To mark the 90th birthday of long-time preacher, Dr. John Douglas, at SGAT meetings in which what the BIBLE teaches regarding the end-time prophecies is set forth, being transcripts of messages preached at a week of meetings in Newtownabbey Free Presbyterian Church:
Copies may be obtained from the Secretary of SGAT, Mr Stephen Toms,
1 Donald Way, Chelmsford, Essex, ENGLAND, CM29JB.
The enemies of Israel should bear in mind the divinely inspired prayer which will, without a shadow of a doubt, be answered wonderfully by Heaven in God’s appointed time.
“Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion.
”Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore it groweth up:
“wherewith the mower filleth not his hand; nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom,” Psalm 129:5-7.
“Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins,” Isaiah 58:1.
TO SHEW GOD’S PEOPLE THEIR TRANSGRESSIONS IS A VITAL PART OF THE FAITHFUL MINISTER’S DUTIES!
1. Here is the supreme directive to preachers. It overrules all attempts to suppress the exposure of sin amongst God’s People, be those attempts made by councils, parliaments, presbyteries, synods or any other body that thinks that they can overrule the only King and Head of the Church, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul said to Timothy: “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables,” 2 Timothy 4:1-4.
There are few, if indeed any, Free Presbyterian ministers have been ordained without these words being read to them!
God is on the side of any who, like Elijah of old, “have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts,” and that because, “the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant,” 1 Kings 19:10.
This command was given to Isaiah, and divinely recorded for it is a directive for ALL servants of God who find themselves in the circumstances in which Isaiah found himself.
The day in which Isaiah ministered is described for us from the very beginning of his book.
“The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the LORD hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider. Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward. Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah,” Isaiah 1:1-9.
Any who cannot see the parallel to the situation here in Ulster and much further abroad, is suffering from a stupidity that exceeds the mentality of the donkey and bovine stupidity, to quote the Lord as he rebukes those He was angry with back some 2800 years ago!! Click to read more…
Shane MacGowan — showing every evidence of his profligate lifestyle!
Here is a most distressing example of the blind folly that grips many regarding what is a true Christian and the requirements of God for entrance to heaven.
I was grieved at the report of the death of a notorious ‘singer’ and the most awful and empty hope entertained by his family as to where he will be throughout eternity. Th person in question is Shane MacGowan, someone I really knew nothing of until his death.
MacGowan was a Roman Catholic, calling himself ‘a free-thinking religious fanatic’ who also prayed to the Buddha. As an adolescent, he considered the priesthood.
Having grown up in an Irish republican family, MacGowan said in 2015 that he regretted not joining the IRA. In a filmed interview he said, ‘I was ashamed I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA . . .’
MacGowan began drinking alcohol at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep. His father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. He suffered physically from years of binge drinking. He often performed onstage and gave interviews while drunk. In 2004, on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week, he gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland.
With a ‘religious and chaotic pedigree’ as this and given his widely publicised ‘hell-raising’ lifestyle, his foul mouth, his prolific consumption of alcohol, it is illustrative of the dreadful ignorance of God’s truth that dominates the mind of the Irish Roman Catholic, that his wife is widely reported as saying after he died: ‘I don’t know how to say this so I am just going to say it. Shane… has gone to be with Jesus and Mary and his beautiful mother Therese.’
The notion that a life of blatant degeneracy can be instantly followed by an entrance into the presence of ‘Jesus of Nazareth . . . . the Holy One of God,’ (Mark 1:24); the very One whose name was repeatedly used in a most blasphemous manner, is utterly repulsive to a God-fearing, Bible-believer.
How evil is the system that promotes such a perverted notion of what the religion of Jesus Christ entails! That religion blights, among other places, the island of Ireland!
This is our second study in response to a request from one of our readers to set down the Bible’s teaching on HOLINESS.
I was requested if I “would consider outlining in a series of email teachings, what it means to live a separated and holy life and what that looks like for the Christian in this day and age?”
This is the second part of my answer. Let me quote again the Shorter Catechism’s definition of Sanctification or HOLINESS.
“Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”
Our second study will concentrate upon the truth:
SANCTIFICATION IS THE OUTWORKING OF GOD’S FREE GRACE
This takes us a little further than our first study.
1. All that the Lord does for us is something we do not deserve but is of God’s free, unmerited favour. We so often forget this simple truth. That is because ‘self-esteem’ is deeply embedded within us. We were very much opposed to accepting this truth before our regeneration and that reluctance remains within us as part of our ‘old nature’. We have a new nature now of which Peter said: “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust,” 2 Peter 1:4. We have been made partakers of God’s holiness.
We now have two natures, the ‘old’ which is sinful and the ‘new’ which is holy. They are at war with each other. “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would,” Galatians 5:17. Of this inward, ongoing struggle Paul said of his resulting quandary: “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do,” Romans 7:18-19.
We can surely find some comfort in the fact that Paul also struggled to resist the tendency to sin that sprang from his old nature. Click to read more…
“But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not,” 2 Peter 2:1-3.
He who “is a liar, and the father of it”, the devil, has always had his lackeys at work in this world, especially mingling amongst the people of God, passing themselves off as servants of the Lord. Peter here tells us that the devil’s pattern of activity as seen in Old Testament times will continue in this New Testament era. Indeed, as Paul and many other of the prophets inform us, his activities will increase as this age draws to a close. “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils,” 1 Timothy 4:1.
His increased activity will be driven by his knowing “that he hath but a short time,” Revelation 12:12.
I think that we can have no doubt that in recent years we have witnessed this acceleration of Satanic action. Today, the world is awash with falsehoods of every form. When you think that you have just about heard every absurdity, along comes something even more outrageous!
Lies and deceits abound in every sphere of human activity.
There are scientific falsehoods and deceits. Chief amongst them is the ’Theory of Evolution’, which is presented by its disciples, not as a mere notion, but as FACT. School books, lecture halls, television nature programmes all echo to this self-contradicting folly!
There are medical falsehoods. Increasingly chief amongst them is the notion that man is moving toward the defeat of death and the beginning of physical longevity and a man-made Utopia.
There are historical lies, a perverting of the true record of past events. Chief amongst those lies are the denials of the divine creation of all things, of the accuracy of the Bible’s account of the life, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and, more recent denials, the wonderful mercy of God toward mankind in His intervention in the times of the 16th century Protestant Reformation.
But above all, there are THEOLOGICAL FALSEHOODS.
This has always been the chief end of the devil. He would blind mankind to its true state of sinfulness and the terrible fate which awaits those who die in that state and the TRUTH OF GOD, set forth in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, whereby God’s remedy for man’s sinfulness is declared. “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them,” 2 Corinthians 4:4. Click to read more…