Was Jesus Christ married? Did Jesus have a wife?

The papyrus dates from the fourth century — roughly 350 years after Jesus’s life and death.

The recent discovery and translation of the fourth-century "Jesus' wife papyrus" has reopened the discussion as to whether Jesus had a wife / was married. The "Jesus' wife papyus" says, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ...'" This discovery is interesting in that it is the first Gnostic writing to explicitly state that Jesus had a wife. While a couple of the Gnostic gospels mention Jesus having a close relationship with Mary Magdalene, none of them specifically state that Jesus was married to her or to anyone else. Ultimately, it does not matter what the "Jesus' wife papyrus" or Gnostic gospels say. They have no authority. They have all been proven to be forgeries invented to create a Gnostic view of Jesus.

If Jesus had been married, the Bible would have told us so, or there would be some unambiguous statement to that fact. Scripture would not be completely silent on such an important issue. The Bible mentions Jesus’ mother, adoptive father, half-brothers, and half-sisters. Why would it neglect to mention the fact that Jesus had a wife? Those who believe/teach that Jesus was married are doing so in an attempt to “humanize” Him, to make Him more ordinary, more like everyone else. People simply do not want to believe that Jesus was God in the flesh (John 1:1, 14; 10:30). So, they invent and believe myths about Jesus being married, having children, and being an ordinary human being.

A secondary question would be, “Could Jesus Christ have been married?” There is nothing sinful about being married. There is nothing sinful about having sexual relations in marriage. So, yes, Jesus could have been married and still be the sinless Lamb of God and Savior of the world. At the same time, there is no biblical reason for Jesus to marry. That is not the point in this debate. Those who believe Jesus was married do not believe that He was sinless, or that He was the Messiah. Getting married and having children is not why God sent Jesus. Mark 10:45 tells us why Jesus came, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Do you want to learn about the true "wife" of Jesus? If so, please read our article on "What does it mean that the church is the bride of Christ?"

Recommended Resource: Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss the Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture.

Source: GotQuestions.org

Joy Unspeakable

Joy must be very important because it is often encouraged and taught in the Bible. 

It is more than feeling happy. It is definitely more than giggling and laughter. 

Joy is a deep satisfaction that you have made the right decision, especially in the direction of God's will. 

It is the harvest of the seeds of faith that you have sown some time ago. It is the fruit of the Spirit. 

Most importantly, joy is Jesus! 

Let Jesus embrace you today and let your joy be full.

"Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory," 1Peter 1:8

Rev Albert Kang

Jesus In Your Eyes?

Evangelist Reinhard Bonkke

During the years of our tent crusades in Africa my music-minister Adam Mtsweni and I were looking for a new platform organ and went from shop to shop in the city of Johannesburg. 

It was noon, and there was one more shop we were heading for. On arrival I saw a salesman hanging around during the lunch-break, and I thought he had hardly noticed us. 

My colleague and I went from instrument to instrument, but suddenly that lone salesman stood in front of me. His eyes were wide open and his face as white as a sheet. “Sir”, he stammered, “I can see Jesus in your eyes.” 

I was dumbfounded. “How can this be?” I thought, “a total stranger says he can see Jesus in my eyes?” 

We had something like a revival in the music-shop, and when I left walking to the car I said, “Lord, I will never understand how something like this is possible.” 

Then the Holy Spirit spoke to me “No problem! Jesus lives in your heart, and sometimes he likes to look out of the windows!” 

What a wonderful truth. In John 14:23 “Jesus answered and said unto him, if a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” 

REINHARD BONNKE

If You Carry A Wallet, Passport and Credit Cards, Read This!

Here are some very helpful tips for you if you carry a wallet, passport and credit cards.

1. Do not sign  the back of your credit cards. Instead, put 'PHOTO ID REQUIRED.'

2. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts,  DO  NOT put the complete  account number on the 'For' line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who might be handling your check as it passes through all the check processing channels won't have access to it.

3. Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address.Never  have your  SS# (identity card number) printed on your checks. (DUH!) You can add it if it is necessary. But if you have It printed, anyone can get it.

4. Place the contents of your wallet on photocopy machine. Do both sides of each license, credit card, etc. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel.. Keep the photocopy in a safe place..I also carry a photocopy of my passport when I travel either here or abroad. We've all heard horror stories about fraud that's committed on us in stealing a Name, address, Social Security number, credit cards..

Unfortunately, I, an attorney, have firsthand knowledge because my wallet was stolen last month. Within a week, the thieves ordered an expensive monthly cell phone package, applied for a VISA credit card, had a credit line approved to buy a Gateway computer, received a PIN number from DMV to change my driving record information online, and more. But here's some critical information to limit the damage in case this happens to you or someone you know:

5. We have been told we should  cancel our  credit cards immediately. But the key is having the toll free numbers and your card numbers handy so you know whom to call. Keep those where you can find them.

6..  File a  police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc., were stolen. This proves to credit providers you were diligent, and this is a first step toward an investigation (if there ever is one. But here's what is perhaps  most important of all: (I never even thought to do this.)

7. Call  the  3 national credit reporting organizations  immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and also call the Social Security (identity card)  fraud line number.. I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for credit was made over the Internet in my name.

The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit..

By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves' purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert. Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away this weekend (someone turned it in). It seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks.

Forging Your Character

From a rock, a refined masterpiece is unveiled.

Forging Your Character 

by Jim Rohn

Personal success is built on the foundation of character, and character is the result of hundreds and hundreds of choices you may make that gradually turn who you are at any given moment into who you want to be. If that decision-making process is not present, you’ll still be somebody—you’ll still be alive—but you may have a personality rather than a character, and to me that’s something very different.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you must take responsibility for forming. You build character by how you respond to what happens in your life, whether it’s winning every game, losing every game, getting rich or dealing with hard times.

You build character from certain qualities that you must create and diligently nurture within yourself, just like you would plant and water a seed or gather wood to build a campfire. You’ve got to look for those things in your heart and in your gut. You’ve got to chisel away in order to find them, just like chiseling away rock to create the sculpture that previously existed only in the imagination.

But the really amazing thing about character is that, if you’re sincerely committed to making yourself into the person you want to be, you’ll not only create those qualities, you’ll strengthen them and re-create them in abundance, even as you’re drawing on them every day of your life. That’s why building your character is vital to becoming all you can be.

Three Steps to Enhancing Your Personal Performance

Three Steps to Enhancing Your Personal Performance

by Jerry Clark

1. Clarity of Outcome: Before you begin any endeavor, know in advance exactly what you expect your outcome to be. By getting clear on your outcome, you will be using the awesome force of what I call the "Future Pull.”

In other words, the future you create for yourself pulls you closer to it and empowers you to take the proper actions in the present. So before you do anything else as it relates to your personal or professional life, take time to get crystal clear on what your desired outcome will be. See it in your mind's eye until you feel really emotional about it.

2. Consolidation of Power: This is a fancy word I learned in 1982 while taking Martial Arts. It simply means Focus. Since you have a certain amount of time, energy, and money to devote towards accomplishing your outcome, it's important to know which activities you should direct your resources towards. If you don't take the time to determine which of the multitude of possible activities will provide you with the highest payoff, you may find yourself squandering much of your resources. Thus, apply the 80/20 rule here.

The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activities. Therefore, it's important for you to concentrate your efforts on the 20% of the activities that will get you 80% of the results. Most people concentrate on the 80% of the activities that will get them only 20% of the results. 

In a nutshell, 80% of your time should be spent on the following activities: 

(a) Using and Sharing your products 

(b) Exposing people to your opportunity 

(c) Attending and Promoting events 

(d) Engaging in personal development and 

(e) Learning and Teaching the system your company and support team members have set up for you. 

These are the high payoff or revenue producing activities. You can file your product orders and clean out your desk after hours, i.e., during non-revenue producing time.

3. Commitment to Disciplines: This is where you actually execute your action plan... Once you know which areas you will be focused on, you can now get busy by moving ahead in those areas... It's important to remember that consistency is the key at this stage.

By doing the small simple disciplines on a daily basis, eventually the compounded effect will kick in and you will "Collect Your Outcome". Every day in every way, you're either performing simple disciplines or simple error in judgments. Apply this simple three-step process and watch what happens to your personal performance levels.

The Toughest Sermon To Prepare

Preparing a sermon is easy and yet it is not. It's easy because the Holy Spirit is actively helping me to prepare it. It is tough, because the same Holy Spirit is convicting me of the very things I would be admonishing others to do or not to do.

For example, the sermon that I preached last Sunday at High Praise Church. After the service, most comments from the congregation were good because it spoke to their hearts. Even Grace said it was a good sermon because it ministered to her. However, my dear wife knew the 'anguish of soul' that I had to go through just to get this sermon out. Let me explain - the sermon was about becoming a Grace Giver. 

Apparently, the topic was not a problem because having been a recipient of God's grace,it should be an easy task to produce an acceptable sermon. As the sermon preparation progressed, my heart became heavier and heavier. The Holy Spirit was not telling me what to say to the congregation but was dealing with the discrepancies in my own life. Every word that I penned became sharp arrow of conviction. There were so many long pauses for prayer in between the preparation, so much so, that it took a much longer time to complete the sermon.

Being a recipient of God's grace many times over, I should be the most gracious person. The Holy Spirit showed that it was not the case - I was seldom as gracious as I should be. In many relational encounters, my inner spirit was more adversarial and not at all loving. It was warlike and lacked the ingredients for peace. It was only through self-control, social graces and the ability to mask this innate struggle that made me looked and sounded like a peace-loving person. The Holy Spirit had nothing to do with pretense and fake stuffs. 

The danger of having pretended for a long time was that I somehow thought the pretense was the genuine product. It was like a story that I heard in Cambodia about the Cambodians drinking fake whisky of a particular brand for so many years that when the real whisky arrived, they rejected it. 

This was not the first time that the Holy Spirit used my own sermons to convict me of sins or mistakes in my life. I remember one occasion that I had to pull off the highway so that I could weep and repent. It happened after listening to the recording of my own sermon about the difference between a 'driven person' and a 'called person'. King Saul was such a 'driven' man that he failed in fulfilling his call to be the leader of Israel. David, on the hand, was a 'called' man who took his call seriously. Even though he made many mistakes and committed serious sins, he always returned to His God for help. Acknowledgement and repentance were the first steps David took to receive forgiveness and then to his spiritual recovery. Driving that drive, the Holy Spirit revealed that my 'driven' life had to be replaced. I had wanted my church to become a mega-church that I stopped at nothing to achieve it. The Lord was not happy about aht and He wanted me to repent of that. Alone in the car, by the side of a busy highway, I sought His forgiveness.

It was because of God's grace that He allowed the Holy Spirit to reveal the present discrepancy. God had nothing to do with my pretense and wanted to remove the false display of peaceful attitude, intentions and motives. They had to be genuine or God could not do a deeper work in my life. 

I should not live a lie any more. This hypocrisy had to be overwhelmed by truth. His grace and mercy provided that revelation of truth which made it impossible for me to hide behind any excuses. The light of His loving truth was powerful. It shone through every dark corner of hypocrisy and self-deception. 

It was humbling but not humiliating. It was redeeming and not destructive. It a surrendering of one's will to the One whose will provides a much better proposition. It was a confession unto the grace of God and not the judgement of God. 

He had reprimanded me so that I could be a better servant. He had accepted me as who I was when He saved me but now He is changing me to be like His Son. The conviction was not for the purpose of crushing my spirit but transforming it. 

This overpowering experience does not mean that the Holy Spirit is done with me. No, He is not leaving me alone. Sad would be that day if He would no longer speak because I no longer have the capacity to listen. As my relationship with Him is dynamic, He will continue to guide, correct and adjust me on my pilgrimage. The journey of being more like Christ continues. 

The grace provided is also dynamic and it will carry me through. This is a good feeling. I know that my Redeemer cares enough to teach and guide me. I am thankful that my experience of His grace is not just at the point of my salvation but an ongoing experience that brings joy of transformation. 

"Dear friends, we are already God's children, but He has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we know that we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He really is." (1 John 3:2)

Rev Albert Kang
20 August 2012