Dr. Roy Spencer always brings clarity to the climate change debate. Here is a post looking at the numbers behind the claims that climate change is largely man-made.
I love following the archeological and paleontological discoveries as they come to light. The Institute for Creation Research shares some enlightening news that comes from the discovery of a human vertebra.
Cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace talks about the evidence that makes the resurrection of Jesus a reasonable conclusion:
“For the diligent the week has seven todays, for the slothful seven tomorrows.” —Anonymous
In light of all the uncertainty around us, this quote is a good reminder. “I want you to pray about world events and pursue peace as you are able. However, it’s crucial to recognize what you can change and what you cannot. Fretting about things that are beyond your control will drain your energy and discourage you. Instead of this hurtful focus, endeavor to fix your thoughts on Me. … Remember that I am a God of justice and I know everything. Eventually I will right all wrongs. So be still in My presence—trusting in Me with a steadfast heart while waiting for Me to act.” —Sarah Young, in Jesus Always
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I had a great time on the Thriving In Ministrypodcast with Kyle Willis and Dace Clifton.
Dace asked me what I wished I had learned earlier on in my pastoral career. The answer that sprang quickly to my mind is this: God takes me through things on purpose.
At the time we may not be able to see what God is teaching us, but He wastes no opportunities. Everything we have gone through has a purpose.
How true it is: God doesn’t prepare the path for me, but He prepares me for the path.
My book Shepherd Leadership: The Metrics That Really Matter is proof of this! I never thought God would call me to pastor a church—let alone write a book about pastoral leadership—but as I wrote the book, the Holy Spirit brought back to my remembrance so many lessons that I learned along the way.
I’ve already shared several clips from this Thriving In Ministry interview which you can find by clicking here, and I’ll be sharing more clips soon, so please stay tuned.
Shepherd Leadership: The Metrics That Really Matter is available in print or ebook, and in audiobook through either Audible or Apple.
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Charles Spurgeon. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Spurgeon” in the search box to read more entries.
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How Pruning Helps Prayer
If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. (John 15:7)
How is this privilege of mighty prayerfulness to be obtained? The answer is, ‘If you abide in Me and My words abide in you.’ … Beloved, the first line tells us that we are to abide in Christ Jesus our Lord. …
As if to help us understand this, our gracious Lord has given us a delightful parable. Let us look through this discourse of the vine and its branches. Jesus says, ‘Every branch in Me…that bears fruit He prunes’ (John 15:2). Take care that you abide in Christ when you are being purged. ‘Oh,’ says one, ‘I thought I was a Christian. But alas! I have more troubles than ever. Men ridicule me, the devil tempts me, and my business affairs go wrong.’ Brother, if you are to have power in prayer, you must take care that you abide in Christ when the sharp knife is cutting everything away. …
Take care, also, that when the purging operation has been carried out you still cleave to your Lord. … When you see the work of the Spirit increasing in you, do not let the devil tempt. He will try to get you to boast that now you are somebody; you need not come to Jesus as a poor sinner and rest in His precious blood alone for salvation. Abide still in Jesus. … Your work for Christ must be Christ’s work in you or else it will be good for nothing.
From The Secret Of Power In Prayer
Our Heavenly Father wants us to be fruitful because that brings Him glory and lifts Jesus up for others to see.
We have to commit to abiding in Jesus despite the pruning process. It’s helpful to remember that the reason the Husbandman prunes us is because He has seen fruitfulness in us, but He wants us to be even more fruitful. When we stay in the process during the uncomfortable—and sometimes painful—pruning, more fruit will begin to appear in our lives.
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
One of my favorite classes that I took in college was a philosophy class where we studied the rules of logic. I found it so intriguing to learn how to construct or deconstruct an argument by looking at the premises and its conclusion.
One of the keywords that we would look at is “therefore.” This helped us understand what the conclusion of an argument was. If the argument was made well, what came after the “therefore” was a natural progression from the premises. With that in mind, I always keep an eye out for the “therefores” when I am reading my Bible.
Except I have noticed that God frequently uses “therefore” in unexpected ways.
The classic rules of logic lay out connecting and supporting premises that flow to a natural “therefore” conclusion. But God’s conclusions typically defy natural, conventional logic. His conclusions are frequently supernatural!
Notice a couple of examples from Isaiah. God’s people are suffering the natural consequences for their open rebellion against God. In my mind, the natural “therefore” would be: “You are getting what you deserve.” However, God’s supernatural “therefore” is: “I have taken this cup of My wrath from you” (Isaiah 51:21–22).
In another example, the way God’s people were behaving and the way the enemies of God’s people were treating them, the natural “therefore” that I would expect is: “No one revered God’s name any longer.” But God’s supernatural “therefore” declares: “All people will know My name. All people will know I have fulfilled what I foretold, and all will revere Me” (Isaiah 52:6).
Ultimately, these supernatural conclusions were proven true by Jesus. Our Savior drank our cup of wrath on our behalf and gave us His cup of righteousness in its place. The natural conclusion of Christ’s work for us is also God’s supernatural conclusion: God exalted Jesus to the highest place of honor and reverence (Philippians 2:5–11).
My natural logic fails. God’s supernatural logic succeeds. Always!
His supernatural conclusions should always lead to my revering and glorifying Him even more. Let me encourage you in your Bible study time to pay close attention to God’s “therefores” and rejoice in His Christ-exalting supernatural work.
John Piper’s intertwining of the biographies of John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce in The Roots Of Endurance was masterfully done! Especially because, unlink the previous books in Pastor John’s “The swans are not silent series,” all three of these men knew each other and interacted with each other. Check out my full book review by clicking here.
“Simeon with us—his heart glowing with love of Christ. How full he is of love, and of desire to promote the spiritual benefit of others. Oh! that I might copy him as he Christ.” —William Wilberforce, writing in his journal about Charles Simeon
“It is hoped and believed that the Lord has raised you up for the good of His church and for the good of the nation.” —John Newton, in a letter to William Wilberforce
“Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of man and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you.” —John Wesley, at 87 years of age, in a letter to William Wilberforce
“Frustration is normal, disappointment is normal, sickness is normal. Conflict, persecution, danger, stress—they are all normal. The mind-set that moves away from these will move away from reality and away from Christ. —John Piper
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
Peter Drucker noted, “It wasn’t until the twentieth-century that we pluralized the word priority. For most of its history, the word has been singular.”
If we have too many priorities, we can frequently find them in conflict with each other. This forces us to make an extremely difficult decision: Which priority has a higher priority?!
Ultimately, whatever business or industry or profession we are in, we are in the people business. All of our efforts fail without good investment in people. So our overriding priority must be on the people God has placed around us.
“The human brain is simply not designed to multitask. You can get by doing multiple things at once, but you can’t do them well. Your brain is physically unable to process more than one set of instructions at a time, so while you are juggling all of those actions at once, your brain is scrambling to keep up. Through a variety of experiments measuring brain activity, scientists have discovered that the constant switching back and forth from one activity to another energizes regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination, while simultaneously disrupting the brain regions related to memory and learning. According to the research, ‘We are using our mental energy to concentrate on concentrating at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.’ Got that?
“More simply: when we multitask we’re dumber. How much dumber? A recent study for Hewlett Packard exploring the impact of multitasking on performance revealed that the average worker’s functioning IQ drops ten points when multitasking…. (The analogy the researchers used is that a ten-point drop in IQ is equivalent to missing one night of sleep.)” —Marcus Buckingham
The biggest victim of attempting to multitask is your relationships. Those closest to you suffer the most. If someone needs me and I’m too busy to give them me, then very busy has become too busy and it’s time for me to evaluate who—not what—is my highest priority.
Friends, this is something that helped me with the apparent controversies not only in the Bible but in conversations with those who have differing opinions from me. I hope this helps you too!
You can help me help others by becoming one of my Patreon supporters. As my thanks for that support, you will receive exclusive content that only my supporters get access to. Please check out my Patreon page and support this ministry at just $5/month.
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
This is part 4 in our series “Is that in the Bible?”
Statement #4—Name it and claim it. Is that in the Bible? No!
But in fairness, even the proponents of this belief don’t usually say it this way. Instead they quote words from Jesus like: “I will do whatever you ask in My name” (John 14:13) or “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you” (John 15:7).
They really want this to be true, I think, because in their minds happy, prosperous Christians make God look good. On the other hand, struggling Christians make God look bad. There is a whole branch of theology called theodicy which literally means: “a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.”
This is nothing new. Religious people have always tried to have pat answers. In the oldest book of the Bible, Job’s friends were convinced that suffering results from sin and blessing results from righteousness. And yet according to God, Job was a righteous man (Job 1:1, 8, 20-21).
At the advent of Jesus, the chief priests and scribes want the Messiah to be heroic so they modified a prophecy to make Bethlehem sound more impressive (compare Micah 5:2 with Matthew 2:6).
So it follows that this name-it-claim-it group wants God to look good because His people look good, dress well, drive nice cars, live in big homes, fly private jets, and never get sick.
But Jesus Himself told His followers to, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor” (Luke 12:33). And He said,“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me” (Matthew 5:11). And Jesus also said, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33).
This is not to say that God opposes wealth: He gave wealth to His leaders, Job was doubly-wealthy after his trial, and wealthy people funded the ministry of Jesus and the early church. But this isn’t the same as pursuing—or even demanding—wealth, or of making the erroneous connection that poor people are somehow out of favor with God.
How do we avoid these errors? Here are three thoughts:
The word “eisegesis” means to read something into the Word. But that is like creating your own beliefs and then going to the Bible to find phrases that support what you already believe. On the other hand “exegesis” is to read the Bible and have it speak to us by the Holy Spirit.
Two of the phrases from Jesus that the name-it-and-claim-it folks use (John 14:13 and John 15:7) turn out to mean something entirely different than, “God will give me all of the things I demand from Him” when they are read within the context of the things Jesus was teaching at that time (see John 14:9-14 and 15:1-8).
(3) Understand your terms.
If something is biblical, that is something the Bible says yes to. Unbiblical things the Bible says no to. But non-biblical are those the Bible doesn’t explicitly address. We have to be very careful of trying to make non-biblical things sound biblical or it may lead to some unbiblical attitudes and actions.
This is exactly what the Pharisees did by giving their non-biblical traditions the weight of biblical statements, and then looking down on others in a very unbiblical way.
God is sovereign. We do not tell Him what to do. We do not demand Him to respond to our needs. We trust Him and and we abide in Him. Then in the abiding, asking and understanding and fruitfulness are as natural as a flower sprouting from a branch that is attached to the vine. We don’t name things and claim things for our personal comfort, but we desire solely for God’s glory to be seen—whether in wealth or poverty, health or sickness, peaceful times or tribulation.
Evaluating all biblical sounding statements by those three items—studying the whole counsel of God’s Word, understanding the context, and knowing our terms—will guide us from going astray.
If none were sick and none were sad,
I love the humanitarian work of Convoy of Hope wherever there is a need. They are on the front lines of Ukraine right now. If you are looking for a good organization to support financially, 
Craig T. Owens 