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What To Do When You Go Forward For The Altar Call After The Message, And God Suddenly Shows Up

I will be praying that Celebration Church continue to build on their recent changes, continue to put the focus on doctrine, and continue to preach messages like the one that ministered so powerfully to me.

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The next time you hear a convicting message being preached at church, and you feel the Lord leading you to come forward to the altar to do business with Him, do it. You may just get more than you were looking for, or even knew you needed.

About a month ago, I was in church on a Sunday morning with my daughter Kelsey, and the pastor was preaching a message from Isaiah 61. It was a good solid message that was taken from Isaiah’s prophecy about the ministry and mission of the coming Jewish messiah, whose identity is confirmed for us as Jesus of Nazareth in Luke 4:16-21. It was a good message that really hit home, and when it was over I stood to come forward when the altar call was given. Kelsey grabbed my hand and walked down front with me.

But a funny thing happened on the way down, the Lord showed up. By the time we arrived at the altar, it was for a very different reason that I never saw coming.

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD,” Isaiah 61:1,2a (KJV)

Before I go further, it is important for you to know that we were not at my little white Baptist church, we were at my daughter’s church, Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Florida. For regular readers of NTEB, you may remember I wrote about Celebration back on Easter sunday when the pastor, Stovall Weems, dropped the bombshell that he had had a personal, visible, and audible encounter with Jesus Christ.

The ‘vision’ that lead to a revelation, for me

You can reread that article here if you wish to refresh your memory, but suffice to say the events surrounding it were a little on the wild side. There is nothing in the writings of our apostle Paul for the Church Age that might lead you to think that a face-to-face with Jesus here on this side is possible. Indeed, many a cult has been built on the claimed “visions” of a charismatic leader who had a personal visit from Jesus or an angel.

So when I got home that day I wrote that article about the claimed encounter that the Celebration pastor had with Jesus. In fact, it became a larger 4-part series on the end times ‘falling away’ of the Christian church from doctrinal truth. I believe there was much-needed truth contained in those articles, as well as a timely warning for the Body of Christ around the world. But as I also found out when responding to the altar call last month, from a sermon preached by the same pastor in the same church, the Lord showed me I had left something out.

Something that, in His mercy, He would allow me the opportunity to make right.

Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted

The sermon that Pastor Weems preached on August 12th was built on Isaiah 61 verse 1, one of the most power-packed verses in the entire Bible. In it, we see how Jesus would one day come to ‘set the captives free’, and to ‘heal the broken hearted’. The next time your heart breaks you will be reminded how important it is that God provides a Healer for that.

The is the sermon that God knew I needed to hear at exactly the time I needed to hear it

This is the sermon my article refers to, it’s really good and I hope you will give it a listen all the way through. It’s the best sermon I’ve heard yet at Celebration, and hopefully this type of preaching will continue there for a long time to come.

Having recently been through at that time a very impactful, soul-shaking experience that left me broken-hearted and shaken to my core, Pastor Weem’s message came as unexpected manna in an extremely dry season. (I’ve included the video of that sermon here in this article and I do hope you will watch it all the way through.) I needed a fresh blessing and refilling of the Holy Spirit very badly, and God in His mercy gave me just that.

“And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.” Joel 2:13 (KJV)

As I stood in front with the rest of the people who came forward for the altar call, with tears falling from my face, I began to get right with the Lord and started to lay my burden down on the altar. The God we serve is both merciful and forgiving, and I had come to the altar to receive both those things. But as I began to lift my hands and pray, my eyes found themselves suddenly fixed on the pastor, and then God started speaking.

Meeting God at the altar, and doing more listening than talking

He brought to my memory the article I had written about the pastor and his claim of a personal visit from Jesus, and showed my the part that I had left out of it. He showed me that, though my desire to refute what I felt was wrong and misleading teaching was good, I had not written the article as to a fellow brother in Christ, but rather as to an adversary. God showed me that I had indeed thrown the ‘baby out with the bathwater’, and that here at the altar we were going to add another aspect to the reason why I had originally come forward.

I began to pray earnestly and fervently regarding my original petition. I asked the Lord for forgiveness and mercy, offered forgiveness and mercy, lifted up those who needed to be lifted up, and with all my heart I believe I received what I came looking for. Then I sought out the pastor for the second reason I was there.

Pastor Weems came over to talk, I found him to be gracious and open to speaking with me. In his mind, I am sure he was reacting to me as he normally would when someone wanted to have a word after the morning message. After all, that’s what pastors are supposed to do, right? But little did he know why I was actually there. As I started to speak with him, a flood of true emotion came over me. I tearfully told him that I had been the one that wrote those articles, and I was sorry for being so hard on him personally. It took a moment for it to click in but eventually it did. What was his reaction? He warmly and physically embraced me as a fellow member in the Body of  Christ, accepted my apology, and told me he would be praying for me in a way that I totally believed he sincerely meant, and that he would actually do.

And in that moment, I felt the burden that I didn’t even know I was carrying lifted from me, and the sweet joy of gaining a brother in Christ.

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1,2 (KJV)

Without love we are nothing

I find it fittingly ironic that the very person I had called out for promoting a false teaching would be the same person that God would use to minister to me through preaching at a very low point of my life. Now don’t get me wrong, I still believe that anyone who claims a ‘personal visit’ from Jesus is not making that claim on the basis of the Bible, and those things should always be called out. But as the Lord showed me, I had completely left out compassion and brotherly love when I did so.

As far as Celebration Church and Pastor Weems are concerned, in the intervening months since ‘the vision’ took place, a fair number of changes have taken place at the church. And from my perspective, they are good changes. For one, Pastor Weems having had some time to reflect on his experience, has come to understand that it was a deeply personal spiritual event which took place, and not necessarily a personal physical appearance of Jesus in the flesh.

Secondly, they have greatly reduced the amount of laser lights, smoke machines and ultra-loud music that used to precede the services. In the service I attended there was none of those things present at all, for which I was quite grateful. As Pastor Weems discussed in the time following his ‘vision’, he truly felt the Lord calling him to take a fresh looking at his calling and to make sure they were doing things in the services that were pleasing to the Lord. They even changed the way they take up the offering, and again, it was a good change. I totally respect a pastor whose heart is still open to receive correction from the Lord. May that be the prayer of our hearts also!

Lastly, this being the first sermon I heard at Celebration since last Easter, I was pleasantly surprised at the doctrinal strength of it and the manner in which Pastor Weems preached it. It had Holy Spirit power and conviction behind it, and it was certainly what I needed to receive on that Sunday.

Just because it’s a mega church doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing

My type of church will never be the modern megachurch, that’s just not me. I love the little white Baptist churches I have always attended since first getting saved, singing the old hymns and standing on the old Book. But the Body of Christ is as varied as the people who make it up, and no one church presentation reaches everyone.

Stovall Weems is truly a good guy, and a good pastor who truly cares about his flock. I will be forever grateful for the Christian love and forgiveness he extended towards me. I will be praying that Celebration Church continue to build on their recent changes, continue to put the focus on doctrine, and continue to preach messages like the one that ministered so powerfully to me. For my part, I will do my level best to make sure that any and all articles published here regarding the doctrines and teachings of other churches are done with true brotherly love and Christian charity. For those of you who are regular readers here, you will notice that that change took place about a week ago.

“Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” Matthew 5:23,24 (KJV)

The next time you hear a convicting message being preached at church, and you feel the Lord leading you to come forward to the altar to do business with Him, do it and don’t delay. You may just get more than you were looking for, or even knew you needed.

And it might not just be you doing all the talking.

 

 


 

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Some Random Thoughts On The Goodness And Mercy Of God After Battling COVID-19 For The Past 7 Days

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Dr. Ruckman used to say that if the Lord tarries, the only thing coming in this life are graves and hospital beds, and that’s a very true statement.

My COVID test took less than 20 seconds to provide my positive result as I watched it light up like a pinball machine last week. Immediately my mind raced back to the height of the pandemic in 2021 where we prayed for so many people on the NTEB prayer list who were deathly ill with COVID, many of whom went to the hospital, and the names of the people who didn’t come back. My street preacher Mark Bennet, he didn’t come home, neither did John Roth the man who sat behind me in church for over three years, or Ken Shiner who attended my daughter Kelsey’s wedding. They all died excruciatingly torturous deaths in medical comas with a tube down their throats.  Now it was my turn, “where to, Lord?”

“But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever.” Psalm 52:8 (KJB)

For the first couple of days, I was overwhelmingly exhausted, sleeping 16 hours a day, no appetite, and throwing up every few hours. The stench of COVID permeating all my senses, with this mildly sweet though musky smell seeming to come off of everything. As it turned out, that smell was inside my own nose, and it kept me in a persistent low-level state of nauseousness. I had chills, endless sweating, shakes and terrible sleep. What a fragile thing our health can be, and how it all can turn on a dime. Most of my prayers have consisted of asking God to simply help me make it through the night.

I took a second test earlier, and this one too lit up positive in mere seconds, showing me perhaps another week of housebound helplessness. The idea of sitting in front of a mic and talking for hours about the Bible, something that gives me great joy and pleasure, now seems at the moment like a physical and mental impossibility. Even just writing this short article has been a drawn-out and laborious process taking place over many hours this afternoon. Through all this, random thoughts about the goodness of God in the midst of a time of sickness, misery and death pop in and out of my feverish brain.

God owes us nothing, and every moment we have on this earth is borrowed from His time clock, breathed with His air, and experienced through a beating heart that He set in motion the day we were born. What does God owe us? Nothing. What do we owe Him? Everything. He is worthy of our utmost effort to reach the lost with the gospel of the kingdom of God. Dr. Ruckman used to say that if the Lord tarries, the only thing coming in this life are graves and hospital beds, and that’s a very true statement. The question is, how to live your life in the meantime. The answer, I believe, is to live a life wholly given over to the things of the Lord Jesus Christ, a life lived for the furtherance of the gospel. That Book! Of all the risky things that make up this life, living for Jesus Christ is not risky at all, it’s a sure bet because He is worthy.

I covet your prayers for a full recovery, and not just for myself but we have many sick with COVID now at NTEB, as this end times gain-of-function horror continues. In my body, I am wiped out and depleted, but in my born again spirit I am chomping at the bit to get back in the game. Called to be soldiers, there is no quit, there is no retreat, there is only the battle. TO THE FIGHT!!!   

Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church

When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. We have a Gospel Billboard program. We are now broadcasting Bible studies, Podcasts and a Sunday Service 5 times a week, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.

But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. The Lord has given us an open door with a tremendous ‘course’ for us to fulfill that will create an excellent experience at the Judgement Seat of Christ. Please pray for our efforts, and if the Lord leads you to donate, be as generous as possible. The war is REAL, the battle HOT and the time is SHORTTO THE FIGHT!!!

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJB)

“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB

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One Of The Things You Might Very Well Expect To See As The Spirit Of Antichrist Rises Is The Discovery Of The ‘Bones Of Jesus’ In Jerusalem

Prepare yourself for the ‘greatest archaeological discovery of all time’, the bones of Jesus! But it’s actually a trick of Satan.

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You can show the bones of Buddha, and they have them, and still be a good Buddhist. You can show the bones of Mohammed, and they have them, and still be a good Muslim, but you cannot show the bones of Jesus Christ and still be a Christian.

Today I want to write about something that is purely speculative, at this point just a feeling I have, but something that nonetheless the Holy Spirit seems to be pressing on me to talk about. Last year, I wrote an article about the rising spirit of Antichrist that palpably came on the scene last year, and that spirit has done nothing but increase over the past 21 months. If we are where it seems like we are on the end times timeline, and if the man of sin is about to step onto the world stage, then there should be something fairly big to take place that will take a shot at discrediting Jesus of Nazareth. So prepare yourself for the ‘greatest archaeological discovery of all time’, the bones of Jesus!

“And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” 1 Corinthians 15:14-17 (KJB)

Think about it, in Isaiah 14 where Lucifer is shaking his dirty fist at God, telling Him that he will take His Throne and everything else that belongs to God, those aspirations come true for a very brief period of time when he puts the spirit of Judas in the body of an earthly human like Emmanuel Macron as Antichrist. Remember, Antichrist does not come as himself, as Satan, but he comes pretending that he is the Messiah. So Antichrist comes as a fake Jesus claiming to be the actual Jesus, and it stands to reason that one of the first ‘shots across the bow’ will be to discredit Jesus of Nazareth. What better way to do that than by producing the ‘bones of Jesus’ to ‘prove’ He was not the real Messiah.

“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:” 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 (KJB)

The Bible says that the Devil’s time is short, only has 7 years from start to finish, but when he sits down in the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem at the halfway point he exposes himself to be the Devil, so he really has to do something quite impressive at the outset. Want to prove that Jesus Christ is a fake? Easy, just produce his bones and that will show Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead as the Bible says He did. You can show the bones of Buddha, and they have them, and still be a good Buddhist. You can show the bones of Mohammed, and they have them, and still be a good Muslim, but you cannot show the bones of Jesus Christ and still be a Christian. This is why I feel, quite strongly actually, that a ‘discovery’ is about to be made in Jerusalem and that discovery will produce the ‘bones of Jesus’.

“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.” John 10:18 (KJB)

So what happens if I’m right about this? First of all, I am writing this now to warn you so if it does happen, you are already prepared to view it as nothing but a trick of the Devil. How else could I have know it was going to happen unless the Holy Spirit gave it to me ahead of time? That one fact alone show prove to you that the ‘bones of Jesus’ are nothing but a fraud. Secondly, if we are still here and the ‘bones’ are produced, that should immediately and instantly remove any and all trace of doubt in your mind that we are on the cusp of Flight #777 taking off in the Rapture. Finally, Paul says we are not ‘ignorant of his devices’, we have the Holy Spirit of discernment to show us what the truth is. As I said earlier, this is purely speculative but at the same time it is something that I very much feel will happen. Now you know what to do if it does.

“Behold, I have told you before.” Matthew 24:25 (KJB)

Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church

When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. Even all the way to South Africa. We even restarted our weekly radio Bible study on Sunday nights again, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.

But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. If every one of the 15,860+ people on our daily mailing list gave $4.50, we would reach our goal immediately. If every one of our 150,000+ followers on Facebook gave $1.00 each, we would reach 300% of our goal. The same goes for our 15,900 followers on Twitter. But sadly, many will not give, so we need the ones who can and who will give to be generous. As generous as possible.

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJV)

“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB

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Archaeologists Discover Physical Proof For Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah By God Then Try To Turn It Into A Powerless ‘Jewish Fable’

Archaeologists investigated the destruction of Tall el-Hammam matching the description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by God recorded in Genesis 19.

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Archaeologists investigated the destruction of Tall el-Hammam and discovered an event similar to the description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by God recorded in Genesis 19.

Faith is a funny thing, either you have it or you don’t, and even the discovery of overwhelming physical evidence will not sway the unbeliever to change their position. Today’s article on the discovery of proof-positive, physical evidence of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, modern-day Tall el-Hammam, as contained in the Genesis 19 account has just been found, and is it creating a flood of new believers in the accuracy and fidelity of God’s preserved word? Nope.

Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;…And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the LORD: And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt.” Genesis 19:24,27-29 (KJB)

Archaeologists have unearthed physical proof of what points to the destruction of Tell el-Hammam in the Jordan valley, the region of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, and what they found was really wild. They found evidence of an incredible explosion that occurred in the skies above ancient Sodom, an explosion so intense that building down below were destroyed and things were literally vaporized. Yet these highly-educated scientists and archaeologists come away from this discovery no more a believer in the Bible than before they made it, because proof will not sway the stone-cold heart of man that is set against God. Only grace through faith in Jesus Christ can accomplish that.

I loved reading about this discovery, and seeing what the scientists found, but it didn’t increase my faith because I already believed in the Genesis 19 account, along with everything else contained in my King James Holy Bible. For those who believe in the Almighty God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, no proof is required. For those who don’t believe, no amount of proof will ever be enough. Our article here today on the ‘cosmic destruction’ of Tall el-Hammam is “proof” of that.

The cause of the destruction of Tall el-Hammam, Sodom, was a cosmic airburst caused by a comet or meteorite.

FROM THE JERUSALEM POST: Tell el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley might have inspired the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, according to a new study that has spanned 15 years. In the study, published in the journal Nature on Monday, archaeologists researched the remains of Tell el-Hammam in an attempt to discover what destroyed the ancient city during the Middle Bronze Age. During the period, there were roughly 50,000 people living in the area of the Jordan Valley in three cities: Tell el-Hammam, Jericho, and Tell Nimrin, with Tell el-Hammam the biggest of the three, implying that until its destruction, it would have been the political center of the area. Radiocarbon dating dates the destruction to within 50 years of 1650 BCE.

Examination of the remains revealed evidence of a destructive event that involved high temperatures, such as pottery pieces that were melted and boiled on the exterior, but normal on the inside. The buildings of Tell el-Hammam were made of mud bricks, some five stories tall. In the upper part of the city, the destructive force demolished the buildings to the height of their foundations in the walls, and little mud-brick remained. Of the palace that was in this part of the city, the first floor walls and the upper stories are missing, and most of the mud-brick was pulverized.

In the lower part of the city, the buildings suffered more severe damage, and researchers found evidence of heat-fracturing in the remains.

The towers in the wall that surrounded the city were also destroyed, with mud-brick remains only existing at the height of the towers’ foundation. To try to discover what could have caused this destruction, the researchers compiled a list of possible events and tested their probability relative to the evidence found at the site.

They initially examined the possibility of a fire, warfare, volcanic eruption, earthquake or lightning, but concluded that these events were unlikely to cause the kind of destruction that they found at the site, because none could have produced the intense heat required to cause the melting that they found.

Having dismissed these events, the researchers turned to two other possibilities: cosmic impact or a cosmic airburst.

The consequences of a crater-forming cosmic impact matched all the evidence found by the archaeologists, but it was dismissed as unlikely because no crater was found in the area. The most likely cause of destruction was a cosmic airburst caused by a comet or meteorite. The consequences of such an event also match the evidence found by the researchers, and using an impact calculator, they were able to estimate the details of the event, which also involved the shock wave hitting Jericho that was burned to the ground.

It can be assumed that the event that destroyed Tell el-Hammam would have been witnessed and recounted through the generations until the time of the biblical Sodom, at which point the event would have been an inspiration for the story, which tells of stones and fire falling from the sky to destroy the city. READ MORE

Tall el-Hammam Destroyed by Cosmic Air Burst 3,600 Years Ago

Many of you will already know about the new paper released by Bunch et al, titled “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea”, the significance of which should not be underestimated.

Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last Days before the Rapture of the Church

When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. Even all the way to South Africa. We even restarted our weekly radio Bible study on Sunday nights again, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.

But whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Time is short and we need your help right now. If every one of the 15,860+ people on our daily mailing list gave $4.50, we would reach our goal immediately. If every one of our 150,000+ followers on Facebook gave $1.00 each, we would reach 300% of our goal. The same goes for our 15,900 followers on Twitter. But sadly, many will not give, so we need the ones who can and who will give to be generous. As generous as possible.

“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJV)

“Thank you very much!” – Geoffrey, editor-in-chief, NTEB

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