USA – Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christian, October 5, 2025

  “A most ignoble example of giving is found in the Gospels, where ten lepers came to Jesus and were healed of their leprosy. They did receive healing and they were delivered. The old spots went away, the old sores disappeared, the old symptoms were gone.   There were ten healthy men, and with this new gift of health they all started away. Nine of them kept right on going, satisfied with the gift of health. But the tenth one happened to remember that he had received a gift from the giver, and his eyes went from the gift to the giver, and he came back humbly and thanked the Lord Jesus.   And Christ said, sadly, where are the nine? The others were satisfied with the gift, but one came back to get better acquainted with the giver. It was Campbell Morgan who said, We ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men peace. We ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men repose from their conscience.   We ought never to offer them anything short of life. And I repeat that we should never divorce any gift we offer to men. We never should divorce it from the giver.   We should hold it for the giver, as we sing. So that he did not say, Ye have tasted the grace of God, though they had. But he said, You have tasted that the Lord is gracious, and that is quite something else again.   Our selfish praying when we come to God with a long grocery list and petition God to do this and do this and do this and do this, and if God answers our prayers, then we cross it off and go on down to the next list, and so on we go. It seems to me that it is very saddening to the heart of God to be thus used as a convenience. It seems to me that the Lord Jesus must be very heavy hearted at times when he finds his redeemed people more taken up with the redemption than they are with the redeemer.” A. W. Tozer

   Many Christians are "waiting" for the promise that God has given to them. Abram was given a new name, Abraham, and a promise of a child but he never saw the fulfillment of the promise until he kept the "covenant" that God gave him. He was told that he was to be circumcised. After the circumcision came the fulfillment of the promise. Circumcision is the removal of anything in your life that is not reproductive. Unfortunately, many people want the promise without the circumcision. Jesus doesn't care what you "give", He is concerned about what you "keep". He can't put something new in your heart, until you are willing to let go of what is in your hand.   We are slaves to our own self-centeredness. The reason we don’t have the time, money and energy to do what God wants us to do is because we are using it to do what we want to do. We love us and now that we know that God loves us too, we demand twice as much for ourselves. Death is the only way out. We must choose.