“A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back.” (ESV)
Have you ever had one of those days when you just wanted to let everyone know what you were thinking? Or, maybe you’ve had one of those moments when you wanted to let one particular person know everything you were thinking about them. Did you follow through with that? If so, how did it go? Read the rest…
“Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
James advises patience here until the coming of the Lord Jesus. Now, many people think about patience as a mostly idle waiting for something to happen. We want something to do while we wait. We don’t really practice patience today anymore. Instead, we practice being distracted by entertainment so we don’t have to think about the fact that we can’t have something else we want immediately. Read the rest…
In this second-to-last part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we tackled what is perhaps the stiffest challenge to the Christian faith ever recorded: The problem of evil. How do we who confess our belief in a God who is good account for all the evil in the world? That’s perhaps a bigger question than we could answer over the course of a single sermon. What we can do is talk about how to respond to those who are struggling with it personally. That is exactly what we wrestled with in this message. Keep reading to see what we discovered.
An Absentee God
I read a story a couple of weeks ago about a serial killer in Russia. The man was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering 22 women. Recently he confessed to additional murders for which he had not been previously convicted. Fifty-nine additional murders to be precise. If you’re into math, that makes 81 people—mostly women—whom this monster raped, likely tortured, and murdered. He was a police officer the whole time. When he was off-duty, he would offer to give young women walking on the side of the road a lift home. Over a span of more than twenty years, eighty-one times somebody’s daughter disappeared without any apparent trace. Let’s just go ahead and ask the hard question: How, in a world presided over by a God whose goodness is affirmed over and over again by billions of His followers, is something like this allowed to go on for so long without recourse? Read the rest…
“But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
The fear of the Lord is a poorly understood concept even among His people. This is quite simply because we think about fear only in a single sense: terror. To be afraid of something isn’t good. Thus, while perhaps we should fear the Lord because we’re told to do so over and over and over again in the Scriptures, this isn’t something that ultimately draws us closer to Him. We fear Him so that we’ll do what He says. Once we develop the pattern of doing what He says, then we begin to grow closer to Him, at which point we don’t need to fear Him any longer. The logic here seems just about airtight…and it’s just about completely wrong. Read the rest…
“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
During the course of his first campaign for President, Barack Obama was asked a question about his thoughts on sex education in schools. His answer was unintentionally a great deal more revealing than he perhaps wanted of a worldview belief far more common today than it ought to be. On this particular occasion he was asked whether he supported students being taught an abstinence-only curriculum or preferred one that included lessons on various methods of contraception, including abortion. Read the rest…
The Nexus 