From the Heart by B.Demaere

 1)  Goodness is Action Goodness is the action behind kindness.   Kindness is passive, but goodness is active showing itself through acts of love toward people and meeting their needs.   The goodness of God was put into effect when he sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world.   Because he is God meant that sending his son into the world was a sacrifice for you and me.   He left his home where he was with His Father and came to earth where he was initially rejected through the Crucifixion.   Mind you he was resurrected, but he came back to life for you and me.   That was God’s kindness in action. 2) Goodness promotes Growth Look! In 2 Peter 1:5-6 “For this very reason, applying your diligence [to the divine promises], make every effort in [exercising] your faith to develop moral excellence, and in moral excellence, knowledge (insight, understanding), and in your knowledge, self-control… Note that in the Amplified translation of the Bible in use the words “Moral excellence” for g

For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen.  These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth.  And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that god made with hands are not gods.  And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing…. (Acts 19:24-27) The goddess Artemis was a Greek goddess of wild animals, the hunt, and vegetation.   Yet one silversmith in Ephesus was becoming wealthy as well as providing jobs for others in the community.   Because of such profit it is very understandable that the whole town became upset at Paul’s preaching about a God that could replace all of their gods.   We hold on to worthless things in our

The world is seeking for answers about life and death and about the end.   How will it all end?  Well, I am not an expert in prophesies but as I was seeking the Lord for his help he put on my heart the book of Daniel, one of the prophets of the Old Testament.    Daniel was used by God because he let himself be used by Him just as it is possible for us to follow Jesus today.   Jesus is our example.   He became a channel for God’s glory to work through and we know a lot from Daniel because of his exploits such as him in the lion’s den and his refusal to bow his knee to the false gods. That is what we should be as well and consequently God poured a lot of knowledge in Daniel about the end-times.   He will also do this with us as we follow Jesus.   Daniel 12:1-3 “At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people.  And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time.  But at that time your people shall be

I have come to appreciate what the 89 th Psalm proclaims: In the second verse it says: “Your faithfulness is as enduring as the heavens” (NLT) But in my French Bible it says something like…” Your faithfulness is anchored in the sky” (Francais courant) As I read the rest of the psalm, I understand why he speak of the faithfulness of God with so much respect.   The rest of the psalm speaks of the covenant God has made with David and it will never be broken.   In fact, one of his descendants will have an eternal kingdom and now we understand that this descendant is none other than Jesus, the Messiah himself.   Because in verse 26-27 it says: “And he will say to me, ‘You are my Father, my God and the Rock of my salvation.’ I will make him my firstborn son, the mightiest king on earth. Jesus, who is not who, was, is that mightiest king and he is coming back to establish his Kingdom forever because he is not just faithful to David but to all the seed of the promise to Jesus and his

“Pilate said to him (Jesus) What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, I find in him no fault at all.” (John 18:38) That is the Question Pilate had asked that question about 2000 years ago without it seems really wanting an answer.   Since then, the world has had its own idea and philosophy of what the truth should be.   Many people today have their own personal view of what is truth.   No one really is teachable and ask question about it.   We just stubbornly make up our own truth to avoid it altogether.   If Pilate had been teachable, he would have known the truth because the truth was with him right there at the front of him.   Pilate represents what a lot of people are like today.   The Truth is right with them and in the front of them and yet they still ignore.   Nevertheless, there is a price for that, and it is costly.   There is not much time left for you to know the truth.   You are better finding it soon. The Truth is Personal “Jesus sa

And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion.  And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him.  And they began to salute him, “Hail, King of the Jews!”  And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him.  And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of his purple cloak and put his own clothes on him.  And they led him out to crucify him. (Mark 15:16-20) Introduction In these verses, the author Mark offers the most details about the way Jesus, an innocent man who is the Son of God suffered humiliation.   The world has not changed much in over 2000 years.   Nothing to be proud of course.   We are still condemning innocent men and women and setting criminals free.   There is total disregard for justice.   All I can say is: “God help us to be on the right side of God.” No historical records Y

  Immanuel There you have it, the simple message of the Gospel in the baby Jesus.  The promised Messiah, the Son of God.  The prophets foretold his birth some 600 years prior it happened. “Behold the virgin shall be with child and give birth to a Son, and they shall call his name Immanuel”--- which, when translated, means, “God with us"   (Matthew 1:23) Now this might seem obvious that any god could be with us.   But this Almighty God is living and almighty. Have you heard the story in the Bible in 1 King 18:26-29 where the prophet Elijah along with the prophets of Baal called on their false gods to get some attention from them but obviously since they were not real, they never responded. (verse 27)   At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry out with a loud voice, for he is a god, either he is occupied, or he is out or he is on a journey.   Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened….   In the end, the living God is the only One who responded by fire and burned the sa

  What’s your Silver?   Is it of a good quality?   If you were the silver would God want you? “They are the worst kind of rebel, Full of slander. They are as hard as bronze and iron, And they lead others into corruption. The bellows fiercely fan the flames to burn out the corruption. But it does not purify them, For the wickedness remains. I will label them ‘Rejected Silver,’ For I, the Lord, am discarding them.”(Jeremiah 6:28-30)   Let us be honest with God.   Are we as good as we claim to be, or do we put lots of makeup on our brokenness? God looks at us like an appraiser of metals.   He wants quality in his silver.   He wants to see his reflection. He wants to see Jesus in us.   We are his showpiece to the world, let’s not have too high an opinion of ourselves. What’s your silver? Too many impurities?   Too many foreign metals in it?   No, not good enough!   God wants the purest kind of silver, nice and supple. Jesus said that he is coming soon and that

  Times might be a bit tougher in our world, but I want to encourage you with this verse in 2 Timothy 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Here Paul is giving us a message, a teaching.  He is giving us a vision, a goal. What if I put that verse in a goal mode starting with: My life-goal is to fight the good fight It is to finish the race, and to keep the faith. The good fight is fought by faith The race is being run by faith and through it all we keep the faith. Well, how do we keep our eyes on the goal.  We just keep our eyes on Jesus!(Hebrews 12:2) who is the Author and Finisher of our faith. Note to you all: I will take a bit of rest from this blog for the month of October and hopefully blog again in early November for you all. I appreciate you all and hope you will all be back in November. God bless you all and he loves you. Your friend Bernard

  Plug into Love At first, when I thought of plugging in John 15:4 that speaks about “abiding in Jesus”.   The Holy Spirit turned my thoughts to Love in 1 John 4:16-18. We have known and have believed the love God has for us.   God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remain in them.   This is how love has been perfected in us, so that we can have confidence on the Judgment Day, because we are exactly the same as God is in this world.   There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment.   The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. Usually, unfortunately we interpret this verse on Love vs Fear as meaning to “not to be afraid of anything”, but as I thought more about these verses, I realized it might mean something entirely different such as our distancing from projects of services around the house or around our community or even church.   Is it not interesting that fear in the context of being hesitant

  Don’t be so hard on yourself. Don’t be so hard on yourself.  I used to hear that often in my downcast state of depression.  Maybe people who are often depressed are too hard on themselves.  There seems to be a commonality. Have you heard that also? Maybe too often? What it meant in my life was that I would be anxious about what my accomplishment be or be worried about other people’s opinion were.   Beat myself regularly because of my past mistakes. Look at me, my past still matters to me more than my present.   Consequently, living in the past was poor thought management because while our children were growing up, I forgot some of the history.   I was editing out the filming of my own life.   So, living in the past cheats you out of quality of your life.   I recommend living in the present and looking forward to the future.   Living in the past can leave the person filled with regrets.   My comfort is in God, and I can trust him that he will use my own troubles and use them

  Moment of Truth (Luke 23:38-43)   Many times, while Jesus was condemned, he was challenged on his ability to save himself if he was…the king or the Messiah (v.38,39) Because of ignorance, many did not know the purpose of Jesus was to save the world, namely you and me.   He came as the Saviour of the world, and he was not going to deviated from that mission.   Now that he was on that Cross with some criminal, he had to die to fulfill that mission to completion.   This was nothing more than a temptation from Satan to stop him short of his goal.   Do you find that Satan tries that one on you too stopping you short of your goal sometime? You see, you are not alone in your temptations, the whole world and especially Jesus had to go through them as well. The one criminal who was crucified with Jesus did not fear God or respected him at all.   He was the one who challenged Jesus to save himself if he was the Messiah. But the other criminal acknowledged Jesus’s innocence and was sa

  Jesus being the Son of God had never experienced death before that the time of the crucifixion at Calvary.  He had never experienced suffering at this level.  He became acquainted with it as it says in Isaiah 53:3. This whole chapter talks about him in the future.  For death as well it was a new encounter.  What a surprise it would have been when life gushed out of the tomb on the third day.  Death had never seen such an adversary like Jesus.  Death was beaten and defeated.  At the Cross, death thought it had won but at the Resurrection it was defeated for sure.  What a victory over anything that claimed to be associated with death like sin, sickness, and infirmities. Now in this world of enmities and injustice, it looks like death is still victorious but not so fast.   God has reserved a time for Justice to take place and he will indeed have to last word.   In the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ and at the end of your Bible he has already written the last chapters.   The

I rose out of my struggle and started singing this song that you all might know:   Jesus loves me, This I know, For the Bible tells me so Little ones to him belong, They are weak but he is strong.   If you are a songwriter or music teacher, I apologize for the way it is written.   I realized then as I was singing it repeatedly that this song is full of theology and inspiration.   In ‘Jesus loves me’ alone.   There is a Bible verse that pops to mind.     John 3:16 that says: “For God so loved the world that he gave his Only beloved Son                           that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.   It is obvious then that the rest of the Bible shows us that Jesus loves us.   This little song took me out of my despair and brought me back to reality which is to know that God loves me, and life is a lot easier with him than without him. I don’t know what you struggle with, but I want to let you know ‘Jesus loves you’.   Next it also says that ‘little ones

  This morning, I did not know where my inspiration would come from but then this day began to unravel.  I always start my day by reading my Bible in French.  I read out of Luke 9:23 which begins:   “If someone wants to come with me, he needs to stop thinking about himself, he must take his cross daily and follow me. ( transliterated from the French Bible ) The Grossest thing ever Now use your grey matter and think of the grossest thing you ever did for someone else.  Well, that can be part of a relationship explained.  To lower your self to help someone else. Soon after I read this passage I was put to the test.   I plugged the toilet all by myself.   Furthermore, we have been travelling and we are in a motel.   There is, of course, no plunger and so I grabbed the closest thing to a plunger that I could find…. Took a deep breath and stack my bare hand in the toilet.   I forgot to mention that my wife needed the toilet, so I had better to unplug it one way or another.   I fin

  Every Scar you own You might like myself have scars all over your body with memories and stories attach to them. I have scars from when I was a child when I went with my bike down a hill, took a spin and fell on my knee and scraped it badly enough that my mother had to take the gravel off it. Another one from Italy when I was balancing on a ramp and fell on an adjacent wall made of sharp stone. It seems that every scar you own are recorded on your or my body.   Sometimes, these scars still hurt like the one I have from my hip surgery.   Sometimes it itches. Every scar has a story to tell, and we bear them one by one. The Bible says that Jesus took our infirmities on himself when he died on the Cross (Isaiah 53).   Even those emotional scars that we carry around.   He wants them for himself so he can heal you.   Those scars of abuse he wants them. Why?   So that they don’t become a heavier burden to you because he loves you.   He wants to carry and care about everything yo

  When Jesus says so…   Let us go… (Mark 4:35-41)   If you look at that day in the life of Jesus and his disciples, it was a day loaded with teaching from Jesus, mostly about faith and the word.  So, you would have thoughts that after the teachings on the seeds planted on different grounds and the mustard seed.  They would be full of faith and believe.  Let us look at this passage! At the end of the day, Jesus told them: “Let us go to the other side of the lake.  Picture this, they were probably as tired as you are when Jesus ask you to do something.  They went anyway and lo and behold, a storm shows up.  At that time in the story, you like to wonder about Jesus.  Do you wonder also when Jesus asks you to do something and then everything goes wrong, and you want to tell Jesus.: “I knew it or I told you so”.  On top of it all as apparently, they were sinking and almost dying, Jesus was sleeping.   Jesus sleeping…you are hurting   Something is humanly wrong here.  Jesus,

  Voracious appetite A lot of diets are happening these days.   We want to be trimmed for our summer looks.   We try to suppress our appetite and look at our neighbour waistline and wish ours was thinner.   We do exercise and work hard on our bodies or get discouraged by our friend’s   high expectations of us.   We just don’t measure up to society’s level of expertise.   Unfortunately, what I have described happens often. We look outward for solutions to our problems, but, we are being eaten up by envy from the inside.   What is eating you up?   Come on, let’s be real? Do you have friends or family members who are doing better than you in life?   How do you feel about them?   Is that envy eating you up?   There is so much envy in this world.   Nations at war with others, for what?   Families fighting amongst themselves, is that not envy?   What about divorces?   Envy and jealousy are such an ugly thing.   I am not talking about the jealousy that protects relationships.   What

  We are born expecting We live for short term hope for the next best thing that we hope will soothe us like a pacifier. Throughout life, we are given false hope over and over like in our next paycheque. Then the proverbial carrot is moved every inch further and we hope some more. It would be so much nicer if we could be richer and we buy a lottery ticket for luck as if luck was on our side. We find ourselves in a long tunnel that is life always told by too many people how our lives should be. We end up expecting less and less toward the end when we retire in a space that is getting smaller and smaller waiting for that something to happen when we will be maybe richer. Thinking that maybe we will experience some happy moments with people. All that we have left now is people to love until the end when the space becomes a box and to dust we return as a promise given to us long time ago. To dust we have returned no longer after anything or anyone. Except yes, for the one we h

  So then, since Christ suffered physical pain, you must arm yourselves with the same attitude he had, and be ready to suffer too.  For if you are willing to suffer for Christ , you have decided to stop sinning.  And you won't spend the rest of your life chasing after evil desires, but you will be anxious to do the will of God.  You have had enough in the past of the evil things that godless people enjoy---their immorality and lust, their feasting and drunkenness and wild parties, and their terrible worship of idols. I have really enjoyed this epistle written that the Apostle Peter wrote for us.  Even more so now,  he gives us in these preceding verses, I think the key to holy living.  The important words are underlined: no where he says that we will suffer as to scare us, but that we must be willing and ready to suffer.  Some of us suffer, but we are not willing or ready.  I mean here, insults from anyone we come in contact with.  When we are finally willing and ready it plunges