Do you serve God cheerfully on a consistent basis, giving yourself to Him freely and without having to be made to? During times of ease and comfort, do you continue to pour yourself out to God in prayerful reverence and loving thankfulness?
Joy (unlike happiness) does not depend on whether what happens to us is pleasing. Not at the mercy of circumstances, it is grounded in unchangeable truth. And the love that flows from a joyful commitment to truth will give itself and keep on giving.
Every path to heaven leads through territory occupied by the devil. To reach our desired destination, we’re going to have to fight. Indeed, it sometimes seems that we have to fight every step of the way. Heaven will not be reached by the cowardly.
God is working toward a lasting solution to our real problem. Rather than patch our wounds with a superficial bandage, He gave His Son to atone for our sins. That opens the door to HOPE — hope that our hearts will be filled up when we reach home.
Spiritual maturity often grows in a “wilderness” of difficulty. When tribulations test us and we’re driven out into the desert, it’s critically important that we discipline our minds. The wilderness is no place for the weak-minded or the careless.
Love is the very antithesis of selfishness. It lifts us out of self-centered thinking and sets us free to enjoy a better focus. It gets us out of ourselves and into a connection with all those external things that we were meant to be related to.
Mankind never would have sinned if it had not believed the devil’s lie; so the only path out of sin is the one that leads back toward truth. The problem ...
John wrote about Jesus’ miracles “so that you may believe.” The miracles authenticated the truth of what Jesus claimed about Himself. Called “signs” by the gospel writers, they “signified” the ...
May we never underestimate the seriousness of what must happen to us in Christ. “Crucifixion” not too strong a word for it. It was distrust that drove us to sin. ...
In the world, obedience is often based on personal feelings or legal obligation, but in the gospel, it’s based on trust in God. Confident that His way is always the ...
Forgiven of past sins, the Christian can rejoice in the present grace and future hope of the gospel. The relationship we can now have with God is rich — and ...
When we obey the gospel and are justified with God, the result is that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is not the subjective FEELING ...
The term “Christian” was first used in Antioch in Syria. Here, for the first time, a congregation was made up of both Jews and Gentiles, and it was clear that ...
Apart from Jesus Christ, there is no way back to God, no certainty of truth about God, and no life other than the desperate yearning of our earthly existence. Jesus ...
On Pentecost following Jesus’ resurrection, a large crowd in Jerusalem heard Peter preach the gospel of Christ. Many were “cut to the heart,” and no one in the history of ...
What is the meaning of the titles associated with the name of Jesus in the New Testament? Over sixty times He is called the “Lord Jesus Christ”? To see fully ...
God is at the center of both our problem and its solution. The gospel is not primarily about our broken social relationships. These are but symptoms of the real problem: ...
We were created for perfect joy with God, a joy not subject to change and decay. By our sin, the human race broke that perfection, but we still yearn for ...