Giving and Receiving Blessing

Now finally, all of you should be like-minded and sympathetic, should love believers, and be compassionate and humble, not paying back evil for evil or insult for insult but, on the contrary, giving a blessing, since you were called for this, so that you can inherit a blessing. For the one who wants to love life and to see good […]

Being Misinterpreted

Once I was speaking on holiness through an interpreter to a group of people who spoke Spanish. Several times people in the audience interrupted my interpreter with suggestions for her that were intended to improve her choice of words in translating what I was saying. I began to wonder what understanding the group was gaining from my effort. In Exodus […]

Simple Gospel

I expect to soon be called on to pray with a 5 year old child regarding some trauma its family has subjected it to. While praying about what to pray, I started to also wonder how to include the child in the prayer. How can I communicate to the child that we are going to talk to Yahweh? How to […]

Anger Stinks

When we live with anger instead of controlling it by manifesting the fruit of God’s Spirit, it influences all we experience in bad ways. We are suspicious. We are fearful. We misjudge and condemn. We whisper about others. We hope for the people we are angry with to suffer. We neutralize the power of the cross in our lives and […]

Service on Purpose

One of the most likely methods of overcoming depression or selfishness or unforgiveness or sadness or hopelessness is to search for someone to serve. Seeing others gain comfort or provision or safety or happiness can be a valuable source of the same things to us. The more I am focused on others’ needs, the more I am stepping into a […]

Fear On Purpose

The culture that we live in attempts to control us with fear. People in power attempt to control others with fear. They can insulate us from Yahweh and immobilize us if they can impose fears on us. Fear of hell, fear of disease, fear of injury, fear of bad luck, fear of rejection, fear of poverty, fear of failure, and […]

Fruitful on Purpose

I must bear the fruit of the Spirit if I want people to experience Jesus, raised  from the dead, through my life. If I answer situations I encounter with creative expressions of the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fullness of faith, gentleness and self-control, I have introduced people to Jesus Himself. E. Stanley Jones described three levels […]

From God or Man?

“Was John’s baptism from heaven or from men? Answer Me.” (Mark 11:30 Holman Christian Standard Bible® ©) One of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, “Your servant, my husband, has died. You know that your servant feared the Lord. Now the creditor is coming to take my two children as his slaves.” Elisha asked […]

Going to Heaven

I feel as though I am about 40 years late doing the things that I believe I am in the earth to accomplish. Among other reasons, this sense that I have not really entered into my destiny here yet makes me pretty annoyed when the church around me is singing songs like “Precious Lord” – asking for permission to leave […]

Eying Others’ Needs

Proverbs 22:9 has an interesting phrase in it. In the Holman Christian Standard Bible, it reads: A generous person will be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor.  Young’s Literal Translation left a picture untouched in it, though: The good of eye — he is blessed, For he hath given of his bread to the poor. The person […]