This is Daniel Whyte III, president of Gospel Light Society International with the Whyte House Family Devotional Reading of Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening podcast. This is Episode #53.

Charles Spurgeon was a prominent English Particular Baptist preacher. He was very influential among the Christians of various denominations during his age and even today, and is commonly called the “Prince of Preachers”. After some time of alternately searching for God and running from God, he had a powerful encounter which led him to give his life to Christ. Spurgeon was only 16 when he preached his first sermon and he began publishing books shortly afterward. At the time of his death, he had preached nearly 3,600 sermons and published 49 volumes of commentaries, sayings, anecdotes, illustrations and devotions. Spurgeon said, “encouraging thoughts are like honey to the heart”, and wrote this devotional in hopes that its uplifting messages for each day of the year would bring comfort and refreshment to our walk with God. He was inspired by Isaiah 50:4 which reads, “He wakeneth morning by morning. He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned” and Psalm 63:5-6 which says, “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips; when I remember Thee upon my bed, and meditate on Thee in the night watches.”

John 1:16 reads: “And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.”

These words tell us that there is a fulness in Christ. There is a fulness of essential Deity, for “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead.” There is a fulness of perfect manhood, for in him, bodily, that Godhead was revealed. There is a fulness of atoning efficacy in his blood, for “the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin.” There is a fulness of justifying righteousness in his life, for “there is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” There is a fulness of divine prevalence in his plea, for “He is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by him; seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” There is a fulness of victory in his death, for through death he destroyed him that had the power of death, that is the devil. There is a fulness of efficacy in his resurrection from the dead, for by it “we are begotten again unto a lively hope.” There is a fulness of triumph in his ascension, for “when he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and received gifts for men.” There is a fulness of blessings of every sort and shape; a fulness of grace to pardon, of grace to regenerate, of grace to sanctify, of grace to preserve, and of grace to perfect. There is a fulness at all times; a fulness of comfort in affliction; a fulness of guidance in prosperity. A fulness of every divine attribute, of wisdom, of power, of love; a fulness which it were impossible to survey, much less to explore. “It pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.” Oh, what a fulness must this be of which all receive! Fulness, indeed, must there be when the stream is always flowing, and yet the well springs up as free, as rich, as full as ever. Come, believer, and get all thy need supplied; ask largely, and thou shalt receive largely, for this “fulness” is inexhaustible, and is treasured up where all the needy may reach it, even in Jesus, Immanuel—God with us.

PRAY.

Thank you for listening to the Morning and Evening podcast. If you do not know the Lord as your Savior, here is how you can be saved from Hell and walk with the Lord morning and evening until you go to that wonderful place called Heaven when you die:

First, accept the fact that you are a sinner, and that you have broken God’s law. The Bible says in Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

Second, accept the fact that there is a penalty for sin. The Bible states in Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death…”

Third, accept the fact that you are on the road to hell. Jesus Christ said in Matthew 18:8: “Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.” Also, the Bible states in Revelation 21:8: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”

Now that is bad news, but here’s the good news. Jesus Christ said in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Just believe in your heart that Jesus Christ died for your sins, was buried, and rose from the dead by the power of God for you so that you can live eternally with Him. Pray and ask Him to come into your heart today, and He will.

Romans 10:9 & 13 says, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved… For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

If you believe that Jesus Christ died on the Cross for your sins, was buried, and rose from the dead, and you want to trust Him for your Salvation today, please pray with me this simple prayer: Holy Father God, I realize that I am a sinner and that I have done some bad things in my life. I am sorry for my sins, and today I choose to turn from my sins. For Jesus Christ sake, please forgive me of my sins. I believe with all of my heart that Jesus Christ died for me, was buried, and rose again. I trust Jesus Christ as my Savior and I choose to follow Him as Lord from this day forward. Lord Jesus, please come into my heart and save my soul and change my life today. Amen.

If you believed in your heart that Jesus Christ died on the Cross, was buried, and rose again, allow me to say, congratulations on doing the most important thing in life and that is accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour! For more information to help you grow in your newfound faith in Christ, go to Gospel Light Society.com and read “What To Do After You Enter Through the Door”. Jesus Christ said in John 10:9, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.”

If you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior today, please email me at [email protected] and let us know. There is some free material that we want to send you. If you have a prayer request, please e-mail that to us as well, and we will pray for you until you tell us to stop.

God loves you. We love you. And may God bless you.

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This is Daniel Whyte III president of Gospel Light Society International with The Scripture & the Sense Podcast #439, where I read the Word of God and give the sense of it based on an authoritative commentary source such as the Bible Knowledge Commentary or Matthew Henry Commentary. This podcast is based upon Nehemiah 8:8 where it says Ezra and the Levites “read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” The aim of this podcast is that through the simple reading of the Word of God and the giving of the sense of it, the church would be revived and the world would be awakened.

Today we are reading Amos 4:2-3.

2 The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that, lo, the days shall come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks.

3 And ye shall go out at the breaches, every cow at that which is before her; and ye shall cast them into the palace, saith the Lord.
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That was Amos 4:2-3. Now here is the sense of it.

The Bible Knowledge Commentary reads:

In order to show the vehemence of His anger and the certainty of their punishment, the sovereign Lord had sworn by His holiness that every one of these society women would be dragged from the city either to captivity or to death. God had vowed the entire reality of His inmost being to this unchangeable sentence. An enemy would storm and capture the city. The destruction would be so thorough and the breaks in the wall so numerous that each woman, rather than going with others toward an exit gate, would simply be pushed straight out of the city. Once outside they would be fastened to ropes with hooks for a single-file march into Assyrian exile. Those who balked or refused to be led away would be forcibly snagged with large harpoons or fishhooks, much like fish pierced together and jerked over one’s shoulder to be carried to market. Yanked in such manner, they eventually would be cast out as corpses as the march neared Harmon. “Harmon” may refer to Hermon, a mountain at the northern tip of the Bashan region on the way to Assyria. If so, an awful irony would attach to their fate: the “cows of Bashan” would end as carrion in Bashan!
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Thank you for listening to the Scripture & The Sense Podcast. Remember to read the Word of God each and every day and pray without ceasing to God for wisdom to understand it and apply it to your life. Most importantly, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Please stay tuned for a complete presentation of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ so that you can get your soul saved from Hell to that wonderful place called Heaven when you die. May God bless you and keep you is my prayer.

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MOSCOW (AP) – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday backed a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow him to seek re-election after his current term ends in 2024, ending uncertainty about his future. 
  
Putin gave his support to the amendment put forward by lawmaker Valentina Tereshkova, who as a Soviet cosmonaut in 1963 became the first woman to fly to space. She proposed either scrapping Russian’s two-term limit for presidents or resetting the clock so Putin’s four terms wouldn’t count.
  
Lawmakers in the Kremlin-controlled State Duma quickly endorsed Tereshkova’s proposal, along with a sweeping set of constitutional changes proposed by Putin.
  
In a speech to lawmakers Tuesday, Putin spoke against scrapping presidential term limits altogether but backed the idea that if the constitution is revised, the two-term limit only would apply from 2024 on. The president’s current six-year term expires in 2024.
  
Putin, 67, has been in power for more than 20 years, becoming Russia’s longest-serving leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. After serving two presidential terms in 2000-2008, he shifted to the Russian prime minister’s office while protege Dmitry Medvedev served as a placeholder president. 
  
Putin reclaimed the presidency in 2012 and won another term in 2018.
  
A series of constitutional amendments Putin proposed in January were widely seen by Kremlin foes as part of his efforts to stay in power. However, it wasn’t clear until Tuesday how Putin could achieve that goal.
  
Observers had speculated that Putin could use the changes to scrap term limits; move into the prime minister’s seat with strengthened powers; or continue calling the shots as the head of the State Council.
  
He rejected all those options and finally revealed his cards Tuesday after Tereshkova, a legendary figure widely revered for her pioneering space flight, offered her ideas. 
  
“I propose to either lift the presidential term limit or add a clause that after the revised constitution enters force, the incumbent president, just like any other citizen, has the right to seek the presidency,” she said to a raucous applause. 
  
After Tereshkova spoke, Putin quickly came to parliament to address lawmakers.
  
He said he was aware of public calls for him to stay on as president and emphasized that Russia needs stability above all.
  
“The president is a guarantor of security of our state, its internal stability and evolutionary development,” Putin said. “We have had enough revolutions.”
  
However, he said that since the constitution is a long-term document, scrapping the term limit wasn’t a good idea.
  
Then he dropped the bombshell, saying he positively viewed Tereshkova’s alternate proposal to restart the term count when the revamped constitution enters force.
  
“As for the proposal to lift restrictions for any person, including the incumbent, to allow running in elections, this option is possible,” Putin said.
  
He added that the Constitutional Court would need to judge if the move would be legal, although the court’s assent is all but guaranteed.
  
Putin’s statement came as lawmakers were considering the amendments in a crucial second reading when changes in the document are made.
  
The Kremlin-controlled lower house, the State Duma, quickly endorsed the proposed amendments by a 382-0 vote with 44 abstentions. A vote on a third reading will be a quick formality. A nationwide vote on the proposed amendments is set for April 22.

Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
 

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If anyone had looked at a map of Southern Baptist church plants in Boston just 15 years ago, there would have been just two. And the city’s spiritual desert extends far beyond just Southern Baptists. According to a Barna Research study from 2017, of the least-churched cities in America, Boston is fourth (and Springfield, Mass., just an hour and a half away is third).

David Butler, the North American Mission Board’s Send City missionary in Boston, says Christians for decades have prayed for new, Bible-believing churches in the city that was once North America’s spiritual epicenter. For much of those decades, God seemed slow to respond to the prayers.

Although there is still a long way to go, in the last decade, a small miracle seems to be emerging among Southern Baptists in Boston. Today, Boston Southern Baptists have 74 active church plants — nearly 40 times the number just 15 years ago.

“Some of the things that are happening in Boston right now — and not just in our tribe — are unprecedented,” Butler said. “How can you explain that a son of a Russian-born dissident now leads a church of 500 to 600 and meets every Sunday in the largest Jewish synagogue in Boston? How do you explain how a pastor of a mega-church in Southern California, filled with the call of God, moves his family here with along with a couple of other families? And now, with a very entrepreneurial spirit, they’ve opened up four or five different coffee shops and each one of them is an outpost for the Gospel, as well as a place for a church plant.”

Today, the narrative is changing in Beantown — and throughout New England — for Southern Baptists. More than four out of 10 Southern Baptist congregations in New England have been started since 2010. More than a third of baptisms in the Baptist Convention of New England came from churches Southern Baptists have started in the last decade.

But Butler says there is still much work to do. He notes that, despite the gains of the last decade, Southern Baptists only have churches in 52 of the 297 communities, neighborhoods, and towns in the Greater Boston area. New England Southern Baptists are praying to start 300 new churches in the city by the time Boston turns 400 in 2030.

Southern Baptists aren’t setting significant church-planting goals only in Boston. Last month, when SBC Executive President Ronnie Floyd unveiled his Vision 2025 plan, it included a bold goal of adding 6,000 churches, or 1,200 per year, to the Southern Baptist Convention in the next five years.

In an article by Floyd last month, he noted that most years the 1,200 new churches would include 750 church plants, 50 new campuses added by multi-site churches and 400 new churches affiliating with the SBC.

The goal came from the North American Mission Board, which has the SBC assignment for assisting Southern Baptist churches in planting new churches. NAMB President Kevin Ezell says the goal is needed to keep up with population growth in North America and the attrition facing Southern Baptist churches.

“Achieving that goal will be a challenge,” Ezell said. “It will require the efforts of all Southern Baptists.”

In 2018, the last year of updated statistics, Southern Baptists planted 624 new churches. Sixty-two percent of those churches were either non-Anglo or multi-ethnic. Another 254 churches began cooperating with the SBC that year.

Since launching Send North America at the 2011 SBC Annual Meeting in Phoenix, NAMB has prioritized partnering with new church plants outside of the Southeast, where most Southern Baptist churches reside. NAMB has particularly focused on 32 strategic “Send Cities,” like Boston, and three strategic areas (collegiate communities, military communities and Puerto Rico).

Ezell says the biggest challenge Southern Baptists will face in trying to add 1,200 churches in five years is finding enough qualified church planting missionaries.

“We could plant a hundred more churches if we had the planters to do it,” Ezell said. “We have fine-tuned our assessment process so that we are sending out qualified missionaries who are ready for the field, but that has meant that the numbers have gone down.

“Quality means more to us than quantity. First, for the sake of spreading the Gospel, we want every church to succeed. But also, these missionaries are real people whose lives and families are deeply affected if they enter the field and discover that they were not prepared for the challenges. And if a church does happen to fail, it might present a bad testimony to the community where that church plant was attempted, often making it that much harder for the next missionary who seeks to reach that community. So there is a lot riding on it.”

To overcome the challenging need for new church planters, NAMB has been helping Southern Baptist churches develop a Multiplication Pipeline, which helps churches “call out the called” and discover new potential church planting team members and equip them to lead.

Source: Baptist Press

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Southern California sounded like a vacation spot to Ebbie Davis at first, not a location for serious mission work. Besides, the seminary degree she was working on at the time focused on international church planting, not North America.

But as she looked at an opportunity to serve in San Diego through the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) GenSend program, a friend asked some questions about what her time there would entail.

“I said I’d be working with a church plant there,” Davis recalled, “and learning how to live my life on mission and do ministry in the context of the city.”

Her friend pointed out that it sounded exactly like the aim of her degree program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Davis realized it might be a perfect fit.

GenSend is NAMB’s missions development program that enables college-age students, age 18 to 25, to serve in a NAMB Send City for six to eight weeks and learn how to live their lives on mission. They come alongside missionaries in church planting and compassion ministry for an in-depth missions experience.

In North America, approximately 75 percent of residents are not born-again believers, which means more than 272 million people are without Christ. While NAMB helps churches plant churches everywhere for everyone, the urban centers of the continent not only have higher population density, but those in cities are also frequently more secular than other regions of the United States and Canada.

“Our Send Cities are 32 of the highest populated areas with the greatest need for the Gospel,” said Jeremy Aylett, NAMB’s Send City Missionary in San Diego. “Millions of people, for example, live here in San Diego, and the reach of this city extends around the world.”

At the moment, one of the biggest challenges for church planting in North America stems from not having enough qualified missionaries who can serve. GenSend affords many young people the opportunity to reshape their view of what it means to be a missionary.

Many leave the program with a plan to leverage their lives for the sake of the Gospel, even if that does not mean becoming a pastor or church planter.

The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American missions provides funding that makes GenSend possible. Students spend their summers serving on the field and can focus on building relationships, sharing the gospel and connecting people they meet with a local church — all without the burden of how they are going to pay for their expenses.

“They don’t have to worry about the logistics of living in the city,” Davis explained. “They only have to worry about, ‘Who can I talk to next to tell them about Jesus?’”

Source: Baptist Press

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As winter comes to a close, a magnificent scene in the sky has appeared, leaving spectators in awe.

The final full moon of the winter season is a “super moon” which occurs when it’s closest to Earth in its orbit.

Some Christians call this last full moon of winter the “Lenten Moon” for the season of Lent before Easter. 

Lent is known as a time of prayer, repentance, and recommitment leading up to the celebration of Christ’s resurrection at Easter and a season of new beginnings and spiritual rebirth through Jesus Christ.

According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the last full moon is also referred to as the “Worm Moon.” When the temperatures start rising and the ground begins to soften, earthworms reappear, inviting the return of robins.

A picture of the #SuperMoon last night, taken by one of our forecasters. #WormMoon #SuperWormMoon pic.twitter.com/mn3y8dMh1X

— NWS Riverton (@NWSRiverton) March 9, 2020

That means the moon will appear much larger and brighter than normal and the best time to see it is right after sunset.

The super moon lit up the sky around the world on Monday at 1:48 pm Eastern Time, inspiring people to post their snapshots on social media.

Check out pictures of tonight’s full Moon rising behind the U.S. Capitol! #Supermoon More – https://t.co/5btzXpR9AR pic.twitter.com/ma8WjfE9i3

— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) March 10, 2020

Today’s fullmoon rising over Seattle and I got lucky with that ferry timing too. Yes, it is one single shot. pic.twitter.com/TMEew96M7E

— Sigma Sreedharan (@sigmas) March 10, 2020

Tonights full moon atop Stage Harbor Light in Chatham #capecod pic.twitter.com/hE7nZvDvgn

— Nick Haveran (@nhaveran) March 10, 2020

Full moon rising!! Out at the East End Trails! #yeg #FullMoon #canoncanada pic.twitter.com/jpa3GFKjA0

— Keith Moore (@kmoorephotos) March 10, 2020

The full moon today at Sevanavank, a medieval monastery founded by princess Mariam in 874 AD. #Armenia pic.twitter.com/HAaOcLndXG

— Armenia (@ArmeniaPic) March 9, 2020

Tuesday night is the last chance to see the current super moon.

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