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Showing posts from June, 2019
When God goes shopping For Father's Day, my wife got me a shirt that has the words, "bought with a price" written in Biblical Greek on it. I've been attempting to learn Greek, so it was an appropriate gift. My neighbor, who is Greek read the shirt. I asked her if she knew what it meant. She was having a difficult time trying to put into English what the words meant in Greek. She finally made an attempt, "something like shopping." Funny, we were heading into the grocery store as we were having this discussion. What a way to look at this act of God, I thought to myself. God went shopping and He bought us. The scripture says that He chose us, sought us out, not the other way around. You could say, the patron bought the bagel of his choice, the bagel didn't choose the patron. So God, in a sense, went shopping and He purchased us - at the very high cost of His Son's blood.  This speaks to His great commitment and to His unfathomable wisdom and ways.
That annoying person you're going to spend the rest of eternity with I can remember a preacher (or two) saying in church something to the effect of, "you'd better love the person sitting next to you because you're going to spend the rest of eternity with them."  In one sense, I agree - we will spend eternity with our fellow believers. But in another sense, (I'd say the truly important sense), I strongly disagree with the implication of that statement.  John, the apostle of Jesus, the one close to His heart, wrote, "But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." The believer you are sitting next to in church is nothing like the person you will spend eternity next to worshiping God with. We shall be like Him; all of us. Think about it.  All of the things in us and about us, broken by sin - our annoying idiosyncrasies, our nasty habits, our rotten attitudes will be blown off of us as we are transformed
It's OK to be honest. In fact, honest words spoken with an attitude of trust show real faith. Confessing the truth does not make one without faith -  I believed, even when I spoke: "I am greatly afflicted"  or as the Amplified version puts it,  I believed [and clung to my God] when I said,  “I am greatly afflicted.” Paul echoed these words in regards to his own sufferings -  Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak ... We despair, we are perplexed. Paul confessed these things in the spirit of faith. I have a cold, I'm feeling depressed, I'm afraid. Those who are honest among us will admit to these things, not because we lack faith, but because our faith rests not in our words or declarations, but in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. That is where our faith must rest. I was visiting with a sweet, elderly believer recently. She's often said