Tag: God’s character

Learning to Trust

Leave a comment

This week we are wrapping up our short series, When I Am Afraid. For the last three weeks we have been talking about how to deal with times of fear and anxiety in our lives. Ultimately, the way we are going to get through that particular storm is through our willingness to trust in God. But what if we don’t trust in God? What if someone we know who is struggling under the weight of life doesn’t trust in God? What then? Well, we have to learn how and why trusting Him is the best decision we’ll ever make. In this last part of our journey, unpacking that truth is what we are talking about with the help of something Jesus said that reveals a great deal about His character. Let’s dive right in.

Learning to Trust

I want you to think for a second about someone you just don’t trust. My guess is that you have at least one person in your life who fits that particular bill. I’m not as concerned with the precise reason for the mistrust right now as I am with the presence of the mistrust itself. Do you have that person in mind? Now, imagine that you are struggling with something fairly significant and this person comes and offers you help. Are you going to accept it? Probably not, right? Maybe if you are sufficiently desperate you’ll give it some consideration, but absent that, you’ll keep on struggling on your own rather than take help from this person. Why? Because you don’t trust them. You don’t trust they are really going to be there when you need them. You don’t trust they aren’t offering with insincere or ulterior motives. You don’t trust they aren’t going to let you down in the end. You don’t trust them. And when you don’t trust someone, it’s hard to receive much of anything from them. 

Read the rest…

Advent Reflections: Isaiah 9:6-7

Leave a comment

“For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. The dominion will be vast, and its prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now on and forever. The zeal of the Lord of Armies will accomplish this.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Grace is hard to find in our world. The world outside God’s kingdom doesn’t do grace. It’s all judgment and vengeance. The irony of this is that the world accuses God of this very thing. Yet while God surely does bring judgment when it is due, His first instinct is grace. We see this grace put most gloriously on display in the coming of Christ as a baby to live and die for our salvation. The arrival, or advent, of Jesus was something God started preparing us for long before the time finally came. The prophet Isaiah foretold His arrival more than once. Let’s take a look at one such prophecy.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Romans 12:19-20

Leave a comment

“Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for God’s wrath, because it is written, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.’ But ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing you will be heaping fiery coals on his head.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We’ve all been there. Someone comes along and does something that makes you mad. What’s more, they meant to do it. Now you are left with a choice: How are you going to respond? Do you get them back? Do you let it go? Do you express your displeasure in some unmistakable way? If we’re being honest, for most of us, our first instinct is to start plotting how we can get revenge in some way. That’s normal. It always has been. And if there’s no God, or if we can’t trust the gods to avenge us, that kind of thinking makes sense. But if there is a God as is revealed in the pages of the Scriptures, it doesn’t. Let’s talk about it.

REad the rest…

Morning Musing: Romans 11:33-36

Leave a comment

“Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and untraceable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? And who has ever given to God, that he should be repaid?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Sometimes the right response is praise. The right response to what? Well, all sorts of different things. A really good experience. A really hard experience. A particularly incredible gift. An especially profound idea. That last one is what drives Paul to praise here at the end of Romans 11. Expressions of praise in the Scriptures are always worth pausing to reflect on because the author is saying things about God that are true and worth not only knowing, but celebrating. So, what does Paul have to say about God here? Let’s take a look.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Romans 9:22-29

2 Comments

“And what if God, wanting to display his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience objects of wrath prepared for destruction? And what if he did this to make known the riches of his glory on objects of mercy that he prepared beforehand for glory—on us, the ones he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? As it also says in Hosea, ‘I will call Not My People, My People, and she who is Unloved, Beloved. And it will be in the place where they were told, you are not my people, there they will be called sons of the living God.’ But Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, ‘Though the number of Israelites is like the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved; since the Lord will execute his sentence completely and decisively on the earth.’ And just as Isaiah predicted: ‘If the Lord of Armies had not left us offspring, we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

So, yesterday we started a really uncomfortable conversation about God’s sovereignty and our subjection to that sovereignty. We like to think of ourselves as truly and completely free individuals. We are autonomous beings. And then Paul asks something like, “On the contrary, who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?'” That hits hard. And the more you think about it, the harder it hits. In fact, it hits hard enough that whereas I was originally going to treat these verses in the same post as yesterday’s passage, there was enough here when I started writing that I had to break it up into two posts. Without further ado, then, let’s keep working through Paul’s exaltation of God’s sovereignty and what that means for us.

Read the rest…