Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Giver

Posted on July 31, 2019 by salooper57

The singer Carolyn Arrends was warned by her friend not to make a purchase that seemed to be too good to be true. She ignored him and suffered the consequences. Then she began avoiding him because she didn’t want him to know what she’d done. She started thinking of him as someone who was against her, not for her.

The same thing happens between us and God. Our idea of him gets distorted. We start to see him as against us, not for us; as a taker, not a giver.

But God is for us, not against us (Romans 8:31-39). He is not just a giver, he is The Giver.
Continue reading →

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The Words We Use Broadcast Who We Are

Posted on July 27, 2019 by salooper57

The “social psychologist James Pennebaker spent years researching the significance of our use of words. With a team of grad students, he developed a sophisticated software program that analyzes what our words say about us. Pennebaker claims that the words we generate over a lifetime are like “fingerprints.” Even small words – what he calls “stealth words,” like pronouns (I, you, we, they) and prepositions (to, for, over) – “broadcast the kind of people we are.”

No wonder Jesus said “that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” Continue reading →

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The Rewarder

Posted on July 23, 2019 by salooper57

These people imagine, to misquote Hanani the seer, that the eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the whole earth, seeking to criticize those who don’t do everything perfectly. But the truth lies in the opposite direction. What Hanani really told King Asa was: the eyes of the Lord go to and fro throughout the whole earth, seeking to show himself strong to those who hearts are fully his. Not those who do everything perfectly. God is not looking for opportunities to criticize but to reward. Continue reading →

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Is Christianity a List of Dos and Don’ts?

Posted on July 20, 2019 by salooper57

A few of Jesus’s many commands can be kept, even without faith.
For example, no one has ever sued me for my tunic, so Jesus’s command to give such a person my cloak as well has never been a problem for me. However, the
command to stop worrying has been a problem. So has the command to love my
neighbor as myself, to guard against hypocrisy, to get rid of all bitterness, and to do everything without complaining or arguing.

As it stands, it is simply impossible to check off these and
the other New Testament commands in the way one checks off items from a to-do
list. To consistently do these things and, more to the point, to be shaped in heart and mind in such a way that doing these things becomes natural, a person must have faith. This kind of faith is not mental assent to a doctrine, even a
doctrine about God, nor is it a belief that God exists and that everything will work out in the end. It is not that these things are wrong; it is that they are not what Jesus and his early followers meant when they spoke of faith. Continue reading →

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The God Who Feeds the Ravens

Posted on July 16, 2019 by salooper57

Hypocrisy and greed are responses to a real problem: fear. Hypocrisy is the pathological response of a malfunctioning soul brought on by the fear of what people think of us. Greed is the response of the soul to the fear of not having enough. Hypocrisy and greed are ways of self-medicating. They alleviate the fear problem … for a while.
But hypocrisy and greed are only temporary fixes; they are stop-gap measures. And, unfortunately, the temporary fix makes the long-term solution less likely. Continue reading →

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It’s Just a Matter of Time

Posted on July 13, 2019 by salooper57

…when Christ came into the world, he brought the new age with him. People aligned with him have already synchronized their watches to the age to come. Continue reading →

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PARTY-PLANNER: The Joyous God

Posted on July 9, 2019 by salooper57

God is not only a planner; he is a party planner. He is the party planner. He loves a good party. Continue reading →

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The Family Business: Doing the Work of God

Posted on July 2, 2019 by salooper57

How often we … miss what is happening around us. Because we don’t see it, we think nothing is happening, that God is on break. But Jesus helped us to see that his Father is working all around us, all the time. Continue reading →

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