Tag: Trust in God

More Than Meets the Eye

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Sometimes we feel alone. We feel alone when we are all by ourselves. We feel alone when we are surrounded by people. Isolation isn’t a function of the proximity of other people. It’s more often first a mental state. When our circumstances get hard, or when we get into sin of some kind, we start to feel disconnected from the people around us, the people who love us. When this happens, our anxiety starts to grow. Then we start to feel disconnected from God. We struggle to see His help in our situation, and things just get worse. Elijah understood this feeling. He felt isolated and alone and terribly anxious because of it. Today as we continue our series, we are going to look at God’s encouragement to him and what that means for us. Let’s dive right in.

More Than Meets the Eye

I finally finished watching the Cobra Kai series on Netflix recently. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically a modern continuation of the Karate Kid story from the trio of excellent movies in the 1980s and early 1990s. To say the whole thing is a remarkable story of redemption and restoration is an understatement. It was fantastic. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch—very little out of Hollywood is these days—but it got Gospel redemption right in some really profound ways. There’s something else it got right as well. 

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Morning Musing: Psalm 131:1-2

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“Lord, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty. I do not get involved with things too great or too wondrous for me. Instead, I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like a weaned child.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How are you feeling these days? If you’re like most people, the answer to that is probably not as good as you’d like. You’re overburdened and under-resourced. You feel like you have the weight of the world pressing down on you and there’s no one to help you hold it. You’re stressed out and just wish you could rest, but there’s no end in sight to the busyness. Where can you find some relief? Take some comfort this morning in knowing you’re not alone in any of this. The ancient Israelites experienced it too and prayed about it when they went to worship. Let’s talk about it.

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You Want Me to Do What?

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This past Sunday we kicked off a brand-new teaching series called, Bible Stories to Make You Squirm. If you are the kind of person who believes the Scriptures should have some kind of a place of authority in your life, you are left with a thorny problem: There are some stories in there that are just downright uncomfortable. If they are there on purpose and for our benefit, what are we supposed to do with them? In this series, we’ll explore several of these hard stories and begin to see that all Scripture really is for our benefit. Even the hard stuff.

You Want Me to Do What?

Have you ever watched or read something that just wasn’t good?  It’s not necessarily that it was bad, it just wasn’t good.  You just didn’t enjoy it.  I remember watching Adam Sandler’s Punch Drunk Love when I was in college.  If you’ve never heard of it, you’re better off for that.  It’s a dark comedy about a socially awkward guy falling in love.  It was awful.  The credits rolled and all of us gathered in my friend’s living room watching it looked around at each other and as almost the same time said, “We can’t have that two hours of life back.”  I remember reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when I was growing up.  A book combining science fiction and medieval adventure should have been an easy winner.  It was all I could do to not put it down and find something better to read.  If I wasn’t such a perfectionist about finishing books I probably would have.  The thing about reading a book or watching a movie that isn’t good is that you can always just walk out.  There are some stories, though, that are harder to ignore. 

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