Relax, God is in control

“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” –Romans 13:1 (NIV)

As we get nearer to Election Day let us remember the promise from Paul’s letter to the Romans, God-inspired Words. Dear Christian, don’t worry about the results of this election, don’t make yourself sick over what could happen, but trust that even though it is the people choosing who they would want as a leader that ultimately it is the Sovereign King of the Universe who determines who the earthly Kings and Presidents will be. No man can ever know the plans of God and we get only a glimpse into the final plans from scripture, and what wonderfully glorious plans they are. Romney or Obama will get chosen by God and for His purposes alone. In North Dakota Heitkamp or Berg will get chosen by God and for His purposes alone.

Now I know that once that paragraph is read people will wonder “Why Vote if God will ultimately choose and not man?” The reason why we should vote as Christians is that our God is a God who works through means. He could work apart from means but for reasons beyond what my puny mind can comprehend He works through means. God uses the things of this world and the people of this world to sovereignly work all things out for the good of those who love Him. Just like God could convert sinful man apart from a man preaching the gospel, yet He has declared that sinful man is only converted through the preaching of the gospel. (Ezekiel 37)

Now go and vote next Tuesday, and don’t be uninformed about the issues and the candidates but do your homework. And do not lose any sleep over what the results could be, but trust in the promise of Romans 13 that there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. What a comforting thought knowing that my God is in control!

Long Overdue

It has been a while since I wrote a post for this blog. I believe that the last post I put up was from Rome, Italy. Originally I planned on writing many more post about my time in the Eternal City, however due to the distractions caused by the allure of the ancient ruins of empires past and the vibrant culture of the Italian people, I only wrote one post. If you (if anybody is actually reading this) are disappointed that I did not write more about my time in Europe, I am sorry, I should have not visited the Coliseum twice and spent so much time sitting in Italian restaurants sipping wine and resurrecting medieval yet timeless debates with Catholic seminary students and priests. If you are dying to find out about my trip you are welcome to look at the pictures on my Facebook page. I plan on having a new post up soon and try to be more disciplined about being consistent with my blog posts.

Psalm 66

<sup>I was part of a prayer chain at my church today for National Day of Pray. A prayer chain is when people sign up for a time and come in to the church's sanctuary to pray during that time so that through out the dya from 8 am to 8 pm we had at least one person praying in the sanctuary. When it was my turn I started my time by reading some Psalms and stumbled upon Psalm 66.

1</sup> Shout with joy to God, all the earth!
² Sing the glory of his name;
make his praise glorious!
³ Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!
So great is your power
that your enemies cringe before you.
⁴ All the earth bows down to you;
they sing praise to you,
they sing praise to your name.” Selah

⁵ Come and see what God has done,
how awesome his works in man’s behalf!
⁶ He turned the sea into dry land,
they passed through the waters on foot—
come, let us rejoice in him.
⁷ He rules forever by his power,
his eyes watch the nations—
let not the rebellious rise up against him. Selah

⁸ Praise our God, O peoples,
let the sound of his praise be heard;
⁹ he has preserved our lives
and kept our feet from slipping.
¹⁰ For you, O God, tested us;
you refined us like silver.
¹¹ You brought us into prison
and laid burdens on our backs.
¹² You let men ride over our heads;
we went through fire and water,
but you brought us to a place of abundance.

¹³ I will come to your temple with burnt offerings
and fulfill my vows to you—
¹⁴ vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke
when I was in trouble.
¹⁵ I will sacrifice fat animals to you
and an offering of rams;
I will offer bulls and goats. Selah

¹⁶ Come and listen, all you who fear God;
let me tell you what he has done for me.
¹⁷ I cried out to him with my mouth;
his praise was on my tongue.
¹⁸ If I had cherished sin in my heart,
the Lord would not have listened;
¹⁹ but God has surely listened
and heard my voice in prayer.
²⁰ Praise be to God,
who has not rejected my prayer
or withheld his love from me!

Romans, Luther, and the Gospel

Buon Giorno! I made it to Rome safe and sound! First of all I would like to say I LOVE ROME! It is such a cool city. Just yesterday I ate lunch at a pizzeria behind the Pantheon, the day before that I ordered a chicken sandwich from a vendor by the Coliseum. Rome is the perfect city for a history nerd like me, to be able to walk among the ruins in the Roman Forum and to see Raphael’s tomb inside of the Pantheon is amazing to me. The place that my group is staying is called Al Casaletto; it is located in the south west part of Rome, just a few miles south of the Vatican. The heart of Rome is only a thirty minute bus ride away. We hop on the 870 bus and ride past the grand statue of Garibaldi, the man who is credited with uniting Italy. This is where we get our first view of the eternal city, domes and steeples of massive churches dot the ancient skyline, this is also the first glimpse one gets of the biggest and most prolific church basilica, St. Peter’s. Each of the other basilicas in Rome are dwarfed by this massive dome. It stands tall over the city like a watch tower, it can be seen almost anywhere in Rome. It is easy to have your breath taken away by its stunning beauty; however once I recall the history of its construction I am reminded of the darkness that this white-washed tomb holds.

                Martin Luther is obviously famous for being the spark plug of the reformation and for the recovery of the gospel from the corruption of the works righteous teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo the 13^th, in order to fund the finishing of St. Peter’s Basilica, ordered the selling of an indulgence. For some time before this Martin Luther was struggling with the authority of the scriptures and how the authority of the scriptures correlates to the authority of the Papacy in Rome. Luther was a professor of theology of the university in Wittenberg and was lecturing through the book of Romans. One verse however caught his attention and completely consumed the man and drove him to the point of madness. This verse was Romans 1:17 “For in the gospel a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’” Luther tells his story in his Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings.

I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. But up till then it was … a single word in Chapter 1 [v. 17] “In it the righteousness of God is revealed,” that had stood in my way. For I hated the word “righteousness of God,” which according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.

                Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteous wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importantly upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

                At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand [that] the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Here a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory…

                And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.

The righteousness of God that is revealed by the gospel is a gift that is received through faith and through faith alone. It is only made possible by the sacrifice of the spotless Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. The end of Romans chapter one through most of Chapter three, Apostle Paul brings all men, Jew and Gentile, to condemnation. Finally summing up his point in chapter three by stating “There is NO ONE righteous, not even one” (v. 3:10) and “for ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And now that every man is condemned to hell before a holy, righteous God, how is it possible for God to forgive us? This is the problem that must be understood, before we get to the good part.

Romans 3:21-31 has been called by many prominent church leaders the Acropolis of the Christian faith; the high point of scripture, the most important part of the bible, which is saying a lot considering how precious the whole book is. “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood.”

Because God, Jesus, came to earth took on flesh, lived a perfect, sinless life and was raised up on a tree and bore the full wrath of God almighty that was due for us poor wretched sinners, we can be justified, declared righteous by God and then adopted into His family. Jesus willingly died and poured out immeasurable love, kindness, and mercy so that one day the children of God can enter into paradise to enjoy the glorious riches of the Triune God forever and ever. AMEN!

SOLI DEO GLORIA!

Ready to go!

Well, tomorrow I am leaving my home and family behind in Bismarck and then be spending the next five weeks in the beautiful Rome, Italy. I am a little nervous; the past few nights have been restless as the checklist of things to do and to bring keeps rolling through my mind. I have given up on the fight of keeping my suitcase below fifty pounds and just paying extra. I have never done international travel like this before in my life (well technically you could count the week I spent in Thunder Bay, Ontario. But I wouldn’t count Canada as International travel; I call it going to Canada). The two trips I have planned are to Florence and then to Venice on March 30^th through April 1^st and will have my first experience of a European Hostel (nervous). And then just a few days after on April 4^th through the 6^th I will fly to Munich, Germany.

It has been a while since I have written a blog and since I am going on a big adventure of a life time, I figured what a better time to start back up. I really want this series of blogs to have two parts to them. The first part is kind of an online journal of the adventures I have been experiencing in Europe and the second part is my thoughts on the book of Romans. How cool is it going to be to read Paul’s letter to the early church in Romans while you are in Rome! Maybe I’m weird but to me that seems really cool. To help me understand and work through Romans I am using the MacArthur Bible Commentary. I don’t know if that’s the best one but that’s the only one I got and I am a poor college student.

I am experiencing a weird set of emotions including being excited, nervousness, and anxiousness. The Italian language has not been good to me. I guess I don’t have the Italian blood in me. Maybe German it more suited for me, it’s not as pretty sounding. I am really excited about what Romans will add to the experience. I have read Romans at least three or four times before but I have never gone in-depth like this before. When Martin Luther read through the book of Romans and studied it and changed the world because of the power of the words the books contains. John MacArthur has said “It's amazing if you just go back in history and see how the book of Romans affected people's lives. The greatest reformations and revivals that we know about were results of the power of this book.”

For example, in the summer of A.D. 386 a man named Augustine, a native of north Africa, who had for two years been the professor of rhetoric at Milan, sat weeping in the garden of his friend, Alpeous(?). He was almost persuaded to begin a new life and yet he found it impossible to break with his old life. As he sat, historians tell us that he heard a child singing in a neighboring yard, "Tolei Legae, Tolei Legae(?)" a little melody that says "Take up and read...take up and read."

It struck him that perhaps that was something he should do and so he picked up a scroll which lay at his friend's side, that scroll contained a portion of the book of Romans. He read it, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof."

"No further would I read," he said, "nor had I any need, instantly at the end of this sentence a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away." And in that very moment from one sentence in the book of Romans the church received the great Augustine...the framer of much of its theology.

In November, 1515 there was a priest by the name of Martin Luther who himself was known as an Augustian monk, who was the professor of sacred theology in the Catholic university of Wittenberg(?). And to his students he began to expound the epistle to the Romans. And from November of 1515 to the following September of 1516, he daily spent himself in the understanding of that epistle. And as he daily prepared his lectures, he became more and more appreciative of the centrality of the Pauline doctrine of justification by...what?...faith. He writes, "I greatly longed to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, `the righteousness of God.' Because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and deals righteously in punishing the unrighteous. Night and day I pondered until I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby through grace and sheer mercy he justifies us by faith. There upon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise, the whole of Scripture took on a new meaning and whereas before the righteousness of God had filled me with hate, it now began to fill me inexpressably with a sweet love. The passage of Paul became to me the gateway to heaven." And need I say what contribution Martin Luther made?

It was the evening of May 24, the year was 1738. There was a man by the name of John Wesley. His biographer says that he went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street where a man was reading Luther's Preface to the epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine he wrote in his journal while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, "I myself felt my heart strangely warmed." Wesley goes on, "I felt I did trust in Christ and Christ alone for my salvation and an assurance was given me that He had taken my sins away, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death." And so it was in Aldersgate Street at the reading of the book of Romans that John Wesley was redeemed. And we all know the contribution he made.

From http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/45-01/romans-the-man-and-the-message

The book of Romans is many times considered the Apostle Paul’s greatest works. I have heard it be called the cornerstone of the Christian faith. Romans chapter three alone has to be the most concise portrayal of the Christian gospel. No other book in the New Testament quotes the Old Testament more than the book of Romans does. If you have never read through Romans before, I encourage you to do so and I would love feedback. May God give me safe travels and may He build us up in faith and love to boldly proclaim the truth of His glorious gospel. May the Holy Spirit soften hard hearts and open ears to the truths of God and His wonderful Scriptures.  

“I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”  Romans 1:16-17

Soli Deo Gloria,

Mitchel Nickolauson

Is the end in sight?

 

Ideas are unpredictable. They are the root of anything that is good and evil in this world. Ideas can grow into a person starting an international mission’s organization that helps give thousands of villages in Africa clean drinking water. Ideas can also lead to the deaths of millions of Jews in concentration camps. Everything that we use every day was conceived from an idea from a single person. The revolutions that we can see unfolding in the Middle East started with an idea of a single person. And America and the rest of the western world watches violent revolutionary protests spread throughout the entire region. I have sometimes thought if this kind of major change is possible in the comfortable America? And another thing that I have thought about is where is God in all of this.

I have watched a couple shows of Glenn Beck now, and I’m not a hard core conservative I try to be independent. But the past couple shows Glenn has talked about how he thinks that the world is beginning a change in the shift of world powers. He says that in like twenty years you won’t recognize America as you know it today. I know that a lot of what Glenn Beck says in ultra-conservative-republican anti-Obama/liberal rhetoric-crazy-lunacy, kind of like the weird paranormal conspiracy radio program that I listen to as I fall asleep each night. But as I watch CNN and see the events unfolding in the Arab world I am starting to believe that this is the start of something huge, that twenty years from now when I am teaching a social studies or current events class I can say to them for example “I remember exactly where I was at when I heard that such and such event happen in Cairo” (or wherever else it may happen) I think this is something that comes with being a history nerd but when I see something like this unfold I can’t help comparing it to something like the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia or something like that.

Another thing I lay awake and think about at night is what God has planned through world events like the Middle East revolutions and the Japan Earthquake. Even though these events now look completely unrelated, you got to realize that in some weird divine way God has interwoven them to be related and affect each other and you can’t help to realize that God will use each of these events to achieve his final ultimate goal which is Jesus returning and establishing his kingdom. Another thing that we have to keep in mind is not to just read the book of Revelation and just instantly assume that anybody could just predict how the endtimes will play out. Remember that the religious teachers did those same exact things when Jesus first came, they expected the messiah to make Israel into this powerful kingdom and to defeat the Roman Empire in some revolutionary uprising. Then Jesus came and they didn’t recognize him when he came because God’s ways are not man’s ways and they already made Jesus into who they wanted him to be. I believe that the book of Revelation is clearly written about what is to come, but God just hasn’t made it apparent to us yet but his word tells us to be ready because his return will be like a thief in the night and come when we least expect it in a way that we don’t know. But when it happens whether sooner or later it will be a sight to behold and all I can imagine is that we will be speechless as we stand in awe!

“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.”- Matthew 24:6

Excerpt from Stream's in the Desert

The following is today's (march 14th) devotional from L.B. Cowman's devotional Streams in the Desert:

Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. (Exodus 20:21)

God still has His secrets – hidden from “the wise and learned” (Luke 10:21). Do not fear these unknown things, but be content to accept the things you cannot understand and to wait patiently. In due time He will reveal the treasures of the unknown to you – the riches of the glory of the mystery. Recognize that the mystery is simply the veil covering God’s face.

Do not be afraid to enter the cloud descending on your life, for God is in it. And the other side is radiant with His glory. “Do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 4:12-13). When you feel the most forsaken and lonely, God is near. He is in the darkest cloud. Forge ahead into the darkness without flinching, knowing that under the shelter of the cloud, God is waiting for you. Selected

                                Have you a cloud?

                Something that is dark and full of dread;

                A messenger of the tempest overhead?

                A something that is darkening the sky;

                A something growing darker by and by;

                A something that you’re fearful will burst at last;

                A cloud that does a deep, long shadow cast?

                                God’s coming in that cloud.

                                Have you a cloud?

                It is Jehovah’s triumph car: in this

                He’s riding to you, o’er the wide abyss.

                It is the robe which He wraps His form;

                For He does dress Him with the flashing storm.

                It is the veil in which He hides the light

                Of His fair face, to dazzling for your sight.

                                God’s coming in that cloud

                                Have you a cloud?

                A trial that is terrible to thee?

                A dark temptation threatening to see?

                A loss of some dear one long your own?

                A mist, a veiling, bringing the unknown?

                A mystery that insubstantial seems:

                A cloud between you and the sun’s bright beams?

                                God’s coming in that cloud.

                                Have you a cloud?

                A sickness – weak old age – distress and death?

                These clouds will scatter at your last faint breath.

                Fear not the clouds that hover o’er your boat,

                Making the harbor’s entrance woeful to float;

                The cloud of death, though misty, chill and cold,

                Will yet grow radiant with a fringe of gold.

                                GOD’S coming in that cloud.

A man once stood on a high peak of the Rocky Mountains watching a raging storm below. As he watched, an eagle came up through the clouds and soared away toward the sun. The water on its wings glistened in the sunlight like diamonds. If not for the storm, the eagle might have remained in the valley. In the same way, the sorrows of life cause us to rise toward God.