Archive for October, 2013
The Problem of Seeing God’s Strength as Your Own
But Isaiah 41:10 speaks to the fact that God will fight our battles in and through us. Sometimes, that means that we actually do something on our behalf, submitting ourselves to Him so that He will work in and through us. Other times, it means to do nothing and allow God. Each situation is different.
God’s Permissive vs. His Perfect Will in Life
In all things, God is Victor. In every way, God’s purposes are being accomplished, whether through His permissive will or His perfect will. We also see this in the lives of numerous individuals in the Hebrew Bible (OT). At times, Pharaoh hardened his own heart. On other occasions, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. How can we justify that in terms of “free will”? It is difficult, but the truth appears to be that God will use the unsaved person to glorify Himself. Pharaoh already had an entrenched disposition that led him to harden his heart against God.
Mark Driscoll Crashes the Strange Fire Conference and Then Lies About What Happened
Because of the conference, Driscoll took it upon himself to literally crash the event. I know for a fact that there was a waiting list of at least 400 people to get into that conference. Due to the lack of space, many were denied and only the original 2,800 had seats for the conference. For Driscoll to simply crash the event is something that I don’t believe glorified Christ. Of course, he would likely argue that he did not believe the event itself brought glory to God so that gave him the right to crash it. He even tweeted to his followers that he would be there soon, as a heads up.
Nehemiah is Our Example of How to Build the Wall in Spite of Troubles Surrounding Us
Obviously today, we are not placing physical bricks in a wall. We are introducing unsaved people to God. Satan wants us to stop doing that and he will use intimidation, fear, false charm, and anything else he can muster to change our direction. The only thing we can do is as Peter says and that is to resist the devil and he will flee from us. How do we resist? Through prayer and to see how intense the battle in prayer can get, look no further than our Lord’s difficult time in the Garden of Gethsemane, just prior to being betrayed by Judas (cf. Matthew 26).
Continue Reading October 22, 2013 at 9:46 AM Leave a comment
EBT Madness: A Picture of Things to Come?
This is, of course, the problem with relying on computers to run our lives as well as the problem related to expecting the government to fill your needs on a permanent basis. Computers literally do control many areas of our lives and I think we have long gotten past the point of even noticing it. We’ll get back to EBT cards in a moment.
Jesus Said “Let Your Yes Be Yes and Your No Be No”
In the past week, I’ve experienced three separate individuals telling me one thing but doing another. At first I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to learn from this and to make matters worse, at least two of the individuals attend the same church I attend. In essence, I had learned that they told me one thing, but had really lied. They were being duplicitous, but today we call it being politically correct. Jesus says simply that what they did was evil.
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