The Philadelphia Church - Sabbath Readings 2008

April 26, 2008 Under the second and eternal Sinai covenant, the Sabbath commandments includes the weekly Sabbath and the three times a year when all of Israel is appear before God—and this is what is seen in Leviticus chapter 23. The “Christian” who does not observe the weekly as well as the annual Sabbaths breaks the Sabbath commandment, and is a transgressor.

First High Day Unleavened Bread Keeping the Sabbath of God sets a person apart from this world and is a sign that identifies the person as being of the household of God. But the “Sabbath” is not just the seventh day of the week: it is every day listed in Leviticus chapter 23. It is the weekly Sabbath, plus the three seasons a year when Israelites are to appear before the Most High. And the Sabbatarian Christian who will not come before God on these three seasons breaks the Sabbath just as surely as does the Pope.

April 19, 2008 Keeping the Sabbath by faith (and organizing the disciple’s life around keeping the Sabbath) becomes a representation of the daily sacrifice just as the paschal lamb physically circumcised Israel sacrificed during “unleavened” is a type of Jesus being sacrificed as the Passover Lamb of God at the hour when temple officials were then (31 CE) deeming that paschal lambs should be sacrificed.

April 12, 2008 Within Sabbatarian Christendom, dispute still exists over when the Passover sacraments should be taken. There should never be any dispute that the so-called Last Supper was the Passover meal referred to by all of the gospel writers.

April 5, 2008 Every Sabbatarian disciple needs to avoid those men who would have them either adopt Judaism’s calculated calendar or would have them look to present day Jerusalem when setting a calendar. Every congregation needs to look for itself for the new crescent moon.

1st Quarter 2008

March 29, 2008 We don't today see people immediately dying because of some transgression of the law. Nor was this seen in the 1st-Century before Calvary. So what's going on? And the "what" amounts to realization that death is separation from God, not necessarily absence of physical breath.… His death did not end the Law, or the promise of life. Rather, the Law moves from being written on two tablets of stone to being written-when the new covenant is implemented-on two tablets of flesh, the heart and mind of the disciple.

March 22, 2008 In this era, the person who will live as Jesus lived does so only because of the person's faith that Jesus is the Son of the Most High and the person's elder sibling. There is no other reason why a person believes Moses' writings while professing that Jesus is Lord (add John 5:46-47 to Rom 10:6-9). There is no other reason why the person will return to Genesis without skepticism and with understanding that does not come from human intellect to read again two creation accounts, one about the first Adam, a man of mud, and one about the last Adam, a life-giving spirit, with the first being last and the second being first.

March 15, 2008 The churches of God have, for the most part, ignored “one origin,” because of the awkwardness that the clause produces. They should not have; for if Jesus is not ashamed to call disciples “brothers” why should disciples be ashamed of being called “brothers”?

March 8, 2008 What Jesus told those seeking His life can be said to every leading Christian theologian: “‘You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life’” (John 5:39-40).

March 1, 2008 The parakletos is no more a living entity than the Holy Spirit is—and they cannot be the same, for the world can receive and will receive the Holy Spirit whereas the testimony of Jesus is that the world cannot receive the parakletos.

February 23, 2008 A man—a person—is a soul that can die, but is a soul who shall not suffer condemnation because of the sin and sinfulness of his father (or she, her mother), nor enter into God’s rest because of the righteousness of father or mother. And this was the state of all human beings until the man Jesus came to John the Baptist to fulfill all righteousness by being baptized (Matt 3:15).

February 16, 2008 As long as Christ dwells in disciples, these disciples are with the Bridegroom. The Comforter] has not been sent from the Father, has not come to disciples. But the time will come at the beginning of the seven endtime years of tribulation when the Bridegroom is taken from disciples by the Father.

February 9, 2008 The foundation that Armstrong laid is now charred rubble, his work having gone up in flames when tried by fire. Only work constructed on the foundation Paul laid will stand—and this work of Philadelphia is built on Paul and Christ Jesus.

February 2, 2008 The rest of God is heaven. Entering the rest of God is entering heaven. The natural type of this rest is entering Judea [Canaan, the Promised Land]. The spiritual type in this era of entering into God’s rest is Sabbath observance. Christ’s Millennium reign over the earth will be from the heavenly realm and the last shadow of entering heaven.

January 26, 2008 The Millennium is not yet here: disciples will not enter the Millennium as physical human beings but as glorified spirit beings or not at all. Disciples need not journey to Judea, for circumcision is not now a matter of the flesh but of the heart and mind, and flint knives (Josh 5:2-7) are inappropriate instruments for circumcising the heart. Therefore, disciples in this era enter God’s rest when they keep the Sabbath, the sign between Israel and God that Israel knows that God sanctifies the nation (Ex 31:13).

January 19, 2008 Today, former Believers have become skeptics, dismissing Paul as a fraud and Jesus as a false prophet. This is especially true of former disciples of Herbert Armstrong: the small amount of knowledge they had acquired from Armstrong has been taken from them—and they celebrate the loss of this knowledge as liberation from error and a personality cult. They write with bitterness about their liberation from Herbie’s cult on Internet blogs, little realizing that not only has the knowledge they once had been taken away, but so has been their promise of salvation. They serve as examples of what will be seen on a far larger scale once the seven endtime years of tribulation begin.

January 12, 2008 The person who does not believe that Paul was an apostle and specifically the apostle who laid the foundation for the endtime house of God will lack spiritual understanding and will be like the person (usually of high intelligence) who does not believe that any God exists, that all such belief is carried-forward superstition from an earlier era. No argument will convince the person that God exists. The base for such a belief is not present in the person. Rather, the same amount of faith (or perhaps much more) is employed in disbelief and denial.

January 5, 2008 Understanding holiness, righteousness, and the new covenant begins with eagerly seeking to live by every word uttered by God, with these words forming even the material tent of flesh in which the born of Spirit son of God now temporarily dwells.

The Philadelphia Church encourages all disciples and fellowships that desire to join or partner with the association in taking the good news that all who endure to the end will be saved to contact us.

The Philadelphia Church
PO Box 640
Port Austin, MI 48467