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Showing posts from September, 2019

Do Not Lose Heart

Anytime someone asks me how God speaks to us today, my first response is through the Bible. God's primary means of communicating to us about who he is and who we are is found in his own revelation to us in Scripture. In the Old Testament, he speaks to us throughout history, through poetry, through his law, and by the mouths of his prophets. In the New Testament, he speaks through his Son - Jesus, as we read the eye-witness accounts of the gospels, see the creation and confession of the early church, and are encouraged by the writings of the apostles. God primarily  speaks through his word... but he can also speak through our circumstances, through situations and other people. This morning, I was reminded of the latter. In our Sunday School class, we have decided to devote one Sunday each month to focus on prayer. Rather than have prayer be the two shorter bookends to a longer lesson or lengthy discussion, one Sunday each month we have decided to invert our "order of se

The God Who Sees

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. Genesis 16:1-3 Doubt and Impatience It had been 10 long years. Abram and his wife Sarai had been obedient to God and were following him into the unknown with the anticipation that they would soon have a son and that their family would be expanding, but month after month they had been met with disappointment. In this time and culture, the greatest honor for a woman was to have a child, and infertility was her greatest curse. Children were considered a woman's worth, validating her as human. To be without

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Why the Virgin Birth Matters

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary...  Since the era of the Enlightenment, there have been objections to the authenticity of Jesus' birth found in the gospel narratives of Matthew and Luke. Some scholars have suggested that early Christians borrowed mythical elements from ancient literature in an attempt to adapt the gospel to a Hellenistic (Greek) culture (1), while others have suggested that there has been an error in translating the word almah, leading to a conclusion that the original authors did not explicitly express. Many versions of the Bible render this word as virgin while critics argue that it should be translated young woman or maiden. William Beck, who has done extensive research of the word comments,   I have searched exhaustively for instances in which almah might mean a non-virgin or a married woman. There

I Feel Ya

The room was uncomfortably hot and muggy. The air was stale and had a faint odor, some kind of combination of mildew and the bleach used in an effort to clean it. The padded chairs had grown increasingly harder throughout the day and although the past 8 hours had been informative, the speaker was rather dry, his monotone droning made our eyelids heavy. Those meetings that last all day can be dreadful. Especially in an uncomfortable environment. As my co-worker sat beside me, we found ourselves continually checking the clock on the wall, hoping the speaker would take notice and finally wrap things up. As we sat there, I whispered, "I am so ready to get out of here." My friend put his tapped his hand on his chest and replied, "I feel ya man." I've always enjoyed reading, writing, and just words in general. The way language changes and the clever ways we communicate our thoughts and feelings can be fascinating. Of course, hopefully, no one reading this woul

Fully Known, Fully Loved

When we have people in our lives that are close to us, those individuals that really "get us", we treasure those relationships and consider ourselves to be very fortunate. In my own life, I think about my wife, someone who is familiar with not only my ambitions and motivations but also my fears and struggles. I think about my oldest son, who shares a common interest in music, enjoys watching constant reruns of "The Office", and has a similar sense of humor. When we say that someone "gets us",  we are saying that this person is more than just an acquaintance. This is someone who knows more than a few basics facts about us. This is someone who is dear to us because they know us on a deeper, personal level. Today, as I was reading a verse that I have read so many times before, I found myself coming to a complete stop. So many times I had read this verse or heard someone teaching this passage with my eyes looking towards the future that I had missed