Watchman Radio Hour

The Lord promises that the Jewish People will return to prepare for the Messiah. All was not lost. There was hope for the Jewish people. They would return to their own land. There they would await the coming of the Messiah.

Israel would return to their own land. Though now they were being taken into captivity to Babylon, a time would come when they would return. There is great hope here for Israel. God would not forsake his people. He had a plan and He would carry out that plan.

God has a plan for His people. Jeremiah 31:17 says, "So there is hope for your future....." (NIV) As we study Jeremiah 31, let us be comforted and encouraged about the future of God's people. Let us realize that God has a plan for His people and that He is carryuing out that plan in history.

We are all called to go up to Zion, to the Lord our God. The Lord calls us in the gospel to come to Him and be His people. Isaiah 2:2 says, "In the last days the mountain of the Lord's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it." (NIV) Today, the call is going out to the nations to come to Zion to come to the Lord God and know Him. That call goes out to you who are listening. Come to Zion. Come to the Lord your God.

We are living in an age where sexual immorality in all its forms pervades the nation. We are a sex crazed society it seems. There have been sex crazed societies before who went there on way and God made an example out of them to warn us today. Remember the example of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is a time to remember and take heed befoe it is too late. The axe lies at the root of the tree and is about to fall. Repent and turn back to the God of our fathers.

The Jewish nation paid a price for hindering the gospel in their day. Our nation if it continues to seek to repress Christians and Christianity will certainly pay a price. Yet our prayer is that such repression will stop and that the gospel will flourish in this land as it has in the past.

America is full of sin from the highest to the lowest. Only the powerful preaching of the Word of God will bring repentance to our land. It will be only when America fears God again that we will see a great change. When that happens, God's glory will be revealed in our land as the Psalmist says in Psalm 85:9 - "Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land." Will we ever see His glory in our land again as it was in the days of the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening in the 18th and 19th centuries? Only time will tell but we can pray that it will haoppen again.

We are called to live lives worthy of the Kingdom of God. So many Christians today give lip service to the Bible and yet do not live out its precepts and don't even know what its precepts are. We need to get back to the Bible in a serious way if we are to live lives worthy of the kingdom we have been called into. A lot of the compromising of Christians today stems from the fact that they just don't know what the Bible teaches about how they should live. Many live just like the rest of the world with little difference in their lifestyles. Yet Paul calls on all of us to live differently from the rest of the world because we are being called into the Kingdom of God. Today, we need a national repentance to take place beginning with Christians who hold to the name of Christ but do not live up to that name. Repentance needs to begin with the house of God in this nation and then spread outward to everyone else in the nation.

The Apostles shared the gospel through sacrificial service. Today, we can learn from them what sacrificial service is. We can learn how to identify with a people that we might reach them with the gospel. From their example, we can see the emptiness of the health and wealth gospel and how it makes selffish and materialistic Christians.

The modern gospel of give to get is a direct contradiction of the gentleness and compassion of the apostles toward those they came to reach. The apostles showed the gentleness of Christ in ministry. While the health and wealth preachers of today lord it over their flocks with prosperity messages and pressure to give to get, the apostles put on the role of servants and reached out to the people with love and compassion. We need the compassion of Christ and the love of Christ for people.