain and a time to lose. God has promised that there is a time for every good thing and every bad thing. Prepare your heart, then, to receive with humility whatever He determines that you must face today. Whatever it may be, we know that it will be only a part of the promises of our loving heavenly Father, and if we love God and obey Him, whatever happens can only work for our good.