Tag: Following Jesus

Morning Musing: Hebrews 10:35-39

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“So don’t throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you need endurance, so that after you have done God’s will, you may receive what was promised. For yet in a ‘very little while, the Coming One will come and not delay.’ ‘But my righteous one will live by faith; and if he draws back, I have no pleasure in him.’ But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and are saved.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever missed your chance? If you have, think about that moment for a bit. What was the opportunity, and why did you miss it? Were you late for it? Did someone else snatch it from you? Or was the loss a matter of patience? There are not a few opportunities lost to a lack of patience. We want things on our timetable, but that’s not always or even often the timetable on which they operate. If we demand ours anyway, we’re setting ourselves up to miss out on a lot. As chapter 10 comes to a close, the author calls us to stick with following Jesus, even when it gets long and hard, so we don’t miss out on the best part. Let’s talk about it.

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Habits of Faithfulness

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With one more week to go in our series (and with this being the final part that I’m preaching), this week we are talking about another critically important way we can stand in our faithfulness to Christ even when we are standing alone. As we look at the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, we are going to talk about the kinds of things we do without having to think about them and what that means for our lives. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Habits of Faithfulness

I want you to think for just a minute about the sheer number of things you do on a daily basis that you feel like you could do with your eyes either metaphorically or literally closed. Given how automated many of the things you do are, that may actually be a tough list to compile. How many things in your life do you do because they are simply what you do? Surely your list includes some pretty basic things. If you use any kind of corrective lens, I suspect putting those on in the morning is automatic. Hopefully most of your personal hygiene routine runs on autopilot. The people sitting next to you are grateful for that. If you are a coffee drinker, your morning date with your coffee machine probably doesn’t require a lot of thought…which is probably good because if you are a coffee-drinker, you may not give a whole lot of thought to much of anything before that first cup starts energizing your system. 

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Morning Musing: Hebrews 10:22-25

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“…let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.” (CSB – Read the chapter) ‬‬

What should we do in light of the new covenant? That’s a rather big question. And it could go in all kinds of different directions. But the author of Hebrews here offers us three specific things he thinks it means for us. These are not necessarily the things we might expect—especially the third one—but they are exactly what God considered most important. Let’s take a look and see what we need to be doing.

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Live as You Speak; Speak as You Live

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This past Sunday, as we continued in our series, How to Be Faithful When No One Else Is, we were confronted with the fact that if our words and lifestyle don’t match each other, our words will be robbed of any power they might have otherwise held. This matters because speaking the truth is something we are called to do as followers of Jesus. Let’s talk about all of this through the lens of the next episode of Daniel’s story. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Live as You Speak; Speak as You Live

Imagine for a minute that you are sitting in an audience waiting for a comedian to come out on stage. When the guy finally walks out, he looks like a huge nerd. What’s more, behind him comes a stage crew member pushing out a big screen TV. When the audience looks a little inquisitive about the screen, the supposed comedian speaks up and says, “Oh, that’s for my PowerPoint slides.” Now, without knowing anything else, how excited are you about this comedian? Probably not very much. Somewhere inside you are thinking something along the lines, “I have seen comedians before, and you, Sir, are no comedian.” We don’t really want to listen to someone we don’t believe knows what they’re talking about. We’re terribly judgmental like that. And as much as we tell ourselves stories about not judging a book by its cover, we do it anyway. It’s like we can’t help ourselves. If you are presented with someone who does not appear to have any knowledge of the subject he is preparing to address, you’re going to start tuning him out before he even gets started. Now, maybe he earns a hearing in the few seconds you give him to grab your attention, but the odds aren’t in his favor. 

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Peter 4:15-16

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“Let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or a meddler. But if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed but let him glorify God in having that name.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The story of God lies at the heart of all of our stories. Because He is the creator of all there is, and because He left His fingerprints all over it, this shouldn’t come as any surprise. What this means in practice is that if you pay attention to the stories we tell, you are highly likely to find at least a whisper of the Gospel in them somewhere. Perhaps the authors intended to put it in, but far more often, it is there without the authors’ even being aware of it. This past week, I found yet another example of this. Come back with me to the series, Young Justice, and let’s talk about why the end of the third season was the best moment of the series so far.

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