“Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'” (ESV – Read the chapter)
How do you make plans? How attached to those plans are you? What James offers here is a reminder that all of our plans must be made contingent on what the Lord has planned. All of them. We can strive for whatever we want, but nothing will happen that He does not allow for some reason. The question then becomes: What does God have planned? Read the rest…
“It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Facing hard stuff is something we all have to do at some point in our lives. It may be a little hard. It may be a lot hard. But in a broken world, hard stuff is part of the journey. The only variable here is how we handle the hard. Read the rest…
“And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
We serve the God who is in the business of bringing life where it does not exist. He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. Where there is death, He transforms it into life. Read the rest…
One of the challenges many critics of the church have used to write it off is the fact that we have some skeletons in our closet. There have been several times in the last 2,000 years when the church got its mission not just wrong, but devastatingly so. Still, are things really as bad as our critics allege? A sharper look at history suggests perhaps not. In this fourth part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we take a look at the church’s supposed dark past and discover that there may be a good deal more light there than most folks might think. Read on for more.
A Fount of Injustice?
There is a story about the interactions between a powerful institution and a particular scientist from the 17th century that has come to define much about how many people view the church today. The institution was the Roman Catholic Church. The scientist was a man named Galileo Galilei. Galileo, as the story usually goes, by carefully following the scientific method, discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth as was widely believed in his day. Instead, the truth is the exact reverse: the earth revolves around the sun. For espousing this scientific fact which violated not only their false explanations of how the universe worked, but also the theological explanations undergirding them, the Church set out on a campaign to persecute this courageous scientist into silence. When this didn’t work, Galileo was excommunicated—a social death sentence in that day—and placed under arrest. He spent the remaining years of his life in prison where he died a martyr for the cause of science. Read the rest…
“For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to also bridle his whole body.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
There’s an old playground saying that’s used as a defense against being called a mean name. You’ve probably said it before: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It’s a smart retort in the face of an ugly word, but it is entirely false. Read the rest…
The Nexus 