Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross / Fanny J. Crosby / William H. Doane
Jesus, keep me near the cross;
There a precious fountain,
Free to all, a healing stream,
Flows from Calvary's mountain.
Near the cross! O Lamb of God,
Bring its scenes before me;
Help me walk from day to day
With its shadow o'er me.
Near the cross I'll watch and wait,
Hoping, trusting ever,
Till I reach the golden strand
Just beyond the river.
In the cross, in the cross,
Be my glory ever,
Till my raptured soul shall find
Rest beyond the river.
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. Open your word to my heart, I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen! I read Mark 13 (selected verses) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2013&version=NIV1984:
5 Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many…
9 “You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues…
13 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.
23 So be on your guard; I have told you everything ahead of time.
33 Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come…
35 “Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back—whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn.
36 If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping.
37 What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’”
My Understanding: Before I read the passage of scripture, I prayed that the Lord would help me to hear from Him and to know what he wanted to say to me this evening. I knew he had woken me for a reason. Satan was fighting against me, though. Then, the Lord had the words to this third stanza of this song stand out to me, and as the words played in my mind I heard the word “watch.” Then, as I began reading this passage of scripture, I noted that the word “watch” was recorded three times and the phrase “be on your guard” was also recorded three times. I saw the passage this way in bullet form:
•
Watch out!
• On guard!
• Stand firm!
• You were told
• Be alert!
• Keep watch!
• No sleeping!
• Watch!
This evening, before Rick and I went to bed, I was looking at some information someone had shared with me about our world and its global system of government at present. A man was on the video talking about all the subliminal messages that are being pumped into our minds every day via the media, and most especially via television. He stated that the reason TV was created was for that purpose, i.e. for mind control. As we watched various segments of this video, I remarked to my husband how I had believed this or that, as well, until I woke up, i.e. until God opened my eyes. The man on the video used the same terminology to describe those who were no longer duped by the mind control of the mass media and were able to see through a lot of the deception as those who had woken up, which he likened to be wakened from hypnosis.
Mark 13:5 tells us to “watch out that no one deceives you” and verse 22 says this: “For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and miracles to deceive the elect—if that were possible.”
If it were not possible for us, the elect, to be deceived, then why would Jesus go to such great lengths to warn us, to tell us to watch out so that no one deceives us, and to alert us that the goal of the antichrists is to deceive the elect? Why all these emphatic phrases? – Watch out! Be on your guard! Be alert! Etc. Obviously it is possible for us to not only be deceived but to be deceived by the master deceiver, manipulator, liar and enemy of our souls who wants nothing more than to have us fall into his trap and to be lulled to sleep (hypnosis) by these subliminal messages so that we are not effective witnesses and servants of Jesus Christ in this world because we are of the world.
Mark 13:34 says this: It’s like a man going away: He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with his assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch.
I have Bible software on my computer. I can hold the cursor of my mouse over a passage of scripture, and if it is in the New Testament, it will show the Greek word and the meaning of the Greek word. I did that with this word “watch,” and it rendered this:
Watch – “to give strict attention to, be cautious, active; to take heed lest through remission and indolence (laziness) some destructive calamity suddenly overtake one.”
The timing for this is really interesting, because as I was beginning to write this definition of “watch,” suddenly the weather outside took a turn for the worse. The wind is blowing strong and rain is coming down hard. We are under a tornado “watch” until 4:00 a.m. It says “Warning” in red with an exclamation point next to it and then the weather bulletin tells us that we are under a watch. If it were a tornado warning, it would mean that an actual tornado had been spotted in our area and that we should take cover. A watch means that conditions are favorable for a tornado to appear so we should be on the alert.
And, that is exactly what this means when Jesus told his disciples to keep watch, to be on the alert, to be on their guard, etc. It was not time to take cover yet, but the conditions are favorable for that time to happen at any moment, so we must be actively listening, seeking, paying attention and keeping our minds alert to deception. Remember that to deceive means to “mislead; trick; con; misinform; hoodwink; dupe; delude” etc. Deception is not going to be obvious unless we are watching and we are alert and we are on our guard.
So, how can we watch? What must we do to be on our guard? We have to realize where deception begins (originates). It begins in our minds via messages we take into our minds over and over again to where we are programmed to believe certain ways. So, what this really comes down to is what amount of the world’s messages we are consuming vs. the amount of God’s messages that we are taking into our minds. I have heard Christians tell me over and over again that they don’t have time to have time with the Lord each day in His Word and in prayer, yet they have time for everything they want, including time for their favorite activities, their friends, TV, movies, games, etc. It is all a matter of priorities, but it is much more than that. We can’t put Jesus first in our schedules if he is truly not first place in our hearts. We need to put our all on the altar and give Jesus Christ our bodies and souls, putting off the things of this world and putting on the things of God; being not conformed to the pattern of this world, but being transformed by the renewing of our minds.
Rick and I got rid of our TV two years ago and it was the best decision we ever made. If we are not taking in all those subliminal and maybe not so subliminal messages into our minds every day, then the Lord doesn’t have to sift through all of that to get to our minds when he wants to show us something, i.e. when he wants to reveal His truth to us. We can’t hear the truth if our minds are filled with a pack of lies and if we hold on to the lies as though we were holding on to something sacred. I’m not saying everything on TV is a lie, but a lot of it is. I know that I bought into some of those lies and now in retrospect I wonder how I was so easily deceived. We have to make a clear passageway in our minds in order to receive the truth that the Lord wants to show us, and we do that by putting off conforming to the pattern of the world via taking so much of the world and its messages daily into our minds and thus accepting the lies as truth, and instead we allow God to renew and to transform our minds so that we hear him clearly when he speaks, not meaning at all that we understand everything perfectly (see I Co. 13).
We can’t “watch”, “be on guard”, “be alert,” “stand firm,” and not be caught sleeping if the majority of our free time is spent in front of the television or a movie screen or surfing the net mindlessly or playing continuous games, in particular computer and video games which suck us into the “other world” of cyberspace. So many believers in Jesus Christ spend little to no time at all in the Word of God each day but they fill their minds daily with the things of this world. And, that is what they regurgitate, too. We talk about what is important to us. If all or most of conversations revolve around what movie or TV show we have watched or what video games we play or sports, etc. and little to none of our conversations ever revolve around our relationship with Jesus Christ and what He is doing in our lives and what He is teaching us, then something is seriously wrong. These other things are not necessarily wrong in some forms. I like a good game of Scrabble. I enjoy time with family and friends. I like to connect with people on the Internet. Yet, I have to ask myself these questions:
What is ruling my life? What am I about? What do I talk about? What do I write about? What captures most of my time and attention? What am I taking into my mind? Is it Jesus and his love and is it what is most important to him? Or, is it my own self interests? If I am truly going to be watchful and waiting for my Lord to return, then I need to be all about HIM, not about myself. I pray that would be so of my life. I don’t want to be deceived or lulled to sleep because I failed to spend that time listening to God, obeying Him, and putting off the conformity to the world, the world’s thinking, the world’s philosophies, etc., and putting on Jesus Christ’s mind, his thoughts, his attitudes, and thus resulting in changed thinking and behavior.
At the beginning of this writing, I wrote this: “I think I fell asleep for a few minutes and then woke back up, and I could not get back to sleep.” I did “fall asleep” for a while when I allowed myself to be taken in by the messages of the world and they became my pattern of thinking and behaving, but then I “woke up” because God woke me up, and I could not fall back asleep, praise God! I wrote once that I closed that door on my former way of life never to go back, and that applies here, as well. Now that I am awake and I am no longer being lulled to sleep, I cannot go back to sleep because I don’t want my Lord to return and to find me “sleeping” and not watching. I want to be watching and praying when my Lord returns.
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