Jesus in the Old Testament

Dear Church Family,

Thank you for the tremendous gift of sending me to North Africa. You can be proud of the team from Lakeside as we ministered to our sent ones there. They are doing such a great work in a difficult place. Also, thank you for loving our graduating seniors. Pray for their next step in life as they continue to express their faith as young adults.

I found an interesting devotional that I hope will bless you:

I love how the Old Testament gives us such a beautiful picture of Christ and how He saves us. Let’s look at some of the clues we find there. First of all, what is repentance and how does it fit in our salvation? Too often it has been conflated with confession. Actually, repentance simply means a change of mind. That’s what the 95 theses are about that sparked the Reformation. It’s a list of complaints about indulgences. But at the end of the 95 theses, Martin Luther says he learned that metanoia, in the Greek, means a change of mind, not a turning from sin. So, repentance means a changed mind, and as a result it leads us to love what God loves and hate what God hates. The reason this is so important is because this reverses the damage done from eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve were naked before they ate from that tree, but after they eat of it, they were ashamed. It’s the law that brings to life the knowledge of sin. The law used to be whatever the king said, And Jesus is the Word of God, spoken from the mouth of God, the King of all kings. Therefore, He’s the Word, and He’s the law. The law gets crucified in the flesh, fulfilling it completely. Jesus is the standard of perfection. The Tree of Knowledge gave us knowledge of good and evil. Partaking and receiving this knowledge caused man to redefine good and evil for whatever we want it to be. Now we call what is good evil and what is evil good. And the way to solve this is through repentance—to love what God loves and hate what God hates. And now you have the perfect definitions of good and evil, which undoes the damage from the Tree of Knowledge.

Press On!