What He Has Promised!

Hello,
 
Remember a time when a company could be in danger of the law for false advertising?  However, these days it is common for a product to be described as something far beyond what it can deliver.  It's just accepted as part of our times, for we know what over advertisement is.  It is a disease from which we all suffer.  There are posters on every billboard, exaggerations on every blank wall, representations and misrepresentations without number.  What visions we have seen of impossible results from fruits and flowers grown from Mr. So-and-So's seeds.  A friend told me his tomato plant, ordered in the hanging basket, never looked anything like the one on TV.  The sandwich pictured on the window of the fast-food restaurant has little resemblance to the one you receive at the drive-up window.  Everything is over advertised.
 
Is it the same with the kingdom of God?  Does the fruit that average Christians produce in their lives reflect what is promised by the Bible?  Can you remember when the early glow of your conversion did product the fruit of love, joy and peace, but you came down to the dullness of everyday duties and responsibilities?  And did you also see this in most Christians around you?  The product developed was not what the Bible declared, but doubt, and fear, and unrest, and conflict, and discomforts of every kind?  What is the cause?  Has Christ offered in His Gospel more than He has to give?  Has the kingdom of God been over advertised, or is it only that it has been underbelieved; has the Lord Jesus Christ been overestimated, or has He only been undertrusted?  Why did the fruit stop in the middle of being developed? 
 
I'm made to believe that the problem lies with ones lack of knowing Christ.  It's not a matter of religion, or revelation, or experience. One of Job's friends said, "Acquaint now thyself with God, and be at peace", and in the Lord's last recorded prayer He said, "This is life eternal , that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent."  It's not a question of acquaintance with ourselves, or of knowing what we are, or what we do, or what we feel; it is simply and only a question of becoming acquainted with God, and getting to know what He is, and what He does, and what He feels.  Comfort and peace can never come from anything we know about ourselves, but only and always from what we know about Him. 
 
If your Christian life has gone from that early glow you enjoyed to a dull, boring one Anthony mentioned Sunday morning, could it be that you have failed to grown in your knowledge of Christ?  The kind of knowledge we mean is just the plain matter-of-fact knowledge of God's nature and character that comes to us by believing what is revealed to us in the Bible concerning Him.  The apostle John gave the following reason for writing his gospel:
 
"And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples which are not written in this book: but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through His name."
 
May God bless you today as you get to know Him through His word, and always remember that you are loved!!!

Henry