Because He Lives I Can… • Face Tomorrow… • All Fear is Gone… • I Know the Future • And life is worth the living just because His lives. There are cases where because of a real physical imbalance in the mind that drugs can play an important role in helping individuals find peace. But, our world today has left God out of the equation, and the statistics are clear, without God we have become a lawless, uncontrolled people. God gave us the kind of faith that guided, healed, strengthened and eased the troubled heart, before, psychotherapy, before modern drugs, and before the time when men found ways of infiltrating the minds of young children teaching them “there is no God”, thus, there is nothing after this life. When that metaphoric baton was passed from faith to so-called science and medicine to minister to spiritual things by calling them “mental health” issues—people turned from trusting God—who knows all our troubles and away from the powerful word of God—that properly addresses all our troubles.

This is part two of the lesson titled “You are a Royal Priesthood”. In this lesson we will do some comparisons between the Old Priesthood and the new “Royal Priesthood”.

Overview study of the Old Testament Priesthood. Who were they, what they wore and what were some of their duties?

Acts 22:3 “I am indeed a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, taught according to the strictness of our fathers’ law, and was zealous toward God as you all are today.”

In this our final lesson in the series “Standing on the Promises”, we want simply to understand why we can trust every exceedingly, precious promise that God made. We must realize that God Makes Promises in (2) two Ways His Promises Are – Unconditional and Conditional – In other words God Said If! Blessings “IF” you Obey Deut. 28:1 “Now it shall come to pass, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all nations of the earth. And Curses “IF” you Disobey, Deut. 28:15 “But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:”
You see from this that we may misunderstand and become disappointed in God simply because we think He’s failed to keep His word. When all along the problem is our understanding, not His faithfulness. So, we must understand that many of the exceedingly great and precious promises of the Almighty God, are conditioned upon our obedience or disobedience.

As we come to the end of our series on the book of Ruth, the main question we should ask is, “What is the lesson of this book? If I could take it down to a central theme what would it be?” In this book we’ve seen hardship, death, commitment, love and the joy of marriage and a son born. But after all the ups and downs of life what we really should see is, the best is yet to come.

Paul used the Adjective, Verb and Noun all in one sentence: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). Description of God, how God modified the saved in Christ, and the blessing in Christ are tangible. This message will only point to six of the many blessing.

This study is centered around Peter’s Description of the Promises, “by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the [a]corruption that is in the world through lust” ( 2 Peter 1:4 ). Notice that Peter not only describes the promises as being “great”, but “exceedingly great”, Peter tells us they are “precious” and that God has given them to us. Indeed God is the great Giver and His greatest gift was that of His Son, “For God so loved the world that He gave…” (John 3:16), thus we should all be saying, “Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15).