Bethesda Shalom

Judges 6:7-24 When circumstances sink so miserably low, we grow accustomed to it and can’t see how things can ever change.  WE FORGET!!!  Every revival has begun from the place of low ebbs!! Moses didn’t come on a fluffy cloud with a bolt of lightning to deliver Israel.  Where did God find him?  In a place of low ebb, his people were oppressed and enslaved by the Egyptians!  In the days of Gideon, it was the same.  The Midianites were instruments of humility to turn the hearts of His wayward people back to Him.  When Israel cried out to God, God raised up a deliverer!  From whence did God find this man?  In the palaces of power and influence?  On the contrary; God found His instrument of revival by the winepress, threshing a handful of wheat and hiding in fear.  Men love to look on the outward appearance, but have yet to look where God’s eyes are found – on the heart!  This sermon is an encouragement for believers.  It matters not how incapable you may feel you are. God has a work for you to do in His power!

Part 4 Whenever the doctrine of the Trinity comes under enemy fire, it is a direct assault upon the persons of the Godhead and thus a direct assault on God Himself.  The Apostle John understood this when in his day he contended earnestly for the verity of the Christian faith against an early form of Gnosticism called Docetism.  John shot it straight and made no bones, saying, “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: (but) he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also” (1 Jn. 2:23).  Meddle with the Son and you meddle with the Father; deny a cardinal tenet of Christ’s nature, and you lose the Father in the process!  You cannot have it both ways and yet the irony is, the cults insist you can.  Whether it be Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, or Christadelphians, each attack the deity of the Son of God, stripping Him of His eternal glory while at the same time insisting that they still have the Father!  Concerning the person of Christ, Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus is a created spirit not

Judges 6:1-12 When a generation loses touch with God and the favour of the Lord is taken away, the next generation coming after will have to start all over again!  I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of demolishing a wall.  I’m no builder, but I know for sure that it took whoever built the wall a whole lot longer to build it than it did for the person smashing it down.  My dear people, look around and see; you don’t need me to tell you that we are living in days of great spiritual declension.  This land of ours that once enjoyed regular seasons of refreshing and harvest blessing has for some time now been crippled in the grip of a dearth.  As we begin this series, looking at the life of Gideon, we begin with the sin of God’s people and His remedial judgements. What was true in the days of Israel, is true in our day.  This is a call for the Church to seek the face of God in humility, prayer, and repentance if perhaps the Lord might turn His face again towards His people.

Psalms 62:1-8 Deliverance is not always instantaneous. Sometimes there is delay, and it’s in those seasons of waiting that if we’re not careful, we can lose hope!!  This sermon is an encouragement to the Body of Christ NOT TO LOSE HOPE IN THE WAITING!!  Hope is not a throw of a dice, there’s no chance with God.  He doesn’t deal with probabilities, HE IS GOD OMNIPOTENT!

Part 3 Jehovah’s Witnesses, like all true Christians of every denomination, are monotheistic in their expression of belief. They, like us, believe in one eternal God.  The point of divergence comes however when they maintain that the singular being of God is without a plurality of persons.  The doctrine of the Trinity affirms that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society deny this truth and aggressively attacks this position in its written literature. In this teaching, we take to task the literature of the Watch Tower and counter its heretical claims with Biblical truth.  For Jehovah’s Witnesses, the name of God which it maintains is Jehovah is everything.  But is His name Jehovah?  Does history bear this out? How should the divine name of God (Tetragrammaton) be transliterated?  What if, from the Watch Tower’s own Bible, one could prove that Jesus is Jehovah?  We endeavour to answer all these questions, proving conclusivel

Proverbs 21:22 There are many names given to us in the Holy Scriptures to describe the enemy of our souls. Before ever Satan was revealed as a dragon, he was first revealed as a serpent.  That’s why in Revelation 12:9 we read, “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him”.  Note the title given to him by John, “that old serpent”.  How old?  As old as sin itself!!  I don’t know how long the enemy planned and schemed the ruinous, murderous downfall of mankind, but within minutes, he had executed his plan to perfection!!  How did he do it?  As a dragon?  That would have been too obvious!!  So he came into the garden as a serpent.   Hear the Word of God your hearts and take note!! 

Part 2 As one traces the history of the beginnings of Jehovah’s Witnesses, two names are indispensable to the formation and development of this cult: Charles Taze Russell and his successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford.  In the 1830s, a Baptist minister from New York by the name of William Miller began sharing his new-found belief, that Jesus Christ was going to return around the year 1843.  This belief began to gain momentum across denominations, and by 1840 it had become a nationwide campaign. This was the birth of what became known as Adventism and it was from this influence that the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society would emerge. In this teaching, we examine the history of the Watch Tower cult from its beginnings until the present day. We review some of its teachings that have changed during this period and critique its peculiar version of the Bible, the New World Translation.  Download PDF notes: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/bethesdashalom/2_History_of_Jehovahs_Witnesses.pdf

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

The Sanctuary Conference 2024@Cloverley Hall

1 Peter 3:3-8 The word “joy” appears in some sixty verses in the New Testament of the KJB, and that’s not including the 40 additional occurrences of the same root derivatives “joyful”, “joyfully”, “joyfulness” “joying”, “joyous” and “rejoice”. This simple three-letter word “joy” is like buried treasure, everyone’s searching to find it but they're looking in all the wrong places!  The world you see deals in what is called “fool’s gold”.  To the naked eye, it bears some resemblance to the real thing, but when you run it through a few simple tests, it’s shown to be a fraud!  Happiness is just like this; a superficial counterfeit for joy.  You say, what’s the difference? Happiness is, the agreeable feeling of pleasure that one experiences when circumstances work in one's favour!! When circumstances are not working in one’s favour? Then you have the opposite of happiness, sorrow!! Christ has a better way for His people, which is the way of JOY!! 

Part 1 As of 2023, there are approximately 8.8 million Jehovah’s Witnesses globally, spread across 239 countries.  Between September 2022 and August 2023, 1.8 billion hours were spent in the field of service publishing the news of Jehovah’s Kingdom with an average of 7.3 million Bible studies being conducted each month.  If you compare this with the average amount of hours spent in outreach by Evangelicals, it is shameful on the part of us who profess to have the truth.  Concerning missionary zeal, one cannot fault Jehovah’s Witnesses for their witnessing endeavours  – it’s in their DNA.  What do they have to show for all of this effort?  Last year saw just short of 270,000 people baptised into the dedication of Jehovah’s service.  That’s just over a quarter of a million people, won over to a cult!   In this introductory teaching, we peel back the veneer of the exterior to uncover what Jehovah's Witnesses believe and teach.  Download PDF notes: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/bethesdashalom/1._Introduction

2 Chronicles 34:14-21 I lament the deplorable days of biblical ignorance that pervades so much of the professing Church today Ministers in God’s pulpit without a Word from God because they don’t know the Word of God themselves — blind leaders of the blind!  Can I suggest to you, that it’s not through lack of education that men’s knowledge of the Bible is so meagre in this hour, literacy rates in the Western World are better than they’ve ever been in the history of the English-speaking world? Nor is it through want of material, the tramp on the street has better access to the Word of God today than most of history has ever had.  We’ve translations coming out of our nostrils, Bible Apps galore...NO the problem facing the Christian is not one of lack of opportunity, but one of desire and appetite. He delights in the things he enjoys doing most. Don’t get me wrong, he’ll give a precursory glance over a verse or two just before hopping into bed, but dig into the Bible? No thank you, I’ll leave that to Pastor!  The

The 19th Century has been rightly identified as the cults' spawning ground. Many of the major cults with us today were born at the later end of the 19th century, which saw a literal explosion of false prophets and teachers carried through to the last century. Joseph Smith, Charles T. Russell, and Ellen G. White are just a handful of such false teachers and prophets to rise out of the 19th Century – The cults that they forged and founded; namely Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists have influenced millions for the cause of Satan!! Jesus warned His disciples when asked about the sign of His coming and the end of the world, saying ”…many false prophets shall rise and shall deceive many” (Mat. 24:11). In this teaching, we look at the definition of what constitutes a cult. We look at the warnings given in the Bible of the rise of such groups who would secretly bring in damnable heresies. We look too at the emotional and psychological strongholds that cults have on their victims. Download note

Matthew 21:28-32 In commenting upon James 1:22-25, Albert Barnes noted the following which we must take to heart: “It is implied here, that by merely hearing the word but not doing it, they would deceive their own souls. The nature of this deception was this, that they would imagine that that was all which was required, whereas the main thing was that they should be obedient. If a man supposes that by a mere punctual attendance on preaching, or a respectful attention to it, he has done all that is required of him, he is laboring under a most gross self-deception. And yet there are multitudes who seem to imagine that they have done all that is demanded of them when they have heard attentively the word preached. Of its influence on their lives, and its claims to obedience, they are utterly regardless”.  May the Lord move your heart to action through the hearing of this sermon so as not to be a hearer only, but a doer of His Word.