Divine Revelation Of Gods Holiness And Judgement Order Printed Copy

Author: Michael Sambo
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About the Book

"Divine Revelation of God's Holiness and Judgment" by Michael Sambo provides insights into the holiness and judgment of God as revealed through various biblical passages and personal experiences. The book explores the importance of living a holy life and the consequences of sin, while also highlighting God's mercy and grace towards those who repent. Overall, it serves as a call to reflect on one's relationship with God and strive for righteousness.

Billy Graham

Billy Graham (born November 7, 1918, Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.—died February 21, 2018, Montreat, North Carolina), American evangelist whose large-scale preaching missions, known as crusades, and friendship with numerous U.S. presidents brought him to international prominence. Conversion and early career The son of a prosperous dairy farmer, Billy Graham grew up in rural North Carolina. In 1934, while attending a revival meeting led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham, he underwent a religious experience and professed his “decision for Christ.” In 1936 he left his father’s dairy farm to attend Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University), then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, but stayed for only a semester because of the extreme fundamentalism of the institution. He transferred to Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa, graduated in 1940, and was ordained a minister by the Southern Baptist Convention. Convinced that his education was deficient, however, Graham enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois. While at Wheaton, he met and married (1943) Ruth Bell, daughter of L. Nelson Bell, a missionary to China. By the time Graham graduated from Wheaton in 1943, he had developed the preaching style for which he would become famous—a simple, direct message of sin and salvation that he delivered energetically and without condescension. “Sincerity,” he observed many years later, “is the biggest part of selling anything, including the Christian plan of salvation.” After a brief and undistinguished stint as pastor of Western Springs Baptist Church in the western suburbs of Chicago, Graham decided to become an itinerant evangelist. He joined the staff of a new organization called Youth for Christ in 1945 and in 1947 served as president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Evangelism Graham’s emergence as an evangelist came at a propitious moment for 20th-century Protestants. Protestantism in the United States was deeply divided as a result of controversies in the 1920s between fundamentalism and modernism (a movement that applied scholarly methods of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Bible). The public image of fundamentalists was damaged by the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools in Tennessee; in his writings about the trial, the journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken successfully portrayed all fundamentalists as uneducated country bumpkins. In response to these controversies, most fundamentalists withdrew from the established Protestant denominations, which they regarded as hopelessly liberal, and retreated from the larger society, which they viewed as both corrupt and corrupting. Although Graham remained theologically conservative, he refused to be sectarian like other fundamentalists. Seeking to dissociate himself from the image of the stodgy fundamentalist preacher, he seized on the opportunity presented by new media technologies, especially radio and television, to spread the message of the gospel. In the late 1940s Graham’s fellow evangelist in Youth for Christ, Charles Templeton, challenged Graham to attend seminary with him so that both preachers could shore up their theological knowledge. Graham considered the possibility at length, but in 1949, while on a spiritual retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California, he decided to set aside his intellectual doubts about Christianity and simply “preach the gospel.” After his retreat, Graham began preaching in Los Angeles, where his crusade brought him national attention. He acquired this new fame in no small measure because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, impressed with the young evangelist’s preaching and anticommunist rhetoric, instructed his papers to “puff Graham.” The huge circus tent in which Graham preached, as well as his own self-promotion, lured thousands of curious visitors—including Hollywood movie stars and gangsters—to what the press dubbed the “canvas cathedral” at the corner of Washington and Hill streets. From Los Angeles, Graham undertook evangelistic crusades around the country and the world, eventually earning international renown. Despite his successes, Graham faced criticism from both liberals and conservatives. In New York City in 1954 he was received warmly by students at Union Theological Seminary, a bastion of liberal Protestantism; nevertheless, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union and one of the leading Protestant thinkers of the 20th century, had little patience for Graham’s simplistic preaching. On the other end of the theological spectrum, fundamentalists such as Bob Jones, Jr., Carl McIntire, and Jack Wyrtzen never forgave Graham for cooperating with the Ministerial Alliance, which included mainline Protestant clergy, in the planning and execution of Graham’s storied 16-week crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1957. Such cooperation, however, was part of Graham’s deliberate strategy to distance himself from the starchy conservatism and separatism of American fundamentalists. His entire career, in fact, was marked by an irenic spirit. Graham, by his own account, enjoyed close relationships with several American presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. (Although Graham met with Harry Truman in the Oval Office, the president was not impressed with him.) Despite claiming to be apolitical, Graham became politically close to Richard Nixon, whom he had befriended when Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president. During the 1960 presidential campaign, in which Nixon was the Republican nominee, Graham met in Montreaux, Switzerland, with Norman Vincent Peale and other Protestant leaders to devise a strategy to derail the campaign of John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, in order to secure Nixon’s election and prevent a Roman Catholic from becoming president. Although Graham later mended relations with Kennedy, Nixon remained his favourite politician; indeed, Graham all but endorsed Nixon’s reelection effort in 1972 against George McGovern. As Nixon’s presidency unraveled amid charges of criminal misconduct in the Watergate scandal, Graham reviewed transcripts of Oval Office tape recordings subpoenaed by Watergate investigators and professed to be physically sickened by his friend’s use of foul language. Legacy of Billy Graham Graham’s popular appeal was the result of his extraordinary charisma, his forceful preaching, and his simple, homespun message: anyone who repents of sins and accepts Jesus Christ will be saved. Behind that message, however, stood a sophisticated organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, incorporated in 1950, which performed extensive advance work in the form of favourable media coverage, cooperation with political leaders, and coordination with local churches and provided a follow-up program for new converts. The organization also distributed a radio program, Hour of Decision, a syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer,” and a magazine, Decision. Although Graham pioneered the use of television for religious purposes, he always shied away from the label “televangelist.” During the 1980s, when other television preachers were embroiled in sensational scandals, Graham remained above the fray, and throughout a career that spanned more than half a century few people questioned his integrity. In 1996 Graham and his wife received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States, and in 2001 he was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). Graham concluded his public career with a crusade in Queens, New York, in June 2005. Graham claimed to have preached in person to more people than anyone else in history, an assertion that few would challenge. His evangelical crusades around the world, his television appearances and radio broadcasts, his friendships with presidents, and his unofficial role as spokesman for America’s evangelicals made him one of the most recognized religious figures of the 20th century.

the great prize in christian dating - pursue clarity and postpone intimacy

I got lots of things wrong in dating, but as I think back over my mistakes and failures — dating too young, jumping from relationship to relationship, not being honest with myself or with others, failing to set or keep boundaries, not listening to friends and family, not prizing and pursuing purity — one error rises above the others, and in many ways explains the others: My dating relationships were mainly a pursuit of intimacy with a girlfriend, not clarity about whether to marry her. In my best moments, I was pursuing clarity through intimacy, but in a lot of other moments, if I’m honest, I just wanted intimacy at whatever cost. “The pursuit of marriage” was a warm and justifying pullover to wear over my conscience when things started to go too far physically and emotionally. But even clarity through intimacy misses the point and gets it backwards. I should have been pursuing clarity in dating, and then intimacy in marriage. That simple equation would have saved me and the girls I dated all kinds of grief, heartache, and regret. Your Last First Kiss Most of us date because we want intimacy. We want to feel close to someone. We want to be known deeply and loved deeply. We want sex. We want to share life with someone of the opposite sex who will be involved and invested in what we’re doing and what we care about. With the right heart, and in the right measure, and at the right time, these are all good desires. God made many of us to want these things, and therefore wants us to want these things — with the right heart, in the right measure, and at the right time. Think about your last first kiss in a relationship (if you’ve already kissed someone). Why did you do it? You knew you were risking something, that this wasn’t the safest way to give yourself to someone. What was driving you most in those brief moments before you let your lips touch? For me, every first kiss was driven more by my own desires than by God’s desires for me. Every first kiss until I kissed my wife for the first time, seconds after asking her to be my wife. Before Faye, I had let what I wanted outweigh what I knew God wanted, and what I knew was best for the girl I was dating. I craved intimacy, and I knew I would find it in marriage. So, I punched “marriage” into Google Maps, jumped on the highway, and ignored the speed limits. Instead of waiting to get to my destination to enjoy emotional and physical intimacy, I pulled over and bought something quicker and cheaper on the side of the road. Intimacy — romantic or otherwise — is a beautiful and precious gift God has given to his children. But like so many of God’s good gifts, because of our sin, intimacy can be dangerous. The human heart is wired to want intimacy, but it is also wired to corrupt intimacy — to demand intimacy in the wrong ways or at the wrong time, and to expect the wrong things from intimacy. That means intimacy between sinners is dangerous, because we’re prone, by nature, to hurt one another — to do what feels good, instead of caring for the other person; to promise too much too soon, instead of being patient and slow to speak; to put our hope, identity, and worth in one another, instead of in God. Intimacy makes us vulnerable, and sin makes us dangerous. The two together, without covenant promises, can be a formula for disaster in dating. Different Prizes in Marriage and Dating God is the greatest prize in life for any believer — at whatever age, in whatever stage of life, and whatever our relationship status. But is there a unique prize for the believer in marriage? Yes, it is Christ-centered emotional and sexual intimacy with another believer. Before God, within the covenant of marriage, two lives, two hearts, two bodies become one . A husband and wife experience everything in life as one new person. “Couple” doesn’t describe them well enough anymore. Yes, they’re each still themselves, but they’re too close now to ever be separated again (Mark 10:9). God has made them one. Their things are not their own. Their time is not their own. Even their bodies are not their own (1 Corinthians 7:4). They share all and enjoy all together now. Sex is the intense experience and picture of their new union, but it’s only a small slice of all the intimacy they enjoy together now. Safety for Intimacy The reason that kind of intimacy is the prize of marriage and not of our not-yet-married relationships is because that kind of intimacy is never safe anywhere outside of the lifelong covenant called marriage. Never . There are lots of contexts in which romantic intimacy feels safe outside of marriage, but it never is. There is too much at stake with our hearts, and too many risks involved, without a ring and public vows. Without promises before God, the further we walk into intimacy with another person, the further we expose ourselves to the possibility of being abandoned, betrayed, and crushed. In a Christ-centered marriage , those same risks do not exist. We are together — in sickness and health, in peace and conflict, in disappointment, tragedy, and even failure — until death do us part. When God unites us, death is the only thing strong enough to separate us. That means intimacy is a safe and appropriate experience in marriage . For sure, marriage is not perfectly safe. Married people are still sinners, capable of hurting one another, even to the point of abuse or divorce. But faithful married people are not leaving people. Just like God is not a leaving God. Dating’s Great Prize While the great prize in marriage is Christ-centered intimacy, the great prize in dating is Christ-centered clarity. Intimacy is safest in the context of marriage, and marriage is safest in the context of clarity. If we want to have and enjoy Christ-centered intimacy, we need to get married. And if we want to get married, we need to pursue clarity about whom to marry. We don’t pursue clarity by diving into intimacy. The right kind of clarity is a means to the right kind of intimacy, not the other way around. Careful, prayerful, thoughtful clarity will produce healthy, lasting, passionate intimacy. Any other road to intimacy will sabotage it, leaving it shallow, fragile, and unreliable. Much of the heartache and confusion we feel in dating stems from treating dating as practice for marriage (clarity through intimacy), instead of as discernment toward marriage (clarity now, intimacy later). In dating, we often experiment with intimacy until it basically feels like marriage, and then we get married. The risks may seem worth it (even necessary) because of how much we want to be married (or at least everything that comes with being married). But in reality, the risks are not worth it, and they’re certainly not necessary. God did not mean for us to risk so much in our pursuit of marriage. For sure, we always make ourselves vulnerable to some degree as we get to know someone and develop a relationship, but God wants us to enjoy the fullness of intimacy within a covenant, not in some science lab of love. In Christian dating, we’re not trying marriage on for size, but trying to find someone to marry. Questions We Ask Pursue clarity, and postpone intimacy. What does that look like practically? One test for whether you are pursuing clarity or intimacy is to study the questions we ask in dating. We ask different questions when we’re pursuing clarity more than intimacy. How far can we go? How late should we hang out? What kind of touching is allowed? Is he Christian enough for me to date him? Versus: Does he love Jesus more than he loves me? Does she follow through on her promises? Do I see him showing self-control, or compromising to get what he wants? Is she willing to lovingly tell me when I’m wrong? Healthy relationships may still need to ask questions in the first set, but they’ll be way down the list. When we’re after intimacy without clarity, we ask the first set and often overlook or minimize the second. But when we’re pursuing clarity, we’ll start asking new questions. Here are some examples of questions you could ask in your pursuit of clarity: What have you learned about each other lately — stories, habits, character traits? How have you each grown in your relationship with Jesus since you started dating? Are you both committed to abstaining from any form of sexual immorality? What flags, if any, have others raised about your relationship? What obstacles are keeping the two of you from getting married? Are you each being driven by your own desires, or by God’s desires for you? In what ways is your relationship different from non-Christian relationships? Questions like these — and countless more like them — uncover what we really want in dating, and where we’re likely to leave Jesus behind. They’re the bumpers that keep us out of the gutter, guarding us from impatience and impurity. But they’re also instruments of true love — the well-made parts that keep our car on the highway to marriage. They keep us focused on where we are headed and what really matters. They’re the agents of clarity.