Isaiah 56: 10-12

“His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter. Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink; and tomorrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant.”

I pray that you are doing well in this whole Corona Virus and the restrictions that are imposed. We continue to see the fight between those who understand the freedoms that are being removed and those that want to impose further restrictions. We can see how many of us blindly follow the instructions of the Government without asking why. Yes, there are some persons who are seriously affected by this virus. My wife works in a nursing home, and there are other persons that I know that also work there, but the vast majority of people who get this virus recover, and many who have it do not get sick at all. Yet, the Governments of the world have shut down our lives for the sake of not spreading this virus, and it is not working.

All day long we are bombarded by celebrities and companies that remind us that we are in this together, we are all one family, and just stay home. But this is not true; we are not all one family, we are not in this together, and people can still go to buy alcohol and marijuana but not to the church. This is a joke, and many of us are getting played. It is our duty as citizens to ask the Government, “Why”? It is our duty as citizens to protect our freedoms and to make sure that those freedoms are there for our children. It takes one generation of idle watchers to drop the ball.

Are there people who are very sick and who need the care? Yes! Are there vulnerable parts of our society that need to be secluded and taken care of? Yes! Are there millions of healthy people who are sitting at home doing nothing? Yes! Just this week the idea of a universal guaranteed income was floated by persons in the US Government. The idea of paying people not to work. We have already seen incidents of this during this virus where the people could go back to work with the Government subsidy.

In my case I was put back on my company’s payroll and required to work from home and to track my work. I have to submit a daily work report at 4:30 pm each day or call my Managers throughout the day to report my work. But many have refused to go back on the payroll, so to speak, because they make more money on the current Virus subsidy than they do at work. It was revealed last week in an article in one of our local papers that the Government intends to review all the applications at the end of this pandemic, and those who could have gone back to work will be required to repay the subsidy.

Those of us who are Christians should know what the Bible teaches about work. In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, Paul, by the leading of the Holy Spirit, wrote this:

“For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

We need to be careful that in trying to protect people, and we should, and we do, that we take away the idea of personal responsibility. We can give people the information they need to help themselves; but, somewhere along the way, they have to take personal responsibility. Could you imagine if your doctor called all the fast food stores and told them not to serve you because you have heart disease or that you have high blood pressure? People die every day of all kinds of diseases. We die; that is a part of the human condition. That is the one thing that makes us all even – death.

Further, be wary of persons who are two-faced. A certain billionaire wants to help us by mandating a vaccine for all (in an apparent attempt to save lives). This same billionaire also believes that we are overpopulated and that more of us need to die. He has repeatedly made the case that the planet is overpopulated, yet he and his wife are not volunteering to commit suicide and lead by example. What they mean is there are too many of ‘us’ living on the planet. Yet, in the same breath, they propose a mandatory vaccine to save lives.

The Bible says this ‘fresh water and salted water cannot come from the same cistern.’ Either they want to save lives or they want to kill the rest of us, but they can’t do both. They want us dead.

A certain Prince, the heir to the throne of the UK, has been quoted with the same idea of overpopulation, and on and on we can go; we are expendable. We who love the Lord are the most expendable; why? Because we can see the truth, and the Holy Spirit has our eyes open, and we keep pushing back.

The passage in Isaiah that we are considering is God describing the rulers of Israel. They are asleep at the wheel of the nation. They are blind to the things that are coming. And, I want to be clear, not every leader of every little town and village is reeled in on the New World Order. No, but there are a few that are, and they are the ones dealing with public policy. This is not rocket science if you read the Bible and study prophecy; but for many newer Christians and those that do not understand the end times, or those that do not have pastors that teach about the end truthfully, it is hard to see what is going on.

There are two kinds of leadership we see here, three really that have emerged:

One understands that there is a real virus that is killing people and that there should be precautions taken with the most vulnerable, and we should manage everyone else and deal with breakouts on a case-by-case, location-by-location basis as they arise. But we need to restart the economy and get people out and doing once again, gradually at first and then widespread. The Government cannot arbitrarily take people’s freedoms indefinitely.

The second kind of leaders are deliberately seeing how far they can take their powers of control and restrict the people before the people snap and push back. Some have even restricted protesting; this is dangerous. Free people have the right to protest their government’s decisions as long as they do so peacefully. There are very harsh restrictions, and some Governors and Mayors have threatened to not just stop a church service but to shut the facility forever so they can never meet again. Parents are not allowed to take their kids to the park, even if they are the only ones in the park. Here where I am, in southern Ontario, my wife needs a letter to show that she should be out of her home for her job since she is a PSW. People are technically not allowed in their cars by themselves; this is tyranny.

The third group of leaders know that we have to reopen the economy, they know that things have gone too far, but they are paralyzed by fear of the ‘what if’? What if I open the economy and people get sick again? Let me ask this: what if people get sick with something else? What do we do in the next outbreak?

There will always be a good reason to take away our freedoms as far as the Governments of the world are concerned – We, the ignorant unwashed, cannot be allowed to go on unchecked. We need our ruling class to guide us and help us to live. We need their wisdom and guidance to be able to live our dull lives and to have any life at all. These are the tenets of the NWO found in the Georgia Guidestones:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

In Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel, God stated that the fact that mankind had one language would empower them to do anything they wanted. So, the Lord confused their languages. But notice the third tenet: to unite humanity under one language.

However, the most telling tenet is the very first one. At this point in our history, we would have to kill off more than 7,000,000,000 people on the planet. In 1980 when the stones were erected, the population of the world was 4.4 billion, so they still wanted to get rid of almost 4 billion people. I will bet you that they want to get rid of us and not them – the world does not need us, but it needs them.

The fourth tenet says they want to rule with tempered reason. Do you think it is a tempered reason to want to kill 80% (at that time) of the world’s population? No, they want us to live with tempered reason; they can run off and do whatever they want whenever they want to.

Sadly, many of our leaders have grown up away from the Bible. Sadly, many of our churches really don’t teach the Bible any more. We have little empowerment lessons that tell us how to get the most out of this life and how to live our best lives now. But the Bible tells us that there is a real and deliberate warfare being waged all around us. Like the Pharisees, the political/religious leaders of Jesus’ day, they sound so pious and religious, but they were and are angels of death. Jesus called them “white sepulchers” (Matthew 23:27) – they look and sound beautiful on the outside, but inside they are full of death. In a world that is all about death, the people who talk about life are the enemy. You and I are the enemy.

• The Lord’s churches that call out the warning, Jesus is coming, are the enemy.
• We who tell them, these people are not your salvation, Jesus is, we are the enemy.
• We who warn people that Jesus is the one who came to set us free; all others are here to bind you and hold you, are the enemy.
• We who want all others to read while the government tries to dumb down our kids, are the enemy.
• We who homeschool or send our kids to small Christian schools to be taught the Bible, to be taught to think, to read, to infer, to know the truth, we are the enemy.
• We who teach the people that God did create us and it is to Him we will answer to, we are the enemy.
• We who believe that a baby is precious from conception and made in the image of God, we are the enemy.
• We who understand that God stopped a one-world system in Genesis 11 because it was intrinsically evil, because man is evil, and so we oppose the NWO, are the enemy.
• We who accept the Bible as the Word of God, the absolute final rule of life and existence, we are the enemy.
• We who understand the Bible to teach right and wrong, that there is sin and we are all sinful, we are the enemy.

If we are not the enemy of the system that denies God, kills innocent babies, worships the creation and denies the Creator, defied God and denies Jesus, then we are no better than the blind, lazy and greedy watchmen from Isaiah 56. We are like the Laodicean church, one that is lukewarm; we look churchy but we don’t want to make a difference; we are just along for the ride. Live and let live, we say. They do their thing and we will do ours, but we don’t want to cause a conflict, we don’t want to lose our privileges, and we don’t want to step outside our boundaries. God forbid that we should lose our tax exemption because we did the right thing.

Somewhere along the line, the Lord’s churches decided that only the evil and corrupt people should be in government; and rather than fight, rather than Godly men stepping up and saying, not on my watch, we ran away with our tails between our legs into our prescribed areas, and there we have remained. Now we are wary of people who say they are Christians and then enter politics. Sadly, we have allowed them to be outnumbered.

How is it possible that in a nation of about 130,000,000 voters in the last US election (according to Wikipedia), where many still claim to be saved, that more than 50% could vote for a Party that openly kills babies; they murder full-term babies without any sign of remorse, claiming that they kill them in the name of women’s rights. It amazes me (I am of mixed heritage; Black and White) that colored people vote in a Party that supports Planned Parenthood, an entity established by Margaret Sanger, for the purpose of killing Black people. It was originally called the Negro Project; and even today, a large portion of babies killed are Black babies. In some areas there are more Black babies who die in the abortion clinics than are born in the hospitals.

That Party should not be able to get one vote from anyone who claims to be a Christian. But they do; millions of professing Christians vote for a Party in the US and for the Liberal Party here in Canada who literally hate them. How blind can we be? We are woeful watchmen; instead of warning the people and telling them the truth about what is coming, instead of telling them that only Jesus can bring the Utopia that the NWO wants to try to bring in, we help to vote in the wolves who want to kill the sheep.

We, I include myself here, like to blame the political leaders for our decline, but we, the Lord’s churches, are the watchmen appointed by God. The Lord’s churches are the ones who are to be light in this dark world. The Lord’s churches are to be leading the way to truth and not a party to the lies. The Lord’s churches are to be bastions of life and not agents of death. We should be helping people to see the hope that Jesus came to buy for them in His blood; we should be showing them that Jesus is who and what they are looking for. But we have become rainless clouds, as we see in Jude verse 12.

People look to us for hope, they look to the Lord’s churches for answers, and we give them nothing. Worse, we give them platitudes and lies that cannot help them. We don’t tell them that sin is the issue and Jesus is the ONLY answer. We don’t tell them that unless a man is transformed by Jesus from the inside that he is hopeless.

Is the Corona Virus real? Yes, it is. Are there people dying? Yes, they are. Is the NWO trying to see how far they can condition us before we push back? Yes, they are. Are there good leaders who are trying to do things to diminish the spread of the virus but also respect the freedoms of the people? Yes, there are. Should God’s people be wide-eyed and buried in the Scriptures? Yes, we should. We should be sharing the Gospel, serving and helping all we can. Let us be faithful watchmen, awake, alert and warning the people that the enemy is not just coming, but he has established his tents right in our midst. And while he appears to be an angel of light, he just wants to kill you.

Next week we will get back to Romans. This was on my heart as I set about to write. Jesus is coming soon; if I never meet you here, I’ll see you in the air.

1 Thessalonians 4:17, “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

God bless you,

Pastor Sean Gooding

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca

Chapter 6: 1-14

We are all slaves; who is your master?

“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? ² Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? ³ Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? ⁴ Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. ⁵ For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, ⁶ knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.

“⁷ For he who has died has been freed from sin. ⁸ Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, ⁹ knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. ¹⁰ For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. ¹¹ Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. ¹² Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. ¹³ And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. ¹⁴ For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.“

How are you doing with the ‘stay at home’ orders? We have some lines here in Southern Ontario, some long, some not so long. Our stores are well-stocked and we have not had any real shortages. Our church as well as many churches are meeting using the Zoom platform, and we find that to be very useful. If you ever want to see some of our messages, you can find them on our FB page at Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church. If you like the page, then you will get all of our messages each week. I love what the Lord is doing in that He is flooding the airwaves with lots of good Bible teaching. There are some that are not so good, and so you have to be discerning. But there is a lot more good stuff out there than there was a few weeks ago.

The idea of socialism has reared its ugly head in the past 50 years or so. It is constantly trying to come into North America and, to some degree, it has. We here in Canada have a government-paid-for health care system that one would argue is a kind of socialism. One of the problems with socialism is that the roles of government and citizen are reversed. In the free market system and under the idea of God-given rights, the idea is that the government serves the people and not the other way around. In socialism, their ideals sound good, but when people realize that no matter how hard you work, you will never get any further than the people who don’t, they stop working; then, everything is broken, and the citizen ends up working for the state; the government. Both freedom and socialism require work; in one, the citizen works to rise up and do better. In socialism, the state works to keep the citizen down.

In our text today, we are going to look at slavery. This is not a loved term in our modern vocabulary. But we are all slaves. If you are a child of God, saved and washed in the blood of Jesus, then you should be a bond slave (a slave out of love for Jesus), to do what is right. If, on the other hand, you are a lost person, then you are a slave to the sin nature in you.

Paul is about to begin to deep-dive into the battle that we have in the flesh each day. A battle that will never be over until we die or Jesus comes to get us. A battle that is so real and so painful it can leave scars in our minds and in our hearts. It is a battle that every born-again person must fight to some degree or the other. Some battles are entrenched in a deep, dark corner of the mind; some are very visible in the flesh. Some of these battles we have learned to mask in piety, and some eventually give in and stop fighting.

1. Slavery to Sin.

What Paul writes about here, is surrender. He says that we are slaves to whatever ‘force’ we surrender our bodies to (verse 13); we are slaves to whom we present our bodies. The obvious observation here is that we have volition, the power to choose. We can live for the Lord in our bodies or we can live for the flesh. There is a school of thought that says that we cannot sin once we have been saved, that we are no longer able to sin. I have seen, on YouTube, preachers that claim to be sinless. Their words are found to be mere lies in the wake of the scriptures.

The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 1:15, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” 

Notice that he writes in the present, I am chief. He could have said that ‘I was chief,’ meaning that, at the point of salvation, he was the chief sinner, but now he does not sin. Instead, Paul, under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, said I am chief. He was, at the time of the letter to Timothy, still the head of all sinners, in his mind. Further, the Apostle John says this in 1 John 1:8-10,

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

John, again under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, makes it clear that if we say that we are not sinners, then we make God out to be a liar and His word is not in us. In 1,2 and 3 John, the apostle is writing to a local church and addressing saved persons in that church. He is telling the saved persons that they are sinners and need to confess their sins regularly. We are told that every High Priest, except Jesus of course, had to first offer a sacrifice for his own sins, Hebrews 5:3:

“Because of this he is required as for the people, so also for himself, to offer sacrifices for sins.”

You see that the High Priest had to offer sacrifice for his own sins as well. We are all sinners. But even as a sinner, we have the ability since we are born-again to surrender our bodies to sinlessness, even though we will not ever be sinless on this side of eternity. How does one become sinless? We are given some great tools to help us as we live this life. The first is found in 1 Corinthians 10:13:

“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

First of all, you and I are not unique. The devil has not concocted some formula that is unique to you. Every temptation that you face is the same temptation that all men face. Now, there may be different flavors of temptation, but they all fall under one of three categories: the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.

1 John 2:16, “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.”

We are tempted in one or all of these three ways, and the verse in 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells us that each time we are tempted, the Lord will provide a way of escape. So, the devil tempts, and the Lord provides a way out. You and I are required to exercise our volition; we are required to make choices. We are not robots pre-programmed to react. We are humans made in the image of God with free will and the ability to serve the God we want to serve.

And, this leads us to the second way that we can choose not to sin, and that is to resist the devil. In James 4:7, we see this admonition:

“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”

Notice that if we resist the devil, he will flee from us. But before we are able to resist the devil, we must first be submitted to God. One provides the power to do the others. Thus, in the moment of temptation, one has to choose who they would like to be the slave to and of. That choice will determine the actions that follow being tempted.

1. Slave to Righteousness.

The choice is ours to make. We can be slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. In Jesus, those of us who are saved and who have the Holy Spirit in us can choose our paths. As you know, there are a lot of ‘good’ people in your neighborhood and at work, and they don’t seem to be ‘bad’ sinners. They don’t have Jesus, so what does that mean if they are not sinning? Sadly, it means nothing. You see, no matter how much they don’t sin, their very nature has not been changed. So, the little old grandma who knits scarves for all the homeless people, yet rejects the grace of Jesus, is just a rotten sinner. The devil wants God’s people to fail, and to fail miserably so as to cause scorn on God and His ways.

Remember that if we live right, we glorify God, we let people see the truth about God, and we point people to God.

Matthew 5:16, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

We are called to live in such a way, once we are saved in and by Jesus, so that persons who come in contact with us will see God the right way. Are you and I doing that?

Go back and reread James 4:7. We are called to submit ourselves to God first. Paul, writing in Romans, tells us that in verse 13 (b) “but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.” James says ‘submit,’ and Paul says ‘present.’ The idea is that you and I have to choose whom to serve. We need to stop trying to run our own lives and submit to God. We are called in the same fashion in Romans 12:1-2, to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God and for Him to change us. The context of James and even here in Romans is that, yes, there is a ‘one-time’ surrender to God, but in the real world and in real life, it is a moment-by-moment decision. You are deciding that you will take on a lifetime of deciding.

If we take an honest look at the apostles, we will see that they struggled with the flesh even as they traveled with Jesus, and even after, as they were building and expanding the Lord’s churches; they did not always make the right decisions. In the overall view of their lives, it is obvious that they were surrendered and had presented their bodies for righteousness in the long run; but, at certain times, they did sin. There are many of our Bible heroes that had flaws; men like Samson, Jacob, David and others were sinful men; and yet, in the overall overview of their lives, they were righteous men.

What is the overall overview of your life? Would you say that in general you are surrendered to God with bouts of sinfulness or that you are surrendered to sin with bouts of righteousness? These are honest questions that we need to ask ourselves. I will confess that I struggle with sin. I have very violent battles with my flesh in the dark recesses of my mind; and sadly, I don’t win them all. I am surrendered to righteousness and I am surrendered to God, and there are times when I am able to resist the devil and he leaves me. Unfortunately, not every time turns out this way and I sin. I confess my sins and beg God for His mercy; He is faithful to me and to all His children who will confess.

Who then is your master, my master? Is it our flesh and the sinfulness that lives in it, or are we surrendered to God and long to live righteous lives daily? Remember Jesus’ words about money or mammon, but they can be applied here as well, Matthew 6:24:

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

God bless you,

Pastor Sean Gooding

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca