If the Lord ever asks you a question, don’t answer! The teacher never poses a question to build his knowledge, but to enhance yours.Read More »
The Lord’s Rhetoric
Category: christian living
Ending the Shame Game
There is good shame and there is bad shame.
Good shame is the useful feeling we sense when we are tempted to do something we know is wrong or the feeling that makes us sad after we’ve done it.
Bad shame is guilt (remorse) in the form of condemnation or a lasting stigma for something we are or that we’ve done. It’s the one Jesus removes from our lives.
How to Rest in God
I was a student leader the latter half of my undergrad years. That role along with school work, a job, regular exercise, and minimal recreation was sometimes exhausting. So I periodically took weekend rests to rejuvenate myself.Read More »
Keep Moving Forward
We cannot read the Bible without sensing that the kingdom is on the advance. Where there is seed, there will be growth; and if growth, there should be fruit. Or, those who remain elementary warrant rebuke. Even in the Old Testament, God tells Habakkuk to write the vision so the one on the run can read it without slowing.Read More »
O the Joy of Painting!
Let me dare to guess that we share a favorite TV program. Know what it is? Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting. It is the only program able to bring everything I’m doing to a grinding halt to let me get lost in pure wonder.Read More »
Prayer for All the Coming Saints
Psalm 119:175 says, “Let my soul live that it may praise You.” The idea in these words is something I often pray on the behalf of people who don’t know the Lord, a very broad category of people.
I think about all of those who are indifferent toward God and faith and don’t perceive their need for either. I reflect on the headstrong and the hurting who hate God. Others are running trying to get far away from him, although his hook is in them.
They are without Christ whatever their state. And more than the destruction that lies in their path is all the love, acceptance, freedom, and delight already offered to them by Jesus.
So I pray. I pray that God will not let sin and Satan destroy them. I pray that Jesus will confront them along their Damascus road and send them in a new direction. I pray because it crushes me when I learn of one who leaves this life and enters eternal perdition.
I long to see these folk caught up in worship in the Lord’s house. I want to hear their testimonies of how God mercifully rescued them from their folly at the last moment. I hope to see those testimonies nudge other sin-whipped souls toward the Cross to relieve their burdens.
And I get a little excited that perhaps one day in Heaven Jesus might find me and say, “Michael, you interceded and brought this one to me.”
Does Hand-Clapping Praise God?
The clapping of hands in the Bible has more to do with human aggression than the praise of God. Often we clap our hands to applaud a person or cause, or to the beat of a song—in church too—and there is nothing wrong with this. But let me show why clapping hands in praise to God is nowhere found in Scripture.Read More »
Beware the Spirit of “Churchy”!
There is an enthusiastic, hardworking kind that fills churches these days. A false spirit it is, however, crept in the pews, once rarer to find but now easily spotted from the pulpit to the door. What’s its name? I call it…“Churchy”.Read More »
A 'Mike' for Christ 