THE BOOK OF REVELATION - A SYNOPSIS

MY BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF REVELATION

 

John, was the friend of Jesus, gospel writer and evangelist. The purpose of Jesus’ incarnation was so real and empowering to John. He watched Jesus die. He saw him alive again. He saw Jesus ascend through clouds and out of sight. He knew everything Jesus said about the devil and sin and redemption, and the Kingdom were true. He wrote that God loved the world so much that He sent the divine Son, Jesus, so whomever believes in Jesus will have eternal life. 

Ron Unruh website

Yes, a new website on which my three new books are displayed and offered in both eBook and paperback versions.

THE ELEVEN

AN EXHILARATING READ and a spiritual stimulus for your walk as a disciple of Jesus Christ. The book uses two resources, imagination and biblical data. Each chapter contains both a narrative and a nurturing component. It's a delight to take steps with this author into conversations with each of the eleven disciples who remained true to Jesus. When you hear these ancient men speak about Jesus you will esteem him who turned ordinary common folk into disciples. As you engage with the lessons that scripture speaks from the disciples' lives, you will gain appreciation for what the LORD can do with people like yourself. So download or purchase 'The Eleven' now and have fun learning about the disciples using an embellished imagination and a reliable examination of relevant scripture. You are going to better understand what God is currently doing in your life and you will want to yield to his gentle work.

CLOVERDALE BAPTIST CHURCH 2015

I read many Facebook respondents in the last few days express sadness at the demolition of the forty-something year old building that housed the Cloverdale Baptist Church. I acknowledge my own melancholic sentiments as the giant arm of the shovel pushed through sanctuary walls and reduced them to rubble. I am permitted the feelings since I served as lead pastor for ten years from 1991-2001. I was daily inside the facility and officiated countless meetings and services, weddings and baptisms. My two children were each married to their sweethearts in that sanctuary into which sun blasted through the gaping wound this week before the walls disappeared. 

Now they must remain as memories and that is fine since next to the demolition site now stands a newly completed building with twice as much seating and classroom space and state of the art equipment. This observation stands as a metaphor for a theme on which I have been hammering for a little while. What has been constructed is not a church although that is how we commonly employ the term. Nor would it be true to say that the church was reduced to debris. Church was the collective people inside the older structure and Church continues to be that group of people and whoever also joins them inside the new design. It's difficult for us to move away from language that by weight of habit associates church with physical structure, but we should make the effort. We do not go to church. We are church. We don't attend church. We live as church. Does it make any difference? I believe it does. Otherwise, like a fantasy we could say, if we build it (the church), they (people) will come. What we should say is, if we are it (the church) they (the people) will come. It is not where we go but who we are that is important. If we live as church, God's family, Christ's bride, a ransomed flock with a divine shepherd, then by exposure to us, others whom the LORD wants to call will hear his voice. 

THE CRYING DESIRE

Not for a moment would I suggest that every church that is located inside a building whether a small wood frame structure or colossal concrete edifice is an ineffectual institutional church. That kind of wholesale depreciation would miss the point of all my recent articles and certainly of this one. I must make that qualification as I publicly question present-day interpretations of church and what churches do. I observe the church through the lens of scripture and the eyes of experience.

The assembly or church about which Jesus spoke just before he was airlifted into the heavens began with the investment of the Holy Spirit into each one of the approximately 120 people waiting and praying as he instructed them to do. That was the memorable Day of Pentecost described in Acts 1&2. By the end of that first day, 3,000 more people were added to this assembly, the same way the first 120 were endorsed, by repentance of personal sin, faith in Jesus being God's Son, Messiah, whose death atoned for their sin, personal baptism as a public display of allegiance to Jesus, and the coincident filling by the Holy Spirit of God.

Jesus' early church was stamped with an enthralling relationship with God that should characterize his followers always. It is that gripping rapport with the Father for which many people are longing today.

That dynamic affiliation with Almighty God, and with the eternal Son and with the indwelling Spirit, is not the experience and sometimes not even the teaching that occurs within institutional churches whether wood or concrete. For that reason some believers pull away, disappointed, vacant, starving. They will search for that which scripture described, the church that God is building rather than the church that humans build. God's assembly or church has been knowing God and loving God and experiencing His power, and growing numerically ever since those early days. This is Jesus' church. His church is comprised of people with a passion for obediently following Jesus; people who can talk together with love and grace and permission to be authentic; people who compassionately respond to people around them. Jesus' church has grown in battle field bunkers, in refugee camps, in summer children's camps, in prisons, in lunch break conversations during business hours, in family devotions, in university dorm rooms, and in sanctuaries of some country and city church buildings.

What many of you want more than anything is friendships with people who are fervently following Jesus and living his holy kind of life and winsomely relating to everyone with the presence of the LORD.

THE THIEF

THE THIEF

Past flight and worry, he's been caught.

His ankles chained, unable to walk.

Waiting, condemned, his time soon comes.

He'll die today when come the drums.

Escorted swiftly to his cross,

Impaled in agony, all is lost.

He can't get down, he can't atone.

Never can he go back home.

Endures for hours and then hears Jesus

Speak the words with power to free us.

"Remember me," to Christ he cries,

Love's alive in Messiah's eyes.

True faith the Lord can recognize

"You will be with me in paradise."

A promise from the one beside,

About whom he'll say, "for me he died."

Death is no master, no need to fear it,

"Into your hands I commit my spirit."

© Ron Unruh, March 2015

TO UNDERSTAND WHO WE ARE, WE MUST UNDERSTAND GOD

To understand who we are, we must understand who God is. Psalm 8:1 says, “O Lord our Lord, how majesty is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” God is the ultimate reality, existing in and of himself with an infinite existence that is unlike any other being in the universe. He is without a beginning and he doesn’t have an end date. God has personality and the essence of God is distinguished in three persons, a trinity of persons, who are neither three gods or three parts or modes of God but rather are coequal and coeternal.

David wrote this psalm to praise the incomparable Creator of this entire universe. How big a deal is that?

We view the sun positioned in the heavens of our planet. The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. If we create our own scale, reducing the sun to the size of a beach ball two feet in diameter, we can commence a staggering comparison. You step off eighty-two paces (a pace being two feet long), and put down a mustard seed to represent the first planet Mercury. Sixty more steps and you put down a beebee for Venus. Walk seventy-eight more paces and for earth you put down a pea. One hundred and eight steps further you will be at Mars and you will put down a pinhead. Then you may scatter some fine dust to represent asteroids and mark off seven hundred and eighty-eight more steps and mark Jupiter with an orange. Nine hundred and thirty-four steps further and for Saturn you put down a golf ball. Another two thousand and eighty-six steps and Uranus will be marked by a marble. Two thousand three hundred and twenty-two steps more and you mark Neptune with a cherry. That will have taken you two and one half miles and you aren't even near Pluto. However, if you swing this two and one half mile arm around you will have a mass surface of five miles in diameter and that will represent our solar system. You will have to travel another six thousand seven hundred and twenty-two miles on the same scale before you meet another two foot ball to represent the nearest other star.

GRASPING HOW MUCH GOD CARES FOR US

To best understand that God infinitely cares for each of us, I must begin with the Big Picture. Somewhere in the broad window of pre-history God determined to create humanity and a world in which the species would live. You and I are sitting in different places, a library, a living room, a Starbucks, some place where we can read. That’s the small picture. The big picture is that we are at this moment part of a whole human history. Human history had a beginning and it has always been moving toward a target. It is a matter of design, and this design originated with God. That design bears upon the theme that intrigued David, the psalmist, shepherd, soldier and king of ancient Israel. He wrote memorable conversation to God which is recorded as Psalm 8 in the Book of Psalms of the Old Testament.

8:1 O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9 O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

ALL THE WEALTH IN THE WORLD

I’m a senior and I tire more easily than you. I tire of prosperity preachers who shamelessly urge people to live right and get rich. I also tire of preachers who teach about money with a controlling agenda to increase your giving to the church. Yet I do believe that an understanding of economy within God’s frame of reference will lead to generous, responsible charitable donations.