Psalm 133 tells us that in order for us to sharpen others—and for us to be sharpened by them—we have to be around other them. Christian saints put a high priority on spending time with others.
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
From Desiring God’s Here We Stand series comes this great snippet from the history of the Reformation: “[John] Calvin intended to go to Strasbourg for a life of peaceful literary production. But while Calvin was staying the night in Geneva, William Farel, the fiery leader of the Reformation in that city, found out he was there and sought him out. It was a meeting that changed the course of history, not just for Geneva, but for the world. Calvin remembers, ‘Farel, who burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance the gospel, immediately learned that my heart was set upon devoting myself to private studies . . . and finding that he gained nothing by entreaties, he proceeded to utter an imprecation that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquillity of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the necessity was so urgent. By this imprecation I was so stricken with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had undertaken.’”
Have you ever heard people claim that celebrity deaths seem to come in threes? It does seem that many times the major cataclysmic events happen in bunches. Dr. Roy Spencer has an interesting post (with corresponding data) in which he outlines the role of randomness in these events.
“In Hebrews 12:2 the writer uses a participle—‘fixing your eyes’—to describe what should be the characteristic orientation of our every waking moment. True and full faith wants to say with David, ‘I have set the Lord always before me’ (Psalm 16:8). … If we are living full faith, having the eye of our heart fixed on the world of unseen things, the reality of that world and all its beauty, goodness, and truth will begin to be evident in our daily lives, filling our lives with the overflowing Presence of Jesus Christ (John 7:37-39).” —T.M. Moore
“There are three kinds of people in the world; those who have sought God and found Him and now serve Him, those who are seeking Him, but have not yet found Him, and those who neither seek Him nor find Him. The first are reasonable and happy, the second reasonable and unhappy, and the third unreasonable and unhappy.” —Blaise Pascal
Evolutionists are now using language that sounds like words Creationists use: “Flowers like hibiscus use an invisible blueprint established very early in petal formation that dictates the size of their bullseyes—a crucial pre-pattern that can significantly impact their ability to attract pollinating bees.” Check out this article from the Institute for Creation Research.
Another very helpful apologetic video from J. Warner Wallace. This video explains how the origin of DNA is best explained not by scientific theories but by the existence of God.
Just as the smallest enzyme is invaluable to the human body, the gift God has given you is invaluable to the Body of Christ. Check out the full sermon called Let’s grow together.
Is it okay to pray a prayer written by someone else? Sure! But let’s use those prayers merely as guides to help us form our own personalized prayers to our loving Heavenly Father. I shared a whole series on prayer that you may want to check out.
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
T.M. Moore wrote, “The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in believers with an agenda. His agenda is not ours, and unless we can put our agendas aside, we will never line up with His to realize more of the presence, promise, and power of the Kingdom of God. The Spirit has not come to make us ecstatically happy. He has not come to fulfill our every wish. He comes to bring forth in us distinctly Kingdom values and virtues: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He comes to distribute among us spiritual gifts, God-given abilities to serve one another in caring and sharing ways. He comes to empower us as witnesses for Jesus, both in how we live and what we say. And He comes to build our churches up into Christlikeness by our unified and focused work.”
I am really enjoying these mini-biographies of key leaders in the Reformation presented by Desiring God. One that I found especially fascinating is about Menno Simons—“If you are familiar with the contemporary Mennonites, you may be surprised to learn that the group’s founder started as a Catholic priest who had never read the Bible.” Yet, near the end of his life, Menno wrote, “Although I resisted in former times Thy precious Word and Thy holy will with all my powers…nevertheless, Thy fatherly grace did not forsake me, a miserable sinner, but in love, received me…and taught me by the Holy Spirit until of my own choice I declared war upon the world, the flesh, and the devil…and willingly submitted to the heavy cross of my Lord Jesus Christ that I might inherit the promised kingdom.”
“What strikes me is that there’s a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference.” —Andrew Lloyd Webber
This past Sunday I spoke to my congregation about how Christians should behave biblically during an election season. Someone forwarded to me a related graphic from the Pentecostal Evangel magazine (a publication of the Assemblies of God) from 1984. I love these reminders for Christians!
Researchers unveiled the largest brain map ever completed. It was of a fruit fly, whose brain “includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses”! It took four years to complete this map. “All told, the researchers identified 8,453 types of neuron—much more than anyone had expected. Of these, 4,581 were newly discovered.” This level of complexity and order in a fruit fly is astounding to me. Can you imagine what it would take to map the much larger and more complex human brain?! Truly, David was right when he said that we are wonderfully made by our Creator!
“Freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire!” —Martin Luther
“Faith the mother of all good works justifieth us, before we can bring forth any good work: as the husband marryeth his wife before he can have any lawful children by her.” —William Tyndale
Christians should run their entire race with joy—we should soar across the finish line! Check out this full sermon on Psalm 132.
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
“Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.” —C.S. Lewis
John Piper points out that thinking and knowing are essential for Christian maturity, but there is also a danger in knowledge. How do we find the correct balance?
I talked about a Christian’s self-examination this week, and then I came across this from T.M. Moore: “Christians do not fear to examine themselves. Especially when it seems something may be lacking in our walk with and work for the Lord, we need to heed the words of the apostle Paul and do some serious soul-searching and altering of our life course (2 Corinthians 13:5). Examining ourselves involves carefully considering how we use our time (Ephesians 5:15-17) as well as what’s going on in our soul and our life. We must not fear to examine ourselves nor resent when others may encourage us to do so.”
God’s messengers call people to consider the way they are currently living in comparison to the way God has called them to behave. Wise people will heed this call and repent from any ways that deviate from God’s way. I talked in more depth about Haggai and his message of considering our ways in my series on the minor prophets.
“Come to Jesus by quitting every other hope, by thinking of Him, believing God’s testimony about Him, and trusting everything to Him. If you thus come to Him, the rest which He will give you will be deep, safe, holy, and everlasting.” —Charles Spurgeon
One more from T.M. Moore: “We will only hunger and thirst for more of the Lord and His promises as we consider how far short of that might and greatness we fall. … I suspect that most Christians today are fairly satisfied with the state of their faith. They have a ‘good enough’ experience of Jesus and they’re not really thirsting for much more. But the work of shepherds is to help people realize that splashing around in the mud puddle of faith is not to be compared with sailing on the ocean of God’s grace and power.”
A.W. Tozer said, “There’s an awesomeness about God which is missing in our day altogether; there’s little sense of admiring awe in the Church of Christ these days.” May we repent of little prayers and boldly pray to an awesome God who wants to do awesome things that will bring Him glory!
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
This is a very informative Q&A session with cold case detective and Christian apologist J. Warner Wallace. But I especially like his answer to the first question: Do Christians have to investigate every other religion to be convinced that the Bible is true?
“Faith untried may be true faith, but it is sure to be little faith, and it is likely to remain dwarfish so long as it is without trials. Faith never prospers so well as when all things are against her: tempests are her trainers, and lightnings are her illuminators. … No flowers wear so lovely a blue as those which grow at the foot of the frozen glacier; no stars gleam so brightly as those which glisten in the polar sky; no water tastes so sweet as that which springs amid the desert sand; and no faith is so precious as that which lives and triumphs in adversity. … Faith increases in solidity, assurance, and intensity, the more it is exercised with tribulation. Faith is precious, and its trial is precious too.” —Charles Spurgeon
“Mature Christians can be recognized by a variety of indicators. They feast on the Word of God (Hebrews 5:14), persevere in love and good works (Hebrews 6:9-10), bear the fruit of the Spirit rather than the marks of the flesh (Galatians 6:16-23), use their gifts to help build the church (1 Corinthians 12:7-11; Ephesians 4:12-16), teach the things of Jesus to others (Hebrews 5:12: Acts 1:8), and more. This, the New Testament insists, is the condition toward which every Christian strives.” —T.M. Moore (check out all of the Scriptures T.M. references here)
“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.” —W.E.B. Du Bois
Jesus shows us that only secure people can serve others. Insecure people won’t ever make themselves vulnerable, and so they miss out on God’s blessing. I address this in more depth in my book Shepherd Leadership.
Leaders should be able to use mistakes as growth opportunities. Check out these wise words from the book Spiritual Leadership.
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
T.M. Moore encourages Christian to be ready to help their neighbors answer their burning questions: “Christians, Charles Taylor insists, must not be guilty of crushing human flourishing by a too-small vision of God and an unloving or unenergetic approach to our neighbors. Instead, we must study and prepare to ‘respond most profoundly and convincingly to what are ultimately commonly felt dilemmas.’ We must be ready to guide our neighbors out of the dark woods of wrong belief into the radiant meadows of the Sun of Righteousness, risen with healing in His wings. But to do this, we must be ready guides. We must anticipate the questions our groping neighbors will ask and prepare to answer them clearly and intelligently (1 Peter 3:15).”
True strength and courage only come to the one who thinks God’s thoughts and does God’s deeds (see Joshua 1:7). The strong and courageous leader is never self-made, but unshakably God-dependent.
On the latest Craig and Greg Show podcast, this the quote from Andy Murray that I shared: “A great team begins to happen when you have the right people on the bus in the right seats and the bus breaks down…. They work through the crisis, they get back on the bus, they’re sweating and tired. All of the sudden something magical happens: They begin to talk to each other. Culture happens through crisis. Unfortunately, many team environments have structured the crisis out.”
Mabel Dean went to Egypt at 40 years old and stayed there for nearly 40 years without taking a single furlough! “All of Dean’s life, people did not expect her to amount to much. Despite what others said, Dean believed that she had a mandate from God for missions work in Africa. She later stated, ‘I was the only homely one in my family. Yet I was the one that He chose for His work.’”
One of the prayers in the Songs of Ascent calls us to mature (or ascend) in our prayers for those who have hurt us.
“There is always a better way of doing things, and either you or your competitor will find it.” —Brad Anderson
John Piper was asked to weigh-in on the value of repetitive phrases in worship songs. He said, “The issue’s not repetition per se but whether there is enough substance, enough rich content of truth about God woven into the repetitions to justify them, to warrant them. That’s the issue. There’s a difference between repetitions that are called forth by the repeated crescendo of new, glorious truth, and repetitions that serve as a kind of mantra without sufficient truth that is simply used to sustain or intensify a mood. Moods in worship should be awakened and sustained primarily by truth, assisted by music—not primarily by music with a little truth thrown in to justify the singing.”
Pastor John Piper used Psalm 136 as an example in the post above. T.M. Moore also shared this thought about Psalm 136: “The term most frequently used to describe this everywhere-present-and-always-at-work love of God is translated as ‘lovingkindness’ or, in some versions, ‘steadfast love.’ Especially Psalm 136, with its antiphonal arrangement of verses, insists that the cosmos is upheld, sustained, and pervaded by the lovingkindness of God. … It would improve our learning to pray without ceasing if we simply took some time out during the day to thank the Lord for the many ways His steadfast love surrounds, sustains, and swarms us at every moment!”
“When people refer to a man as a man of the Book, meaning the Bible, he’s generally found to be a man of multitudinous books, which simply isolates the one Book to its proper grandeur. The man who reads only the Bible does not as a rule know it or human life.” —Oswald Chambers
Men’s Health magazine shared an interview with Jeremy Renner, who was nearly killed in a tragic accident. I love his attitude about making today better than yesterday. His words remind me of a poem my grandma used to use to motivate me to keep “besting” what I had already done.
Christopher Ash writes about reading the Psalms through the lens of Jesus. He concludes this way: “I remember seeing on the wall of a church the words of Psalm 20:4: ‘May [the Lord] grant you your heart’s desire and fulfill all your plans!’ How wonderful, you might think. The Bible promises me all that my heart desires. Until you read the psalm and realize that Psalm 20 is a prayer for the king in David’s line. Ultimately, it is a prayer that Jesus will have His heart’s desire granted and that His plans will be fulfilled. And they will! The Psalms are not all about me. If I think they are, I will end up disillusioned. But when I grasp that they are all about Christ, my heart lifts in joy that He is the blessed Man and I belong to Him.”
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
I’m proud to be a part of the Assembly of God fellowship that has its roots in missions. Alice Luce is a great example of a missions pioneer whose work in the 1920s is still bearing fruit today.
“Our nation’s founding document declared independence from Britain, but, with equal fervor, declared dependence upon God. Expressing ‘firm reliance on the Protection of divine Providence,’ the signers committed the American experiment to their Maker. The Spirit of 1776 was reverence and trust. So, as we mark this solemn occasion, let us seek a rebirth of true liberty, which is possible only when governed by divine law. For, without God, we can never have ‘liberty and justice for all.’” —Chuck Colson
“It is impossible to describe the abundance of peace and heavenly joy that often flows into my soul by means of the fresh answers which I have obtained from God, after waiting upon him for help and blessing; and the longer I have had to wait upon him, or the greater my need, the greater the enjoyment when at last the answer comes, which has often been in a very remarkable way, in order to make the hand of God the more manifest.” —George Mueller
The Institute for Creation Research reports on a study: “Physicists at Roskilde University in Denmark have shown that a single equation correctly describes the frequency of wing and fin strokes for a wide array of flying and swimming creatures, including birds, insects, bats, and whales.” Wow, it’s almost as if an all-wise Creator knew what He was doing!
T.M. Moore uses the understanding of wireless internet access to help Christians with a picture of prayer. “When we bend our increasingly Christ-filled minds, hearts, and consciences to the spiritual code-writing of prayer, we craft messages which shape the spiritual air as they course their way toward the Source of all living-water spiritual power, Who is filling all things with Himself. The more we pray with Christ-overflowing souls, the more we flood the spiritual airspace with the Lord, crowding out and sidelining those forces of wickedness which seek to jam those airwaves or fill them with spiritual disinformation. And the less spiritual ‘airspace’ the devil can command, the better for all of us.” —T.M. Moore
In what may be the best-known parable that Jesus told, what’s the difference between the hard path where the seeds failed to produce anything and the fertile soil where the seeds produced an abundant harvest? The fertile soil had a plow applied to it. In the same way, God wants to “plow” the hard places in our life so that there can be an abundant harvest! Check out this full sermon here.
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
“The greatest reason for a loss of reality is that while we say we believe one thing, we allow the spirit of the naturalism of the age to creep into our thinking, unrecognized.” —Francis Schaeffer, in True Spirituality
“The glory of God is a silver thread, which must run through all our actions.” —Thomas Watson
“Christianity is not the removal of weakness, nor is it merely the manifestation of divine power. Rather, it is the manifestation of divine power through human weakness.” —Dr. Donald Stamps, Life In The Spirit Study Bible,commenting on 2 Corinthians 4:7-9, 12:9-10
“In our media-rich, secular age, we must be especially vigilant against unbelief finding its way into our hearts [Hebrews 3:12]. The heavenly calling of God is really real, and we can really partake of it. But we’ll need to be continuously on guard against ideas and messages that can undermine our confidence, stifle our boasting, rob us of the reality of our experience of Christ, set us adrift from the Lord, and end up proving us to be someone other than we thought.” —T.M. Moore
“If you don’t want responsibility, don’t sit in the big chair. To be successful, you must accept full responsibility.” —Pat Summitt
From the 1440 Daily Digest: Congratulations, America—July 4, 2024, marks the 248th commemoration of the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress. Through the centuries, the US has grown from 13 colonies with about 2.5 million people to 50 states and 14 territories with a population of more than 330 million. The economy has swelled to over $27T. Advances in public health have cut the child mortality rate from over 45% to under 1%, while our citizens live over 35 years longer on average. Scientific achievements in the US have delivered everything from the light bulb, modern flight, and the internet to air conditioning, movies, and the polio vaccine. More than 2.7 million miles of power lines electrify the country across over 4 million miles of paved roads, with over 90% of households accessing broadband internet. The US has also been responsible for more than 800 human visits to space—the most of any country.
Godly men honor their wives by having eyes only for them. Fellas, if you find your eyes wandering you need to tell yourself, “That’s not mine!” and then quickly put your eyes back where they belong. Check out my full message to men on Father’s Day.
I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
From a recent article at The Institute for Creation Research: “Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have recently confirmed that two galaxies are extremely distant, with one becoming the new record holder as the most distant galaxy from Earth. … By uniformitarian reckoning, this galaxy existed just 290 million years after the supposed Big Bang, yet it looks too mature for its age. … This new record-breaker is just the latest example of the ‘distant mature galaxy problem’ that has long plagued the Big Bang model.” These galaxies are all the masterpiece of one Creator! Here is another resource from a biblical perspective that outlines what the “in the beginning” moment (Genesis 1:1) may have looked like.
“Give me the preacher who opens the folds of my heart; who accuses me, convicts me, and condemns me before God; who loves my soul too well to suffer me to go on in sin, unreproved, through fear of giving me offence; who draws the line with accuracy, between the delusions of fancy, and the impressions of grace; who pursues me from one hiding place to another, until I am driven from every refuge of lies; who gives me no rest until he sees me, with unfeigned penitence, trembling at the feet of Jesus; and then, and not till then, soothes my anguish, wipes away my tears, and comforts me with the cordials of grace.” —Samuel Pearce
Matthew Emadi writes, “The New Testament quotes Psalm 110 more than any other Old Testament passage. The apostles and the early church loved Psalm 110 for its majestic depiction of the Lord Jesus Christ and His reign over all nations.” Here’s how to read Psalm 110 in light of the words and works of Jesus.
J. Warner Wallace, at a Q&A session, answers questions about why some Bible translators have marked a couple of passages as unreliable, and why some books that claim to be authentic accounts aren’t included in the canon of Scripture.
“So the writer [of the Book of Hebrews] urges his readers, as part of being faithful to Him Who called them, to consider Jesus, to strive for the glory of Jesus, and to fix their minds on Jesus as the key to knowing daily strength for faithfulness (Hebrews 12:1-2). What does this entail? … The writer of Hebrews admits that he learned to look to Jesus by paying attention to those who had known Him, listening carefully to their words, and laying hold on them with faith (Hebrews 2:1-4). As he heard the apostles and studied the Scriptures of the Old Testament, the picture of Jesus presented there began to become increasingly clear. … The lesson is plain: Jesus is being revealed in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. Wherever we read or study in the Scripture, Jesus is present, making Himself known. We can see Jesus throughout the Bible, and consider Him as He is presented to us, in all His majesty, beauty, and power. Our responsibility is to read the Bible in such a way as to recognize what God is revealing about His Apostle and our High Priest, Jesus Christ.” —T.M. Moore
Craig T. Owens 