What if God gave you a dangerous assignment? What if it meant risking your reputation or your career or your financial security or some other temporal benefit?
Would you be willing to go? Would you raise your hand and say, “I will go and if I perish, I perish”?
Also, our passage in Proverbs warns us about the slavery of debt and Paul, in our New Testament reading, hits us with the issue of sin and then shows us God’s cure.
Most of us are familiar with the proverb: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” But we all know kids who were raised in church and, yet, have walked away from God. What went wrong? Did their parents miss something? Did God fail to keep His Word? Do we have a parental guarantee that our children will always walk with God?
Also in today’s post:
As we start the book of Esther, we’ll look at what God was up to, and the un-fairy-tale-like ending for the other young virgins taken as “potential queen for a night.”
And from Romans, we’ll read about God’s warning to us concerning the danger of self-righteously judging others. So, as you can see there’s a lot to talk about in these passages.
An unwillingness to accept and believe the truth about God can start an individual or a society on a dangerous downward spiral. But that rejection is not done in ignorance. Romans 1 tells us that creation alone provides each of us with enough knowledge to know there is a God. It’s not a lack of truth. Instead, men and women suppress the truth because they don’t want to hear it and they don’t want to respect God’s authority in their lives. The consequences are evident in our world today.
Many of those who reject the truth most vehemently are, also, the most educated in our society. Our schools, colleges, universities, and many professions are full of people who think they are wise with all their science, business acumen, and knowledge. But though they claim to be wise, God says they’re fools if they reject Him and His authority!
It’s what has been called “The Great Exchange.” We get to exchange our failures for His perfect obedience, our sin for His righteousness. If Christ is our Savior and He lives in us, then God’s faithfulness, mercy, and righteousness are ours!
Nehemiah 8.10 says, “… the joy of the Lord is your strength.” How did the people in Nehemiah’s day go from brokenness over their sin to joy? Why should we find joy for the same reasons?
Also, read about the importance of different spiritual gifts, why it’s so important to understand the character of God, and how God uses the storms in our lives.
We have all known once seemingly faithful pastors and other believers who have fallen into sin or simply let their walks with God fall by the wayside. Too often they leave destruction, even despair, in their wake. What about you? Could you be drawn away from God’s call on your life by flattery, fear, money, success, favor with the right people, or other distractions? What can we learn from Nehemiah about protecting our testimonies, our jobs, and our ministries from those things?
Today our churches are full of people who do religious things. They go through the motions and may even look like faithful Christians to others. But God is always looking at the heart. Many of them have never understood or embraced the gospel and so have not experienced genuine heart change. Others are trying to appear one way while living another. When they do, it’s just empty religion and not pleasing to God. Could any of this apply to you or me?
Do you find yourself tempted to envy someone? We can envy when we have been lazy and not put in the effort that is required to accomplish something. But often, we’re working hard and can’t understand why someone or many someones seem to enjoy a level of success that we don’t. Either way, we can become discontent with where God has us. And instead of trusting that He knows what’s best, we grumble, complain, and run the risk of becoming bitter and resentful.
A few years ago I taught a lesson during a summer ladies’ Bible study. The posters promoting the study were very eye-catching, but it was the tagline that caught my attention, “A woman of God can never be like a woman of the world.” My lesson was on wisdom versus foolishness which has everything to do with being a woman of God rather than a woman of the world. I’d like to share some of those truths today and in the next few lessons in this series.
The Bible has a great deal to say about wisdom and the flip side, foolishness. In this series, we’ll look at what it means to be wise and, by comparison, what it means to be foolish and how to recognize the difference.
The latest statistics I could find say the rate of divorce in the US is about 40-50%, but I’ve discovered that statistics are hard to pin down. Some say the rate of divorce has dropped in the last decade and that as high as 70% of marriages make it to their 15th year. If that’s true, what about the 30 or 40% who don’t? And is it possible that the divorce rate is going down because many couples simply live together without marrying?
What does the Bible say about divorce? Is it allowable to divorce because we’re not happy or no longer in love? Is it okay to divorce if we realize we are unequally yoked? Are there biblical grounds for divorce? And one final question, why is it so important for singles to understand these principles, too?
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