How do we move from becoming anxious about what we see and read to being able to have peace as we build a habit of turning to God with prayers and petitions based on what is going on? And how do we keep from letting our minds go down an endless spiral of negative information and instead choose to dwell on restorative things?
I have to see that I have a need for forgiveness because I am a sinner. Now, that’s sort of negative. That’s humility. That helps toward forgiving other people when you realize “I’m a sinner too”. But that’s the bad news. The good news is the cost of forgiveness. What God went through, what Jesus went through in order to get you that forgiveness and to forgive you freely. And that fills you with grateful joy, and there’s a need for both the humility and the joy.
How do we move from becoming anxious about what we see and read to being able to have peace as we build a habit of turning to God with prayers and petitions based on what is going on? And how do we keep from letting our minds go down an endless spiral of negative information and instead choose to dwell on restorative things?
Christians in every society must use their wisdom in how to apply the Bible carefully, allowing others to come to different conclusions and use different approaches—all of which are based on biblical inspiration, but none of which comes with absolute biblical warrant. How freeing is it for the church that we can agree on the moral imperatives, but have a healthy (and even heated!) debate over the application of those morals in culture?
An autoimmune disease that had been lying dormant surfaced early this year with life-changing force. Overnight my world completely shifted.
Even though I turned her down, she befriended me, and over the next few months, she and her friends became my friends. I was attracted to the way they loved one another and me, and was often amazed by their generosity and care. I eventually accepted one of their many invitations to come to church because I grew to trust them and love their community. About a year later, in large part thanks to their persistence, I became a follower of Jesus.
An autoimmune disease that had been lying dormant surfaced early this year with life-changing force. Overnight my world completely shifted.
As I rode the subway home, I was lost in thought. I recalled the moment on 9/11 when Brian and I had said goodbye to each other at the fort, when I realized that my relationship with God was practically nonexistent. But here I was, going to the church for help, and those ladies had cared. As I pieced everything together, something shifted inside of me. I felt hope.
I realized I had made an idol out of being a pastor and when it was taken from me, I reacted like a small child with his toy taken away. I began to converse with God daily and digest his Word again daily and pray and sing and fast. And the prison I had willingly put myself in slowly melted away.
There’s a clear line of demarcation in each of our lives: the pre- versus the post- September 11th reality – and there’s nothing we can do to change this. What a strange and overwhelming feeling of powerlessness this realization brings, and yet, having been forced to confront it, our lives go on, in some ways as before and in other ways indelibly altered.