One of the greatest barriers to faith is knowledge of the future. We don’t know the future, but God does. We can easily see our past and know where we have come from. We ought to be cognizant of the fact that it was God who carried us through whatever we have gone through. However, I wonder how many of us really believe that? Try as we might, to know we couldn’t have done it on our own, I think we still have as tough a time of grasping the past in faith as we do the future. What does this then say about barriers to our faith? We cannot exercise faith in the past or the future. Therefore, we have to rely on faith for right now. We can say, “I am here, right now, alive and in my right mind because God brought me through.” We can claim victory because we are alive. This really is our only measure of victory because death is defeated.
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Why do we compete? No one competes to lose, do they? When we watch a sporting event we want our team to win, right? Even if we don’t have a team, we applaud the victors and wish the defeated better luck next time! Whenever we compete, we’re doing so for some sort of reason. I’d wager we want to win and bring home the trophy for winning. No one gets a trophy for losing. Of course, nowadays there are lots of trophies given out just for participating, but I’m not talking about those sorts of trophies. Trophies are evidence of victory we can display for all to see.
View full article »Anyone who thinks the Bible doesn’t have any drama has never read Genesis 38. In this chapter, we have lies, deceit, incest, prostitution, idolatry, and hope. A likely group of bedfellows except for hope, I suppose. Yet, for all of the events in this chapter, there’s a lot we can learn from it about God’s grace and mercy.
View full article »I get a lot of pleasure out of reading. Sometimes I’m reading a good story that captivates my attention, and it takes me away to far-off lands. Other times I feel like an explorer reading a text to uncover things about it I don’t know. I’m not bored, very often, when I’m reading something, as long as I can find something interesting in it. I really like the Bible because I can read it and be carried off by the stories it tells, or I can delve into it and discover things I didn’t know before. Often, I can read the exact same text and come away with a new understanding. There’s no other book quite like the Bible.
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Four-Calendar Café 