Mark Holmes, #runttam

Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called, ‘Today’. - Hebrews 3:13

Thank You Lord, for continuing to provide for all of my needs ❤️🙏🏽

Hey y’all! Send me referrals for Music Mixing Engineers

Holiness is still a supreme attribute, still.

I’m open to change, because I listen to those I don’t understand or agree with

It’s not an easy task/ producing, writing, mixing, performing music from scratch/

Times do change, but Christians still don’t have the authority to bless sin.

During the initial years of The Church’s existence immediately following the resurrection of Jesus Christ around 32A.D., The Church faced constant turmoil and opposition from world leaders and governments. The Church was constantly brutalized and imprisoned in futile attempts to suppress the growth of The Church. Peter, Silas, and many others were jailed for sharing the Gospel. Believers like John were exiled. And believers like James were martyred. During those early years ranging from 32A.D. to 313A.D., being a Christian was actually “Illegal”, so choosing to become a follower of Christ was a very dangerous commitment to make. World leaders such as Nero the Roman Emperor, were notorious for persecuting and torturing The Church. But in 313A.D., the Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which newly made Christianity into a “Legal” religion—but prior to this edict, being a Christian was illegal. Yet and still, The Church continued to grow daily by the thousands during those early centuries of extreme persecution. But now, with the newly issued Edict of Milan, The Church could finally exist without being legally persecuted. And then several decades later in 380A.D., the Roman Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which is the edict that made Christianity into an official state religion.

Acts 5:27-33 | Acts 8:1 | Acts 16:20-24 | Acts 2:41 | Acts 16:4-5

There is a lot of confusion surrounding what actually is “The Church”, largely because there are many church-based organizations which are inappropriately claiming themselves to be the one true Church. One of the biggest examples of this type of confusion is found in the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), because the RCC erroneously claims to be the one true church. They are incorrect in that claim. Like many other denominations derived from a Christian-based belief system, the RCC is literally a “religious organization” constructed by the hands and minds of human beings. The same goes with Protestantism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or any other organized form of Christian-based orthopraxy that exists today. They are all expressions of how people choose to religiously organize the ways in which they practice their religion. But none of them—I repeat, none of them are exclusively “The Church”. There is a difference between organized religions constructed by people, and the collection of believers who are assembled by the working of God Himself. The Church is defined and constructed by God alone. The Church is not something that you get to join on a whim at your leisure. Sure, you can request for God to allow you to join The Church, but the only way you can actually become a part of The Church, is if God Himself allows you, transforms you, and transports you into His Church. There are no backdoors; there is only one Way to enter into the membership of God’s Church, and it is not through joining a man-made religious organization. The RCC is not the one true church, because they do not have the authority to define what belongs to God—God alone defines and builds The Church as He sees fit. Moreover, in these various organized religions such as the RCC, there are many people who are in fact a part of God’s actual Church, yet in the same breath, there are also many people in those organized religions who are NOT a part of God’s actual Church. Though the wheat and the tares grow together, they are not the same. And just because someone attends church or is a member of an organized religion, that does not mean that they are actually a member of The Church.
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Acts 17:24-25 | 1 Corinthians 6:19 | Matthew 13:30

The Christian Faith does not have its origin in mankind, but rather in God Himself. There was a time when people thought that Abraham was the founder of The Faith, but they did not understand that there was One who existed long before Abraham. That One, was Jesus. This was confusing to them, because on one hand, they rightly understood that Jesus had actually been “born after” Abraham had already lived and died. Moreover, there were lots of other humans who had been born before Jesus was born. Yet on the other hand, Jesus claimed to have “existed before” Abraham was even born. The Bible refers to Jesus as the Preeminent One, to signify that He was “the First”, having not only been the Firstborn in creation, but that He is also the first born from the dead, being First in all these things. And after rising from the dead, Jesus referred to Himself as “the First and the Last”. You see, whenever we consider Jesus in the scope of Church History, we must not lose sight of the fact that Jesus exists both inside and outside the history of Time. Jesus existed before time, then later He chose to enter time as a man, and then once again He exited time to sit at the right hand of God. The Lord Jesus’ ability to bend, manipulate, and control time in these ways, proved to be confusing to minds of the Pharisees in His day. But as it is clearer now to see, even before Abraham—who is seen as a father of our Faith, there was the Lord Jesus. 😤✊🏽🙂🙏🏽

John 8:58 | Exodus 3:14-15 | 1st Corinthians 1:19-26

It is possible, and also probable for Christians to become unnecessarily critical of other Christians who make mistakes. Because the inescapable fact, is that ALL Christians fall short of God’s glorious standard of perfection in their daily lives. And, some confrontations are warranted. There will always be Christians who fall short in one way or another. I sin, you sin, and all of us, like sinners, go astray. And this will continue to happen throughout the entire history of The Church, until Christ comes back to remedy us from this burdensome circumstance. The Church will continue to need correction occasionally, because we don’t always do what is right. From Nathan to David, Paul to Peter, even from you to me, let those who believe themselves to be mature in Christ, display their claimed maturity by addressing each of our failures—great or small—with wisdom, love, and care, keeping in mind that our Righteous Redeemer lived a perfect life on our behalf, to cover us whenever we eventually fail to do so ourselves.
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2nd Samuel 12:7 | Galatian 2:11 | Romans 7:19

The very first Christians were actually Jews. Consider this: Just five years before The Church was born, while Jesus was still growing up as a young man, the religion of Judaism was not yet what many would consider a unified religion. Instead, Judaism was more of a collection of various Israelite religious Sects, which held to their own individually unique beliefs. The four main Jewish religious sects were, the Essenes, Zealots, Sadducees, and the Pharisees. The Essenes were the highly mystical types who were quite pacifist, seeking to remain reclusive from society and world politics. The Zealots were practically the opposite of the Sadducees, where their religion was largely political, as they were very active in society and local politics, seeking political independence for their fellow Jewish people. The Sadducees were the religious elites who felt as though they were above believing in things like the resurrection from the dead. And fourthly there were the Pharisees, who consisted of the scribes, the scholars, and many of the Jewish common folk who were Pharisees. Being a Pharisee was more of a religiously comfortable middle ground for the average Israelite—they were not as extreme as the Zealots, yet also they were not as pacifist as the Essenes. Many of the very first members of The Church would end up being Jews who once belonged to those very same religious sects of Judaism. The only exception being the Sadducees, who did not become Christians, because they had believed resurrections were impossible. But when the Sadducees got news of Jesus resurrecting His friend Lazarus from the dead, and then later they also heard the news of Jesus being resurrected from the dead by God, their disbelief in resurrections were thoroughly demolished, leading to the total extinction of the Sadducee religious sect.

Matthew 22:23 | John 11:43-45 | Revelation 1:18

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