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The Holy Spirit yearns to bring God's people back to serving the Lord with joy and gladness. How grieved heaven must be to witness the wet blanket of despair and sadness that has fallen upon multitudes of believers. The Word of God commands:

"Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands…serve the Lord with gladness…" (Psalm 100:1–2).

"The hope of the righteous shall be gladness…" (Proverbs 10:28)

"Let the righteous be glad; let them rejoice before God; yea, let them exceedingly rejoice…"(Psalm 68:3).

There is a fiery message burning in my bones. It is a message every Christian needs to hear, especially in this age of overpowering temptations and excruciating hurt.

The message I bring to you from the Lord is simply this: God has not forgotten you! He knows exactly where you are, what you are going through right now, and He is monitoring every step along your path. But we are just like the children of Israel who doubted God's daily care for them, even though prophets were sent to deliver wonderful promises from Heaven.

In America I see great churches full of godly, loving people. I rejoice that the Lord has blessed his people here incredibly. In many congregations, the presence of Jesus is awesome—the worship is glorious and the altars are regularly filled with hungry, repentant people. But American Christians have to come to grips with something. If we continue only to drink in blessings and neglect to give them out, we’ll face what happened to the church in Jerusalem.

How God Makes Us into Who He Sees Us to Be

God has promised his people a glorious, incomprehensible rest, a peace and security for the soul.

I grew up in New York, but when I was in high school my family moved to east Texas. During my first year there I wasn’t known as Gary but as “Yankee.” The longer I kept my New York accent, the more puzzled looks I got, along with a question: “What did you just say?”

I’ve written before about my reputation for always preaching on grace. I’ve actually toyed with publishing a book titled Confessions of an Extreme Gracist. Not an appropriate title, maybe, but it’s a tag I wear proudly anyway.

The church today lives in a time of great light. With so much teaching available to us, the Holy Ghost has revealed to us the incredible blessings of Jesus' work on the cross.

Yet there was a time when Christ's wonderful work was obscured from the world. That period was the Dark Ages, when the meaning of the cross was veiled from humanity's eyes.

Behold, now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2, my italics).

This message is meant for all who have backslidden from the Lord. Backsliding is a biblical term that means “falling away, turning away, apostasy.” According to the apostle Paul, who wrote the verse above, “Today is the day of mercy and grace.” In other words: If you ever plan to believe, that time is now.

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?… Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which has drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out….