Does your faith need strengthening? Are you confused and wondering if Jesus Christ is really "The Way, the Truth, and the Life?" "Fight for Your Faith" is a blog filled with interesting and thought provoking articles to help you find the answers you are seeking. Jesus said, "Seek and ye shall find." In Jeremiah we read, "Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall seek for Me with all your heart." These articles and videos will help you in your search for the Truth.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Sharing the Faith

Words from Jesus, unless otherwise indicated


Audio length: 8:41
Download Audio (7.95MB)

What have you done today to save a soul? Have you asked yourself this question today? Have you done your part to save a soul today?—Not only in deed, but have you done your part through prayer and supplication?

*

You know the saying, ‘Four months between planting and harvest.’ But I say, wake up and look around. The fields are already ripe for harvest. The harvesters are paid good wages, and the fruit they harvest is people brought to eternal life. What joy awaits both the planter and the harvester alike!—John 4:35–361

*

Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are already white to harvest. The harvest is plenteous and the trees are laden with ripe fruit. But even now the fruit falls to the ground and perishes for want of those to harvest it. Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields. Be not secluded in your blessings, but let your heart be touched with the feelings of those without—those who don’t know the truth and who don’t know the Savior, those who are dying of starvation and who freeze in the cold for lack of the warmth of My Spirit and My love.

*

Have I not promised that they that understand among the people shall instruct many?2 Be faithful to give what you have received. Freely you have received, freely give.3 I will give you boldness and conviction that you may go forth to minister and to pour forth the Word of God that so many desperately seek.

*

The only cause that is big enough to satisfy the yearning of our hearts is the cause of Jesus Christ, and its flag is the blood-stained body that was lifted on the Cross of Calvary for the redemption of the world. This invitation to discipleship is the most thrilling cause we could ever imagine. Think of it: The God of the universe invites us to become His partners in reclaiming the world for Him! We can each have a part using the unique gifts and opportunities God has given us.—Billy Graham

*

I begin a work in the lives of those who don’t know Me years in advance. I work in their hearts and in their lives in order to prepare them, so that they may be in the right place, at the right time, in the right frame of mind, and in the right position of heart to receive My words of life.

It is also a matter of your prayers, for your prayers have influence. I do not force people to do things that they choose not to do, but through your prayers you enhance the power of the Spirit which speaks to their hearts.

This is an age of cynicism, an age of fear—but greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.4 I have given you great love to overcome this spirit that would envelop the world in coldness and darkness, for the love of many waxes cold, as I foretold ages ago by the prophets.5

As you pour out your prayers and your tears for those who have yet to be saved, I will cause the fires of faith to burn brightly and illuminate and warm the hearts of many.

*

That was the true Light, that lights every man that comes into the world.—John 1:96

*

I gave My life for you, for great was My love and compassion for you. I reached out to you in your time of need, when all seemed lost and there was great despair and life seemed meaningless and empty. I came to you and embraced you through the life of another who reached out with My love and the message of salvation which welled with great joy in his or her heart.

So I ask you to in turn reach out to the lost and the lonely, for they call unto Me in the darkness and in the cold. If you fail to reach out to those whom I place in your path, the opportunity of experiencing the joy, the freedom, the compassion, the understanding, the wisdom, and the great love that I have in store for them now can be missed or delayed.

Therefore stir yourself up and don’t become complacent! Proclaim the name and words of the Lord before the lost and the lonely. Go into the highways and byways and gather them to My bosom. There is great turmoil and confusion, and there is a great lack of love in the hearts of many in the world, and they yearn for answers, which they will only find in My salvation.

Give and it shall be given unto you. As you reach out to give to the needy in heart and spirit, I will anoint you with My power and strength. Your faith will grow and your joy will flow forth!

*

We are the Bibles the world is reading;
We are the creeds the world is needing:
We are the sermons the world is heeding.
—Billy Graham

*

I see the love in your heart for Me and for others. I see your desire to be a blessing and to serve Me with all of your heart, and I will bless you for that love and faithfulness.

You think that you don’t have much to give, but you have great treasures to give, much more than you understand. These treasures are from Me, and as you give them to others, as you scatter abroad, they will increase and I will be able to use you in even greater usefulness and fruitfulness, and will bring you greater joy and fulfillment in serving Me.

*

A missionary does not necessarily go outside of his country, his state or even his own community. A true missionary needs only to go outside himself.—Author unknown

*

God has given us two hands—one to receive with and the other to give with. We are not cisterns made for hoarding; we are channels made for sharing.—Billy Graham

*

I have called and chosen you for the calling that you now find yourself in. I have placed the desire in your heart to be a representative of My love to the lost and to those who do not yet know Me and who do not yet know of My love. You have willingly taken up the calling and have accepted My will for you, and in this I am well pleased.

Thank you for answering My call, for following the path where I lead you. You are My mouth to speak words of love, to be a channel of My love toward others; you are My hands to comfort and soothe the hearts that are broken and the hopes and dreams that are shattered; you are My feet to carry My message to those who have not yet heard of Me; you are My eyes that weep tears of joy for each soul that finds Me. What a high privilege you have been called to—as My representative. Great is your reward.

Originally published 1997. Updated and republished August 2013.
Read by Jerry Paladino. Music by Michael Dooley.


1 NLT.

2 Daniel 11:33.

3 Matthew 10:8.

4 1 John 4:4.

5 Matthew 24:12.

6 NKJV.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Letter to a dear friend like you!

Dear Friend,

Thank you for your message. We are hoping the best for you. Moving is like dying. It's the ending of one life and the beginning of another, but normally it helps us to grow as we broaden our horizons and move out of our comfort zone to face new challenges and in the end find new strengths. The Bible tells us to "look unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith." In moments like these as we open our lives to Him, we can rest in His arms knowing that He is in control and He will lead and guide us down the path He wants us to follow.

I had wanted to talk to you more deeply about this point at the meeting I attended with you, but was unable at the time. In my own personal life, it wasn't until I asked Jesus into my heart that I found that everlasting peace that I was looking for. I was a young university graduate facing the prospect of the Vietnam War and desperately seeking for answers to the many questions I had about life. The FBI was looking for me as I had not attended the required pre-military examinations and later induction. It often takes desperate situations that cause us to call out to God for His help. I had been reluctant to do that because I thought God was something to do with the religious system which I wanted nothing to do with. I thought believing in God would be taking a step backwards as I had been freed from the crutches of religiosity through my college education.

But when my mother called me on the phone telling me the FBI was looking to arrest me, I prayed crying out with tears that if there was a God could He please help me. When I got up off my knees, I thought, "that was stupid, there is no God, what's happening to me?" I had seen the falseness of religion and had seen what so-called religious people do. America was the epitome of religious hypocrisy with its wars and selfishness and greed. You see, I was having a hard time differentiating the religious system from God Himself. The Bible says God is love and that God is a spirit. So God is that loving invisible spiritual being who created and made the universe contrary to the Theory of Evolution.

It was a few weeks later that I met two your people who were hitch-hiking that led me in a little prayer. "Jesus, come into my heart. Forgive me for the things that I had done wrong. Give me the gift of eternal life. In Jesus' name I pray." I didn't hear the thunderclap or see stars or hear music of feel ecstasy. But I knew I had found what I was looking for. I also prayed to receive the Holy Spirit. My new friends explained to me that the Holy Spirit was a gift God had given to help lead and guide and strengthen His people. If I wanted to follow God then asking for the Holy Spirit would help me. And so I did. I prayed for an infilling of the Holy Spirit and that God would lead me into all truth.

These young people were travelling to a three month discipleship course, and so I decided to drive them to there destination. Tuition was free but all needed to participate in the running of the school. I was allocated a job in the school's cafeteria as breakfast overseer/ dishes overseer organizing the dish and kitchen clean-up crews for each meal of around 200 students plus staff. I dug into the Bible and eagerly attended all classes. I was especially interested in Bible prophecy and the classes on Daniel chapter 2 and Matthew chapter 24 which talked about the "last days." Hadn't I felt that the world was headed for its "last days?" I fell in love with Jesus and His word and spent all my free-time reading the New Testament, even memorizing important passages, or passages that spoke to me or gave me strength.

After the three month course, I received my certificate for the Ministry of Evangelization and was offered a position in a new youth center. I decided to dedicate my life to God and to helping others. Most importantly I decided to dedicate my life to sharing my God experience with others that they too might come in contact with the One who created all things, Jesus.

That's why I am sharing this e-mail with you, Dear Friend, in hope that you too will say that little prayer, if you haven't already, to let Jesus into your heart and life, that you will ask Him to fill you with the Holy Spirit to lead and guide you into all truth, that you will begin to have a personal relationship with Him by starting to read His words many of which are found in the New Testament. The famous social critic and writer Charles Dickens said that the New Testament was the best book that ever will be written. If you haven't read it recently, please pick up a copy and read it. Pay close attention to the words of Jesus. His word is food for your soul. He loves you and wants to be your closest friend and companion. He will never leave you nor forsake you and will help you through every difficult moment that you will experience in this life on into the next. It's just that simple and He’s just that wonderful. If you are interested in more reading material outside the New Testament, let me know. Praying that your new experience will be rewarding and will bring you to the place He wants you to be.

Much love,  Dennis

Discipleship for Life

By Peter Amsterdam

Audio length: 14:33
Download Audio (13.3MB)

Discipleship isn’t easy. It never has been. Jesus made that clear from the beginning when He said: “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple. Jesus saith unto His disciples, if any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed. By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.”1

None of that is easy, but that’s discipleship as Jesus described it.

In a way, discipleship is like playing sports professionally. Lots of people, for example, play basketball. Some just shoot hoops once in a while, others play with their friends or in pickup games, others are in amateur leagues, and a few—very few—are professionals. They’re all basketball players, but they aren’t all professionals. What’s the difference? For the vast majority of people who play basketball, it’s just play and exercise, something they do in their spare or free time. For the professional athlete, their sport of choice is what they live for.

To be a pro you have to give your sport everything. Your workday is taken up with training, practicing, playing, or traveling to games. In the off-season you continue to train, body-build, run, and keep in shape. You don’t smoke, overdrink, or abuse your body, because if you do, it affects your ability to play. You have to be away from your loved ones when you travel to other places to play. You play for a team. You wear a uniform. There are functions you’re required to attend. You’re expected to keep yourself in shape and work hard to improve your skill, and if you don’t, then the coaches get on your case and make you work out. If you constantly cause trouble on the team or your performance is consistently poor, you’re usually dropped or traded to another team. If you break the rules, you’re fined, suspended, or fired.

So why do the professional athletes do it? Only for the fame and/or the money? I believe they do it because they love the game. There are other rewards and benefits—such as the fame and money—but I believe most of them play because they love to. They’re willing to put up with a regimented lifestyle, the rigors of training, and the sacrifice of not being able to do some things that others can do, because they love the game.

Why would anyone choose to be a disciple? Why put up with all that’s expected of a disciple? Why make the sacrifices discipleship demands? Because we love the Lord. Our love for Him causes us to live the discipleship life, and that’s not easy. We’re not just casual Christians; we’re disciples for life.

For many of us, Christian service is our profession. It’s what we do. It’s what we live for. As a pro, we have to keep ourselves in shape, grow in skill, and submit to our Coach, just like a professional athlete.

The fact is, there are a lot of requirements involved in being a professional Christian. A lot is expected of you. It’s often difficult, it’s sacrificial, but it’s what it takes to be a disciple, and that’s not going to change. Not only has that been the foundation of the Family from the beginning, but it’s right there in Jesus’ own words in the Bible.

As a disciple, we have to realize that there are some things that simply aren’t good for our spirit. We might like to do those things, we might even want to do them, but because we’re Christians and disciples, doers of the Word, then we should choose not to do things that are bad for us.2

None of us are perfect; we all have faults and commit sins. Every one of us have things we like to do which aren’t good for us, which don’t help us in our service to the Lord. The question each of us is faced with is what do we do about those things. If we know that those things don’t edify us, if they dull us spiritually, if they hurt us physically, if they’re not a positive force in our lives, if the Word tells us those things are not good for us, then we have to make a choice. Do we go ahead and do them anyway, or do we try not to do them?

As disciples, we should commit to not doing those things. Trying to live according to the discipleship code Jesus mapped out in His Word sometimes means not being able to do some things that we would like to. That’s part of discipleship.

Inflexibility has its place when it comes to certain absolutes. For example, eternal salvation. That is an absolute. But not everything is an absolute. Part of the problem is that it’s easier to be rigid, to keep things black and white, with no shades of gray in between. If you go the black-and-white route, it’s easy to judge situations; it’s easy to say what is right and what is wrong. The problem is, many things in life are not that simple. Usually there’s lots of gray in almost any situation, and it takes wisdom, prayer, and counsel to make the proper judgment. It also takes more time and more work, because you have to stop, assess the situation or the question, and pray, counsel, and hear from the Lord. This is necessary to make good, well-rounded decisions, and it’s not easy.

I know of people who’ve gotten hooked on certain websites and online activities, and have spent an inordinate amount of time at these sites. They’ve stayed up until the wee hours of the morning playing computer games, viewing porn sites, or wasting time on meaningless surfing. They’ve done it night after night, even though it meant they could hardly function throughout the day because they were so tired. Yet the next night they were back at it, getting high off the Internet again.

The Internet itself isn’t the problem; it’s the misuse of it that causes problems. It’s the time wasting, the negative input, the addiction, the unedifying sites that are wrong. It’s detrimental when it draws you away from being a disciple, from caring for others, from keeping a close relationship with the Lord, by either taking large amounts of your time or by filling you with things of the world. Of course, the Internet can be useful and entertaining, and it isn’t all negative. But it can be spiritually unhealthy if you’re spending too much time at it or if you’re visiting sites that aren’t good for you.

Everyone makes mistakes, everyone sins, everyone does wrong or stupid things once in a while, because we’re human. We’re not trying to achieve personal perfection and we shouldn’t expect such from others either. If we do, it places unrealistic burdens on ourselves and others.

On the other hand, we are a faith, a religion, a mission-based movement. We’re a band of disciples who are here to do a job, and to do that job you have to commit to staying in good spiritual shape. If you want total freedom to do what you want, whenever you want, as much as you want, then Christian discipleship may not be for you. If total freedom is your goal in life, then you should realize that there are spiritual requirements for disciples; there are things the Lord expects of us, which we need to live up to as Christians.

To change that and to throw the rules away, we’d have to drop the Bible. We’d have to get rid of verses in the Bible like, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world” or “Be ye separate and touch not the unclean thing” or “whosoever is the friend of the world is the enemy of God.”3

In today’s world that promotes personal freedoms, some feel that Christian faith and religion should allow people to do pretty much whatever they want to, that there should be no restrictions, and that even if something is spiritually or physically bad for them, they should be able to discern whether it works for them or not, as in “according to your faith be it unto you.”4

From the Bible that I’ve read, God seems to think that people need some rules and guidelines to live by. He’s put a number of them in the Bible. I think He knows that if there were no rules or guidelines to keep us in line, we’d stray pretty far from Him.

Jesus lived on earth. He was a man and He experienced the same feelings we do.5 And maybe that’s why He’s led His believers throughout all time to follow Him closely, because He knows how tempting and deceiving the things of the world can be. He said to His disciples, “You are in the world but not of the world.”6 Obviously He wanted His disciples to not be of the world. ”I have chosen you out of the world.”7

As a religion, we believe in “choosing the good and eschewing the evil.”8 We want to take things that are good and use them in a responsible manner. But some of those things, if misused, are no longer good and can be evil or damaging, either to ourselves or others.

As disciples, we are called to minimize ungodly influences in our lives, because ungodly things aren’t good for us spiritually. As disciples we should do our best to stay within the boundaries the Lord has set. We should have conviction to do the things the Lord is asking of us. However, no one is perfect, and there are times when we all slip. But if we’re constantly disobeying, if we’re going out of our way to disregard spiritual boundaries, or if some activity actually has a hold on us or we’re addicted to it and refuse to stop, that becomes a problem and a detriment to our spiritual lives.

Man is born in sin, and sin—doing wrong things—is part and parcel of human nature. Everyone sins; everyone does things that are wrong, even Christians, even disciples. The beauty of it is that we have forgiveness through Jesus. When we do those wrong things, when we sin, our sin can be blotted out by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. That’s a wonderful thing. But that forgiveness does not mean that we shouldn’t make the effort not to sin. It doesn’t give us license to do whatever we want, whenever we want to, whether it’s good for us or not. That doesn’t mean that we can deliberately, knowingly, and willfully make wrong choices.9

As a religion, a faith, we have rights, responsibilities, and rules. That’s part of our responsibility as disciples.

The Lord does want us to have fun. He does want us to enjoy ourselves and to have times of relaxation, but that’s not our calling, that’s not what we have committed ourselves to. We’re disciples. We’re Christians who take our commitments to God seriously. We’ve committed to reaching the world with His message, to living His Word, to being a living example of Christian discipleship, to loving Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, body, and strength. That’s what being a disciple is all about.

Like thousands and thousands of other Christians the world over, I’m committed to discipleship. That’s what I do, that’s what I am, that’s what I live for, that’s what I’ll die for. If tomorrow the Lord sends me to a place where there are no videos, no Internet, no music, no pleasures of this life, then I’ll still serve Him, because I love Him and because that’s what I’m committed to.

Discipleship requires a high standard in spirit and behavior. As a disciple, sometimes you have to carry on when everything and everyone seems to be against you, when you feel so down you don’t see how you can last one more minute.

Discipleship is not an easy lifestyle. It’s extremely rewarding, but at times extremely difficult. Even in Jesus’ day, when the going got tough and the message got strong, “many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him.”10 When Jesus asked the 12 if they’d go too, Peter answered succinctly, with a powerful message as to why we are disciples, why we serve God every day: “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that Thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.”11

That’s what we believe, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that He has called us to serve Him as disciples at whatever price He asks. That’s the commitment, that’s the job, that’s the profession. And we’re proud to do it because Jesus, who is our King, Savior, best friend, and husband, has asked it of us.

Originally published April 2002. Updated and republished August 2013.
Read by Simon Peterson.


1 Luke 14:26,33; Matthew 16:24–25; John 8:31, 13:35.

2 James 1:22.

3 1 John 2:15; 2 Corinthians 6:17; James 4:4.

4 Matthew 9:29.

5 Hebrews 4:15.

6 John 17:14–18.

7 John 15:19.

8 1 Peter 3:11.

9 Romans 14:13–22.

10 John 6:66.

11 John 6:68–69.

Copyright © Fight for Your Faith