Bird

The Greek philosophers were the ones who talked most about the immortality of the soul, and they used a beautiful analogy to explain it. They saw the soul like a homing pigeon taking to a far land and when it is release, it always instinctively and unerringly returns to its true home.

The soul they say is like that bird. In this life, we’re living in a foreign land or in a cage, death, therefore, in this view is a release – freeing the soul to return instinctively and unerringly to its true home.

Now that’s beautiful, but it’s not Christian. It’s in much of our poetry and in much of our hymnody, you get some hints of it in the Bible, but that’s not primarily the teaching of the Bible.

The primary teaching of scripture is not the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body and eternal life. The Bible does not affirm that immortality is part and parcel of what it means to be human, but the Bible rather talks about eternal life as gifts – the gift of God in Jesus Christ to those who respond in faith to him.

If you’re going to live beyond death, the Bible says, there must be a resurrection of the body. A resurrection of who we are as we are as persons, yet made new by Christ himself, who even now sitting upon the throne, keeps saying, behold I am making all things new.

When Paul was confronted with what people felt to be the preposterousness of this idea of the resurrection of the body, when you consider what happens to the body in death – he said, we will have a resurrected new body.

And just as the Greeks had an analogy to talk about the immortality of the soul, so Paul had an analogy to talk about the resurrection of the body. He said it’s like a farmer, planting a seed in the ground, and the shell of the husk falls away and new life appears. So we die, to be born again into new life.

Maxie Dunnam, All This and Heaven, Too, www.Sermons.com

Street Evangelism

Street E yesterday was a renewal of passion for evangelism. As I went out to the streets yesterday, I was so thankful for giving me a new passion for evangelism. Thank God firstly for the one soul saved. As I'm reading the Book of Revelation recently, it was a reminder that God is coming again and we are living in the last days.

This world is coming to an end and we have to work while it is day, for when night comes, no man can work. So I was burdened yesterday to just take the gospel to anyone whom I met. I don't have time to stop and rest because these people are going to hell.

I've been thinking about many things recently, and one thing that strike me the most was that people nowadays think that they are very smart. With the access to a whole range of information through the net and with the availability of books and information at their fingertips, people are rejecting God.

Books are written to say that God don't exist, debates are conducted to prove that God is fake, people are thinking that they are capable of saving themselves, movies are downplaying the truth about God, jokes are made about the Bible and God.

People have lost that child-like faith. Jesus have said that anyone who comes to Him have to come as a child, humbling themselves to receive Him as Lord and Saviour. God is extending His hand out to you this Christmas, He wants to give you eternal life and abundant life, but you have to receive that gift from Him.

This Christmas, don't let it pass by as another Christmas, make this Christmas real, make it Christmas in your heart. Come to Jesus today! Will you?