Morning Musings: Genesis 12:2

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“And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

God’s blessings when we experience them are an amazing thing.  Have you known the blessing of God before?  Have you experienced the weight of His presence in a hard moment?  Have you worn the lightness of His burden when you were deep in the trenches of life?  Have you had one of those moments when everything was going right?  That must have been something like what Abram was feeling. Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Romans 6:20, 22

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“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. . . .But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

This is one of the more confusing arguments Paul makes over the course of his letter to the church in Rome.  First, he says Christians were slaves of sin before being saved, then, he says that Christians, once they have been saved and set free from sin, are slaves of God.  So we are saved from slavery only to enter into another kind of slavery?  What gives?  Why not just stay where we were at first? Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Job 29:1-4

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“And Job again took up his discourse, and said: ‘Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness, as I was in my prime, when the friendship of God was upon my tent…'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Job’s ordeal had been intense at this point.  He had lost everything including his health.  That’s not really specific enough.  He had faced total financial ruin.  All of his children had died in a tragic accident (an accident we, the readers, know was caused by Satan).  His wife had functionally abandoned him out of her own grief.  And he was experiencing horrendous physical suffering as well.  To make matters even worse, three of his best friends had spent days with him arguing with greater and greater intensity and insistence that he was ultimately to blame for all of his troubles because of some sin that was going unconfessed in his life.  The old adage, “when it rains it pours,” does not even begin to cover it here. Read the rest…