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May 24 - June 18, 2019
It seemed as though people that I thought were my friends saw me as suddenly more legitimate now that I was going to join the club of the married.
And Jesus, I was sure, would use me in his victory over sin in a special way.
Red flag
The talk that R and I shared during this time was too intimate.
The Spirit’s work in our lives is evident through our obedience to God and our love for our fellow man.
Faith and worldview are intimately intertwined.
No, I had been a double-minded follower of Christ. I followed R who followed Jesus (or, so it appeared). He was my bridge to the gospel, the Bible, the Church, and Jesus himself.
1) Had R not been in that church at that particular time, I would not have kept coming back; and 2) R betrayed me—Big Time.
Joseph, his brothers and Egypt.
But now that you are suffering, I want to know: who is your God? Where is he in your suffering?”
Wow thats very harsh
I saw the perseverance of Christ when elders and church members came nightly to my house to help me with family devotions, giving up time that they should have rightly enjoyed with their own families.
I loved him because I confused the sick patterns that we shared with deep personal conviction. But God took him away for my good.
And never again will I confuse other people’s hopes and dreams for me as proof of God’s will.
Murphy licked my face again and I laughed out loud. This was my conversion in a nutshell: I lost everything but the dog.
Beautiful what God can do.
I’m not a betting woman, but if I was, I’d say that Jesus is not a member of either political party.
But these skinny verses, taken out of their rich and complex context, were just sitting out there on placards, naked and rude.
Good diction here.
The use of the word “might” in the final clause, “that the world through him might be saved,” tells me that the domain of Christian witness is not salvation (that is God’s work) but service—selfless love and sacrifice.
I had learned that being a hero for Jesus was noble work, especially when no one but Jesus himself knew the stakes of the sacrifice at hand.
Jerry Bridge’s book Trusting God Even When Life Hurts:
F. B. Meyer called The Shepherd’s Psalm (1889).
“Unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him…Faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them” (p. 17).
I came to believe that my job was not to critique and “receive” a sermon, but to dig into it, to seize its power, to participate with its message, and to steal its fruit.
thoughtfull, i can learn to view sermons this way.
Kevin Stilley liked this
It affects the way we remember (and rationalize) and the way we live.
Even when faced with the blinding sting of someone else’s sin, it really is not someone else’s sin that can hurt us. It is our own festering sin that takes the guise of innocence that will be the undoing of us all.
My deep patterns of thinking and interpretation were also suspect to sin. That was painfully evident to me now.
My whole body recoiled against this line of thinking. I’m proof of the pudding. I didn’t choose Christ. Nobody chooses Christ. Christ chooses you or you’re dead. After Christ chooses you, you respond because you must. Period. It’s not a pretty story.
Wow! Yes! Amen!
sexual sin is not recreational sex gone overboard. Sexual sin is predatory. It won’t be “healed” by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God.
Christians act as though marriage redeems sin. Marriage does not redeem sin. Only Jesus himself can do that.
“Maybe churches are filled with hypocrites because you are not there. Or maybe churches are filled with hypocrites because you are there in pride and in self-promotion.
“Sabbath keeping,” and my denomination values it highly. We simply took a day off from real life so that we could explore and expand our spiritual lives.
It seemed to me, that in worship, God wanted me to sit down, shut up, and listen—so that I could go and use my gifts out there in the world. It did not occur to me that God wanted me to show off or bring attention to myself.
Michael Bushell’s Songs of Zion: A Contemporary Case for Exclusive Psalmody and Brian M. Schwertley’s Sola Scriptura and the Regulative Principle of Worship.
Kevin Vanhoozer entitled, Is There a Meaning in this Text: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge.
Another word that often interchanges with hermeneutics is worldview.
The Prodigal Son didn’t repent of his sin because he got tired of living like and with the pigs. He repented because God gave him eyes to see.
But because different denominations rank these elements differently, there really is no such thing as “a” Christian worldview.
Brian Schwertley’s book, Sola Scriptura and the Regulative Principle of Worship.
The Bible comes to us as a text edited by men through God’s divine power. This point requires a big intellectual leap: the Bible is the only book edited by God himself. But, and this is important, while the Bible is true, it does not contain all lessons we need to know in the world—God expects us to learn from life.
The more God-centered our worship practice, the more mercy-centered our life. Worship is our rehearsal for how to live today and how to glorify God in heaven.
Either Jesus comes to worship with us and the Holy Spirit fuels and fills us and God is honored or we have, simply, painfully, nothing at all.
The Psalms are the word of God. While hymns and praise and worship music take up themes of Christian life, we are told very clearly here that we are sanctified by the word and by the word alone.
The Christian life becomes a symphony of aesthetics, as each note resounds and resonates to God’s glory and, by the Hand of his composition, fits together, even during those times of darkness and struggle, those times when the symphony rings cacophony.
But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God.
Since marriage is by God’s design, and not by man’s, it is plain that marriage must conform to God’s will.
The separation of a husband and wife is like the severing of a part of the body.
When a wife refuses to live in submission to her husband, this picture of the Church’s relationship to Christ is distorted before the world.
Submission refers to the inner attitude of the heart. It is therefore invisible and secret. Obedience is the outward expression of submission seen in the behavior of the wife.
True religion, which is pleasing to God, is obedience which flows from the humble submission of the heart.
Likewise, that which pleases the Lord, and illustrates the beautiful relationship between Christ and his Church, is a humble submission of the heart of the wife to her husband, which results in outward obedience to his will.
Yet in all things that do not violate the word of God, the wife is not to overrule, oppose, or contradict her husband.
When God says, “Husbands love your wives,” he is not commanding you to feel a certain way toward them—he is commanding you to act in a certain way toward them, regardless of how you feel!
when a Christian husband lords it over his wife in a harsh and unloving manner, he declares to the world that Christ rules over his church in the same way.
