Jesus said to His Apostles: “Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believes and is baptized shall be saved; (Mark 16:15-16)
As simple as it can be is described in this scripture. To obtain salvation and eternal life in Heaven all that is required of a person is to believe the gospel and be baptized.
All of the man made doctrine that you have heard from your preachers is not supported be Bible scripture. Some ridiculous statements such as: “accept Jesus into your heart”, “give your heart to Jesus”, “pray the sinners prayer”, “have a personal relationship with Jesus”, “come forward to the altar and receive Jesus”, “Jesus is standing at the door of your heart and wants in” are nothing but gimmicks that preachers use to get you to do something that is not necessary to receive salvation.
You can do all of these things, but if you have never heard the true gospel of the Lord and accepted it as truth and have never submitted to water baptism, you may have been deceived about obtaining your salvation that you desired.
What is the Gospel?
God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. They that believe in him are not condemned: but they that believe not are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. (John 3:16-18)
What is the gospel? The simplicity of what is stated in the above scriptures is the gospel. The whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is not the gospel no matter what your dishonest preachers are saying.
The Question of Baptism
Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:38)
There are preachers who say that baptism in water is not necessary. Are you going to believe your preacher or the words of Jesus Christ? Jesus said that you must be baptized in order to be saved. There are preachers that say you must be baptized in the name of the “Father” and the “son” and the “Holy Spirit”. But the Apostle Peter, who was given the authority by Jesus, said you must be baptized in the name of “Jesus Christ” after you repent.
Peter’s Authority
Jesus said to Peter: “I give unto you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matt 16:19)
Peter had the authority given to him by Jesus to state the requirements to be baptized. Whatever Peter said had the approval of God. So, are you going to believe your dishonest preacher, or the Apostle Peter who was given the authority by God to state the requirements of baptism?
There is another big lie that your preachers tell you that you must do to be saved and in doing so put such a large burden on your back that you can’t shake off. Jesus came and preached to “repent and believe the gospel”. What Jesus was saying, was for you to turn from your disbelief of what the gospel was saying and believe it to be the truth. That’s the only thing you need to repent of.
If your preachers are telling you that you must repent of all your sins, they are not being honest with you. Jesus paid the price for all the sins of everyone in the World when He hung on the cross. The price was paid for your sins in the past, the present and the future. If this was not true, He gave His life in vain, but He didn’t.
In the beginning of time, God set a condition that the blood of an innocent animal must be shed for the covering of the sins that the people had committed. This sacrifice had to be made once a year. But since then God provided a more certain sacrifice for the sins of His people by providing the blood of His only begotten Son for the forgiveness of our sins forever and not just once a year. If you are taught that you have to repent every time you sin, you put Jesus back on that cross every time. He did it once and for all with a more perfect sacrifice.
So I say to everyone this day just as Jesus did in His day; repent and believe the gospel, submit to water baptism in the name of Jesus Christ and receive the gift of eternal life.
If your Church teaches any other gospel than what God has provided us with, leave that Church and find one that does. For there is no other name under Heaven by which we can be saved, other than the name of Jesus Christ.
There were five men named in the Bible whose names were given to them because of specific instructions sent to their parents from God. These five were:
Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, his wife’s maid.
Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah
Solomon, the son of King David and his wife Bathsheba
John the Baptist, the son of the priest Zacharias
and his wife Elisabeth
Jesus, the son of God and the Virgin Mary.
Now comes the question about why were these five chosen to be named by God.
The New Testament makes it clear because of the connection between Jesus and John the Baptist that the work they were predestined to perform was of utmost importance in God’s redemption plan for the people of the World and God wanted to honor them by letting the World know what their eternal names were.
But what was there about Ishmael, Isaac and Solomon that they were chosen by God to have certain names and so important that God would provide them with those names when they were born into this life?
I believe that with Ishmael and Isaac, both being the sons of Abraham and their role in the future makeup of the Middle Eastern Nations, their importance as heirs of Abraham and God’s covenant with him made it special enough for God to select their names.
Solomon on the other hand stands out as the son of King David who was noted to be after God’s own heart and was chosen as the one to build the Temple of God in place of his father David because of David’s bloody life of engaging in wars, besides being a known murderer of Bathsheba’s husband.
But were these the only men in the history of the Israeli nation who were proven to be great men? Besides Jesus and John, were Ishmael, Isaac and Solomon all so important in history more so than many others to be selected to be named by God?
Jesus was mentioned in another of my writings that His name was given to Joseph and Mary because that was his name when He was with God the Father before the Earth was created. Could it be that the others, Ishmael, Isaac, John and Solomon were also sons of Heaven, being in the original family of God before the creation? Why else would it be so important for these specific names to be given to them to warrant a messenger of Heaven to instruct their parents to use these names?
There are many other cases throughout the Bible where certain individuals had their names changed by God or by Jesus. Maybe all of us have heavenly names that we possessed before entering into this physical life, but it wasn’t important enough for a messenger from Heaven to be sent for us to change our names during this short life on Earth. Make known that the Bible says, those that overcome will be given a new name. Could it be that our names are now written in Heaven just waiting for that day of redemption when, not only will we put on new bodies that will last for eternity, but will also take on our new names which our Heavenly Father knows us by and has know us before the foundation of the World.
From the beginning of time man has desired to have a God to worship that they can see and touch. It wasn’t just the Gentile Nations, but the Israelites were the same way. Both the Gentiles and the Israelites made themselves idols out of material substances or worshipped the Sun or the Moon or whatever they could cast their eyes on.
The Lord God Jehovah made it clear that He was the one and only God and He was a jealous God and warned His people to not worship anything else but Him.
Now in these modern times we are doing the same thing. It isn’t enough to recognize that our Creator, our Lord of Heaven and Earth who proclaims Himself as being the only God for us to worship, so because of our desire to see and touch our God, we are trying to make Jesus our God, who proclaimed to be the Son of God and not God Himself.
You do this by proclaiming that God made himself a body to come into the World to become a kinsman redeemer, which being a kinsman redeemer has nothing to do with it. Jesus stated in Hebrews chapter 10 that God made Jesus a body in order for Him (Jesus) to be the Lamb without blemish to serve as the sacrifice for the sin of the World. If you are going to accept Jesus as being God which was born of Mary, then you might as well celebrate Mary as being the Mother of God and Jesus as being His own Father. How absurd that notion sounds.
Why can’t you people see the truth that Jehovah did not make Himself a flesh body to come to Earth, He sent His Son to be our redeemer. He is not one God in three manifestations or one God in three persons; He is one God by Himself and shares that position with no one else.
Why in the World do you people want to believe this theological mumbo jumbo, these man made doctrines created by those who put their own interpretations to scripture because of their blind ignorance about what the scriptures say. Instead, why can’t you believe a God sent Messenger that proves the truth of God’s Word by clearly pointing to the scriptures? Open your eyes my friends and don’t allow those blind preachers to lead you blindly to false doctrines.
Please look at what the scriptures have to say and believe what you read.
The Apostle John wrote that there are three that bear record in Heaven—the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. God the Father, the Creator of Heaven and earth, is one God and expresses Himself as the Word and the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ, our Lord, is the Son of God, God’s Word made manifest in an earthly body. God spoke Jesus into existence in the body of his Mother Mary. Jesus was the product of the spoken Word of God, the Word of God made manifest in a human body, but Jesus was not God.
Now there are some who will immediately say that having this view and opinion is blasphemy, but to those who will take that stand, then I say to them, you better read and understand once more just exactly what your Bible says about this. Jesus Himself testified that while He was here on earth, both the Father God, and the Holy Spirit were in Heaven. For many times, as He prayed, He addressed the Father who was in Heaven. Then He said that after He was gone, the Father would send the Holy Spirit to us from Heaven.
Now what is the importance of making this distinction between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? Simply because there are some who teach that Jesus is God, and according to Jesus’ own testimony, that is not true. There is only one God in Heaven, and that is God the Father, the one that is called Jehovah. He deserves our recognition and our praise and worship because He is the Supreme Being, the Creator of all things, and the Controller of all things that occur, from the beginning to the end. Taking nothing away from our Lord Jesus Christ, for He also deserves our praise for what He has done for mankind, but He is subordinate to God the Father, who is greater than all others. As is recorded in the Gospel of John, the fourteenth chapter and the twenty eighth verse, Jesus said, “my Father is greater than I.”
How well we know that spiritual things are most often hard to understand for we who are earthly creatures, but it is not really necessary to understand all spiritual things. What is necessary and important that we do, is to believe the Word that God has sent to us and preserved for us these hundreds and thousands of years. Our responsibility to God is not necessarily to understand all things, but it is to believe the truth as He has presented it to us. Too many times our theologians offer their interpretation of what the scriptures mean, instead of just accepting what they say as being the truth. If Jesus made a statement about God the Father, then it is the truth. If He made another statement that we think contradicts the first one, then we have erred in our understanding. For Jesus spoke the words that God the Father gave Him.
There is no way that I would have attempted to take the stand that I have, for fear of angering the God of Heaven, had it not been for the Lord Jesus speaking plainly on this subject. So now let us look at a few scriptures that support what has been said so far.
The following scriptures clearly show that Jesus recognized The Father, which is the God of Heaven, as being the Supreme Being, and that He, Jesus, was subordinate to the Father.
In Luke 10:21, Jesus addressed the Father as Lord of Heaven and earth, recognizing the Father as being God and having the supreme authority of all things. Then in the 22nd verse, Jesus testifies that all that He has was given to Him by the Father.
In Matt 20:23, when Jesus was asked for permission by two of his disciples to sit on His right and left hand, He said that the Father God had retained the right to make that choice, and it was not His (Jesus’) to bestow.
Then in Mark 13:32, when asked about the time of His return and the end of the world, Jesus said that only the Father God knew the time, and He had not given it to the angels or to the Son.
Again in John 5:19, Jesus said, concerning the miracles, that He could do nothing on His own, only what the Father showed Him to do.
In John 6:44, Jesus said that no man could come to Him for salvation unless the Father would draw him to seek Jesus. The Father God clearly must provide the opportunity for man to be saved.
Then concerning the coming of the Holy Spirit, which was promised by the Father before Jesus ever came, Jesus said that the Father would send it to us (Joel 2:28, John 14:26).
Once more in Mark 10:18, when someone came to Him and addressed Him as “Good Master,” Jesus made the statement that there was only one who was good, and that was God.
In John 14:10, Jesus said that it was not He that did the works they saw, but it was the Father who was in Him that did the works. That is why He told Philip in John 14:9, that if he had seen Him, he has seen the Father. The works that Jesusdid were performed by the Father who was in Him. God made Himself known through Jesus by the works that He did through Him. The works demonstrate the presence of God the Father.
That should be enough to show that Jesus Himself testified that He was not God, and that there was a supreme being in Heaven who had control over all things, the Lord of Heaven and earth, God the Father. In addition, many times Jesus said that the Father sent Him into the world to do a work, and when it was finished, He would return back to the Father. That does not sound like Jesus and the Father were one and the same being does it?
Many teachers use the scriptures of John, chapter 14, to justify their position that Jesus was God. When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus said to him, “he that has seen me has seen the Father.” But Jesus was not saying there that He was the Father. What He said was that He was showing them the Father by the works that were being done—that the Father was in Him and the works were performed by the Father. Jesus told them that the Father dwelled in Him. His body was the temple of the Holy Spirit, which was the Spirit of God, and it was not Him that performed the miracles, but God who is a Spirit, performed the miracles. Jesus said to him, if you will not believe my words, what I am telling you, then believe what you see happening, believe the works and know that only God can do those things. Just like He told the Jews in John 10:37-38: If I do not do the works of God, then do not believe me, but if I do those works, believe me that the Father is in me doing the works.
Jesus, on many occasions, made it plain that He was not God, but was the Son of God. After Jesus had healed the blind man, as is recorded in the ninth chapter of John, He asked the man if he believed on the Son of God. When the man asked Him who was the Son of God, Jesus told him that He was. And again Jesus testified to the Jews in John 10:36 that He was the Son of God and the Father God had sent Him into the world. Then as we look in the book of Luke, in the first chapter, we see that the angel told Mary that the son she would give birth to was the Son of God. This was a fulfillment of a prophecy of Isaiah where he said that a virgin would conceive and bear a son, and He would be called Immanuel, which means God with us. God would be with us because of the Spirit of God being in that Son.
When Jesus spoke of His disciples being one with God, He did not mean that the disciples were God, no more than it meant Jesus was God because He was one with the Father. It meant that they all would be one because of the Spirit that was in them (John -22).
Finally, just for one more example, in Revelations, chapter 5, John tells us of what he saw in His vision. He spoke of the Lamb that came and took the book out of the right hand of Him who sat on the throne. Clearly there are two beings here, the Father and the Son. They are not one and the same person; neither do the scriptures teach us that. Being one with God is a spiritual relationship and not a physical one. Jesus the Son was one with God in a spiritual way, just as we are one with God and one with His Son. That does not mean that we are all the same beings; we are not. We each hold to our own identity, our own individualism, but at the same time, being spiritually one with each other.
The Scriptures tell us that Jesus talked of giving our worship to the Father. This is what God expects of us. In the beginning, He told us that there was only one God and He was a jealous God. He will not tolerate sharing our worship with anyone else (Eph 4:6, 1 Tim 2:5, Ex 34:14). As satan was tempting Jesus, Jesus said, “You should worship the Lord your God, and Him only should you serve” (Matt 4:10, John 4:23).
Jesus told His disciples, and it should be the same for us, if we had a need, we should pray to the Father and ask our petitions of Him in Jesus’ name. He very plainly said that we should not ask anything of Him (Jesus), but to ask the Father. Saying this as He did, Jesus once again reminds us that there is one greater than Him, God the Father.
I hope and pray that I have written this just as God has revealed it to me. And hope that I have not in any way made the Lord Jesus appear insignificant, for that was not my intent. I look to His words for the truth, and if I have said anything else besides what He said, I am wrong. But if I have helped reveal the truth of the Word of God, just as the scriptures present them to us, then I have done what God has intended for me to do.
The Lord Jesus has earned all the praise and glory that we can give Him, for He made the supreme sacrifice for the atonement for our sins and is the author of our eternal salvation. Not only should we thank Him, but also, we should thank our Heavenly Father Jehovah God for sending His only begotten Son into this world for us.
So, what did happen to the real Church of God? I don’t mean those local assemblies that call themselves “The Church of God” or “The Church of Christ” or Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans etc. I mean the original Church of God that existed in the First Century AD.
The Bible tells us about the “Church of God” that Jesus purchased with the shedding of His Blood. The Bible tells us about the “Church of God” that was formed by the Apostles as they traveled all over the known World and preached their doctrine and the Gospel of Christ.
The Bible tells us about the one Church of God that gathered in individual assemblies in certain cities and villages throughout the know World at that time. These local assemblies were made up of converted believers from Judaism and from the Gentile Nations. This Church of God was one Church that met in many places and worshipped according to the teaching and oversight of the Lord’s Apostles as they were commissioned by Jesus to do.
What happened to this Church of God? I’ll tell you what happened to it. Just as the Bible tells us in the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelations, the Earth swallowed it up, it disappeared.
During the first Century AD as long as the Apostles were overseeing the Church and all of its assemblies it prospered and grew, but after the Apostles died off it started to break apart. As new leaders of these individual assemblies began to take over, the unity of their faith and beliefs began to introduce division in the Church. Men began to disagree over the tenets of the faith and introduce their own interpretation of beliefs into the Church services. It wasn’t long then until there wasn’t just one Church of God, but many different Churches of God as they called then, set apart from each other because of their differences.
It wasn’t long after the First Century, actually near the end of the Second Century that there were Hugh divisions between the different Churches. So much so that Constantine, the Emperor of Rome called several hundred of the Bishops of these Churches together for the purpose of reaching an agreement in their beliefs to bring about a unity of the faith for all Churches. Instead of bringing a unity of beliefs for all, the outcome of this gathering was the result of even more confusion and divisions.
As a result of this gathering of Bishops, Constantine approved Christianity to be the recognized religion of the Roman Empire, thus the beginning of the growth and assumption of power by the Roman Catholic Church as it exists today.
It wasn’t until the sixteenth Century when the people began to revolt against the Roman Catholic Church, which brought about the reformation and the onset of protestant denominations with their own set of beliefs in opposition to the beliefs of the Catholic Church.
So, where was the Original Church of God? Who knows for sure? If it continued to exist it certainly was a minority and if it exists today, which I doubt, it’s hardly recognizable. Among the hundreds of different denominations and the thousands of non denominational and independent Churches in the World today, the true and original Church of God can’t be found.
As long as we allow individual men to interpret the scriptures and introduce man made doctrines into our Churches, the TRUE Church of God will never be seen again this side of Heaven.
William Branham, a great man of God, said during his ministry in this last Century; the churches have got so much mixed up and misconstrued down through the years that the Churches don’t know what to believe because of the false teaching from so many. The message of the hour is to return to the faith of the Apostolic Fathers and prepare a people for the return of the Lord for His Church. (Paraphrased)
Where is the true Church of God? Father help us to revive it and bring back the unity of the faith that once existed.
If your Church teaches in opposition to the following Biblical facts, they are teaching in error. The Bible is clear if you read it without adding your own interpretation to it. If any Church teaches any one thing in opposition to what the scriptures say, they probably are in error about other things. Grade your Church teachings according to the following list.
The Bible is not the inerrant Word of God. The Bible contains the Word of God, but because of man made errors and contradictions introduced into the Bible by the Bible Translators, it cannot be accepted as the complete, infallible and inerrant Word of God.
The concept of the Trinity is a man made doctrine. The Trinity teaches that our God is a triune God and is the representation of three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit which makes up the Godhead.
There is only one God know to us by the name of Jehovah. Jesus is not God. Jesus is the Son of God as is stated in many places in scripture.
The paying of Tithes is not required for the New Testament Church. This was for the tribes of Israel to pay to the Levites because they were not awarded any land to raise their crops on.
The practice of speaking in tongues is not the evidence of having received the Holy Spirit. This was introduced by the Apostles in error, believing that a person had not received the Holy Spirit unless they heard them speak in an unknown language.
Baptism with total immersion in water in the name of Jesus Christ was the only accepted way in the Bible for the New Testament Church.
Celebrating communion was a part of the regular worship service for the early Christian Church with the taking of unleavened bread and wine which represents the body and blood of Jesus Christ and should be open for every Christian attending a Church service.
Feet washing should not be practiced literally and was not intended to be done so. Jesus used this as a symbolic teaching gesture for His Apostles.
The teaching that a woman should not cut her hair or wear pants by certain churches is a misrepresentation of Bible scripture and teaching this is in error.
The teaching that a person has been predestinated by God before the foundation of the World is in error. God predestinates certain people to accomplish certain works for Him, but predestination to receive eternal life is a misunderstanding of scripture.
The teaching that every person who is converted receives the baptism of the Holy Spirit is in error. After repentance and upon conversion and being baptized a person receives the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but not the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
