CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GODLY AND UNGODLY
”But to the wicked God says: “What right have you to recite my statutes or take my covenant on your lips? For you hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you. If you see a thief, you are pleased with him, and you keep company with adulterers. “You give your mouth free rein for evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you. “Mark this, then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver! The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God!” —Psalm 50:16-23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On-whMoulOM
Here are some characteristics of people who don’t want anything to do with God.
- They can be “religious”
- They hate discipline
- They cast God’s Word behind them
- They are pleased with thieves
- They keep company with the sexual immoral
- They give their mouth to evil
- They are deceitful
- They speak against others
- They slander others
- They think God is like them
- They forget God
These will not see the salvation of God. Only those who worship Him and order their lives rightly, according to His desires, will see the salvation of God. It is interesting when God is silent that people take that silence as an indicator that God is like them. But the day is coming when they will find out that this is not the case.
Salvation has been experienced by all of us who worship our Lord God Almighty. There came a time in our lives where we acknowledged Who He is and started to follow Him. Below is when that started for me. I do not follow Him perfectly, but my desires is to do so.
A LIFE IS CHANGED
By Ted White
I was a junior in High School when my Grandfather died. It was the first funeral that I had ever been to and it shook me to the core. My Grandfather was a mason, working with stone and brick. I worked with him when I was a teen. He was a hard, rough man. He drank hard and smoked much. Unfortunately he got me started drinking at a young age. He had been warned by doctors to stop drinking and smoking or he would not live very long because of his emphysema. He told the doctors he would live like he wanted to. He did live the life-style he chose, but he also ended up dying as the doctors told him he would. The last picture I have of him was at the old Hitchcock Hospital when it was in Hanover, NH, tubes running out of his body and a tracheotomy having been established so he could breathe and be attended to. Tears flooded my eyes when I saw him in that state. A week later he died.
The reality of the finality of death hit me hard at the funeral. People began filing out after the funeral, but instead of going out the door, they turned to pass the open casket. As I passed the casket and looked in, there was my lifeless Grandfather’s body and great emotion welled up inside me. The end of life was not pleasant.
This experience of my Grandfather’s death caused me to start asking questions. Did God really exist? Was there really a heaven, a hell? What was death like? Nobody I knew around me could help me with those questions. It would be another seven years before I found the answers to those questions.
Even though I had started asking questions about life and death after my Grandfather died, my life-style did not change. I really had the same philosophy of how to live life as my Grandfather had. “I’ll live like I wanted and nobody will tell me any different.” I drank much and often trying to find some reality in life… or to escape it. But, this behavior drove me from reality into an escapism that could have easily led to my death. There are many things I have done that would shame me to repeat and there were more than a few close calls with death. There was this emptiness inside that I just could not fill regardless of what I tried to fill it with. It was always there, a deadness inside. Once I thought suicide was the answer, but the attempt failed and nobody knew about it.
Living a life-style that I knew could have easily ended in death. I decided to enter the military, just to get away from the place and people where I had been living. So I went into the Seabees of the Navy for a four-year hitch, thinking that I would know what I wanted to do with my life by the time I finished the four year commitment. I went in as a heavy equipment operator, something I thought I would enjoy. Trouble is I brought myself with me. People and places can change, but if the person fleeing doesn’t change, things remain essentially the same, but just in a different location.
The military did help me in the area of discipline and to acquire some valuable skills, but my life-style did not change. My four-year enlistment passed with much more partying and there were situations that could have led to my death or the death of others. Then my roommate, Andy, made a decision to follow the Lord. Well, that was good for him, but I didn’t need that stuff. Although, when he wasn’t in the room I would pick up his New Testament that he left on our desk and read it.
Andy had invited me to a church picnic on a Saturday at 7pm and I accepted the invitation. When that Saturday came around I went to the beach in the morning and partied with some friends, but I planned to keep my word and attend the picnic. I went back to the barracks, took a nap and got up in time to shower and get ready. I was at my metal door locker and reached in for a shirt. I hung it back up saying to myself, “No, I really don’t want to go to this thing.” A second time I reached for the shirt only to hang it up again and say the same thing. Then I reached for it a third time, hung it up and sighed. At that very moment I remembered what I had said before I enlisted, “When I get out I will know what I will want to do with my life.” I would be getting out in less than a month and I did not have a clue what I wanted to do with my life. Immediately after that thought came this impression which I would have told you at the time it was an audible voice which said, “Turn from your evil ways or be condemned forever… and become a priest.”
This shook me to the core. I went over, sat on my bed and was literally shaking… Andy came into the room at that very moment and said he had forgotten something. From his locker twenty feet away he said, “Ted, what is wrong with you! You’re white as a ghost!” (We had been in the Bahamas for 8 months and I spent most of the time operating an asphalt paver and was black from the sun.) He sat next to my bed and I told him what happened and that I was not going anywhere. This really shook me up.
Two days later I talked with a pastor that led services on the base. He shared the gospel with me and revealed a piece to me that I never understood before. It was about what was really happening at the cross and how it affected me today. When Jesus died on the cross He was taking the penalty for my sin as well as the sin of the whole world. He was dying in my place so I could be forgiven of my sin, come into a relationship with God through Him and become the person the Lord desires me to be. I trusted the Lord in a back side room of the church while it was getting dark. The shadows may have hid the tears that streamed down my face, but they were tears of gratitude and relief.
A short time after I had trusted Jesus my roommate said, “Ted, God could call you into a public speaking ministry.” I laughed and laughed. “No way, not me,” I told him. But, that is exactly what the Lord did. See God is in the transformation business. He can take a person like me who dropped a class in high school because of having to talk in small groups of people I didn’t know and change him to desire to lead and speak to groups of any size. That is what He has done. I have had the great joy to share His love in prisons, nursing homes, at camp grounds, in children’s & Teen groups, at high school graduations, in adult groups, in the U.S., Russia, India, Australia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Guatemala, on tv, on radio and through writing in various venues as well as pastoring a local church.
Who would have thought… when I was in high school… that I would be doing what I am doing today. Surely, I would not have thought it would be so. God does change lives. He surely changed mine. He was not “forced” on me. Neither was it an “organization” that impacted me. It was through the Holy Spirit of God that the Father drew me to His Son (John 6:44). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD6khv6pGkw&t=31s
