In the end, the dividing line won’t be between those who had it easy and those who didn’t; it will be between those who decided to go to heaven and those who didn’t. When “every wind of doctrine” is gusting, it’s the set of our sails that matters.
Nothing gained by mere personality techniques will last. God sees behind our personalities, and most other people do too. Eventually the Law of the Farm will prevail: we will reap as we have sown. There is no short cut to any harvest worth having.
The important thing right now is not perfection but progress. As we work toward perfection as a goal, we’ll make more progress if we concentrate on taking the steps that are immediately before us. Those are always steps that we’re capable of taking.
This life will always be incomplete. Recognizing that we’re not going to see anything more than God’s work “in progress” right now, we are free to dream and yearn and long for the time when His plan will reach its climax, and we can finally go home.
In the end, it’s our deeds that God will judge (2 Corinthians 5:10) — not what we said we believed, not what we wanted to believe, and not what we were planning to believe someday. It’s a fact: what we actually DO is what we really believe.
We should cherish the idea of rich relationship, both with God and those who’ve been created in His image. We ought to work on building good relationships. And the maintenance of our relationships ought to be one of our most pressing priorities.
Take time to find out what things mean. These days, most of us stay so busy with our own trivia, we rarely stop to ask the meaning of even the most important things around us. But we’re the losers when we fail to ask, “What does that mean?”
Knowing that God is “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth” should make us want to reach out to Him. He is a God for whom we can yearn with admiration. Oh, how nourishing it is to know that He desires to save us!
If there were no such thing as God and nothing worth reaching for beyond this world, then desperation would be an understandable response to the condition the world is in. But there is, in fact, a God, and that should make all the difference.
Are we ready to eat the fruit of our ways? We should be, because the “banquet” is surely being prepared and we’ll have no choice but to eat it when it’s set before us. We can run, but we can’t hide. The law of cause and effect will operate.
Our “salvation” from sin must be seen from a different perspective. Proposals by the world’s greatest teachers won’t be enough. We need a grace that only God can supply, and ...
Life in Christ is a sequence of ever stronger commitments, but all it begins very simply. Whether we say it out loud or not, at baptism our hearts are entering ...
God seeks those who will respond gratefully to the gospel and be eager to live in a reconciled relationship with Him. But if He is to have a people who ...
In the first century when many synagogues claimed to follow Moses, and many persons claimed to be the Messiah. And there may be many churches near you claiming to follow ...
We need to appreciate the essential nature of the local congregation as the Lord designed it, and beyond that, value our connection to “the brotherhood” (1 Peter 2:17; 5:9) — ...
Confessing our faith is simply a matter of being genuine and authentic. I call it “courageous sincerity.” We are not to hide the truth about who we really are. When ...
As Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.” Ultimately, there are only two paths available. It’s time to clear up our contradictions. ...
Sin is no ordinary problem, and its cure will not be ordinary either. Only Jesus Christ, the very embodiment of God Himself, has the power to get rid of the ...
If our present position is that we have said no to Christ, we’re on the side of the enemy. But Christ invites us to change our minds and obey the ...
Fervent and faithful, at least to the best of his understanding, Apollos needed to be shown “the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:26). And to his credit, when Priscilla ...
As Paul reminded Timothy, the Scriptures are able to make us “wise for salvation” (2 Timothy 3:15). Whatever may seem right to us, we would do well to listen humbly ...
“There are two freedoms: the false, where man is free to do what he likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought.” Freedom is not ...