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Wrestling with the Devil or God?
Maturation is a lifelong journey with different phases, human and spiritual. And it has many setbacks. What can be helpful is to have a grasp of the natural seasons of our lives and how these interfac... -
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Transgression is Pushing Past Good Boundaries
After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.” With its Latin roots, “across” and ... -
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The Census Taker and the Country Woman
Communicating with people is often easier said than done. Take for instance this apocryphal story of the census taker who had to venture many miles down a country road to reach a cabin. As the man pul... -
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Searching for the Infinite
Robert Burns was a widely heralded poet and lyricist (1759-1796), considered by many as the National Poet of Scotland. Burns’ poems continue to be read around the world and many have been put to song,... -
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The church fathers consistently acknowledged
The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi... -
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Søren Kierkegaard’s Advice on Reading the Bible
Søren Kierkegaard offers two suggestions for the reader who tackles difficult portions of the Bible. First, read it like a love letter, he says. As you struggle with language, culture, and other barri... -
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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. -
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Even the Almighty took seven
Franklin D. Roosevelt had hoped the Yalta conference (which discussed the future of Europe and Germany post-WWII) wouldn’t last more than five or six days. Winston Churchill, however, remarked, “I do ... -
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What it Means to Be "Childlike"
In his book of sermons titled The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner mentions two qualities of childlikeness. First, children have no fixed preconceptions of reality. If someone tells them that ... -
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Who Determines Your Behavior?
Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape... -
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God our Father We confess to you and to
God our Father We confess to you and to one another That we have been quick to anger And slow to mercy We have paid back abuse with abuse Hatred with hatred And violence with violence The world does n... -
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God, the fact that we feel
God, the fact that we feel uncomfortable is evidence that we perceive the injustices in our world. We don’t ask you to help us hear the cries of injustice, but rather to give us courage to act against... -
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Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught
Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you... -
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Lord Jesus, Master of both the light
Lord Jesus, Master of both the light and the darkness, send your Holy Spirit upon our preparations for Christmas. We who have so much to do seek quiet spaces to hear your voice each day. We who are an... -
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We All Need Blessing
We all need [blessing] desperately. It is the one great need we all share in common. We were born for it and there is no lasting joy without it. What oxygen is for the lungs and protein for the body, ... -
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Trusting in God’s Good Gifts
God wants to feed his people. In keeping the one tree from them, God protected Adam and Eve. When they broke table fellowship with God, they suspected that God was withholding something good, that thi... -
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The Perversion of Pleasure
In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte... -
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God’s Abundant Provision in Genesis 2
There is a tendency among readers and scholars of Genesis 2:16-17 to focus on the prohibition of verse 17: “but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” …I want to pause to cons... -
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Why Did God Make This World?
To ask our (not so) simple question in another way: Why did God make this world? Why did he make a world for his own glory in Christ and then fill it to the brim with pleasures—physical pleasures, sen... -
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The Christmas Gift
A preaching professor at Harvard University tells the story of the year his 5-year-old son was working on an art project in his kindergarten class. It was made of plaster, resembled nothing in particu... -
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The Devils Logic [Part 2 of 2]
If I were making a list of benefits like the one Mike McKinley imagines, only this time using the devil’s actual logic, it might look more like this: Experience the excitement of new romance. Get th... -
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Food Didn’t Have to Be This Good!
There is an Indian restaurant in my neighborhood called Bollywood Theatre. I once went to lunch with my friend Todd Miles, a theologian at a local seminary. Taking in our first few bites, he blurted o... -
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A Vice President’s Undoing by a 3-cent Butter Roll
Dr. Bob Reccord tells the story of a major move that was set to take place inside the halls of a Fortune 500 company. It was unheard of, but the company was ready to promote a 38-year-old from vice pr... -
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God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame. -
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This is salvation in the deeper and more spiritual sense of the Old Testament. . . . But even in the religion of the Law, . . . obedience to the revealed will of Yahweh is recognized as the supreme en... -
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Obedience is an essential outcome of Christian spiritual formation.
![The Devils Logic [Part 2 of 2]](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1635612717838-be24c0a2a424?ixid=M3w1NzU0OTZ8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHw1fHwlMjBuZXclMjByb21hbmNlfGVufDB8MHx8fDE3NTUzODM1MzJ8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&auto=compress&fit=crop&w=200&h=200)
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