Do you believe that God loves you for real? Have you let that sink in your heart? Or is it only a nice, intellectual concept for you? God’s monumental love for us is a fundamental fact of Christian faith. If you don’t yet fully embrace it ask God to enable you to believe it. When you really grasp this lovely fact it opens you up to be fully human and fully alive. Because your value comes from God: you are…
Do you enjoy rooting for the underdog? I do. Whether in sports or fairy tales like Cinderella I’ve always enjoyed cheering the least likely to win. The world is a harsh place and it does my soul good to see that people do overcome adversities. There are a lot of stories of underdogs in the Bible. Today I want to look into how David got anointed to be king. He was the least likely candidate, just like Cinderella. Pay also…
Salvation is readily available for everyone. We don’t need to wait until heaven to experience the presence of God. We are all called to a God-filled life right here, right now. How do we do that? By repenting and asking God into our hearts. By getting back on the altar. Day after day.God’s readiness to give and forgive is now public. Salvation’s available for everyone! We’re being shown how to turn our backs on a godless, indulgent life, and how…
God has a master plan for the world. The whole history of mankind is about unfolding God’s story. God uses strategy of grace to advance his master plan. God wants to touch everyone with his redeeming love. It’s news I’m most proud to proclaim, this extraordinary Message of God’s powerful plan to rescue everyone who trusts him, starting with Jews and then right on to everyone else! God’s way of putting people right shows up in the acts of faith,…
Spiritual amnesia is one of the great dangers on our faith journeys. Forgetfulness of God’s goodness pushes us easily into a downward spiral towards spiritual emptiness. This happened time and time again for the Israelites on the wilderness. And it happens to us if we forget God’s graceful ways, either in biblical history or in our personal history. How could we avoid this spiritual amnesia? Spiritual disciplines have always been ways of keeping spiritual amnesia away. The most common ones…
Ignoring God leads to an empty life. We can try to fill our lives with different things. But because we were created to God’s image we long to be with God. That’s why we can’t find happiness outside of God. Like Blaise Pascal has said “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.” The stronger the dissonance between…
Over the weekend some of the quotes I tweeted got very enthusiastic responses from the tweeting community. I realized they have a common theme and thought I’d explore this a bit further. Especially when my daily Bible reading seemed to answer the yearnings of these quotes. “Life is too short not to spend it doing what God wants us to do.” (Jack Hyles) Life seems to fly by. The biggest threat seems to be that we don’t get anything done…
