Building on the Foundation

We live in a rough world; a world bent on our destruction and the destruction of our hearts. In our daily lives, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death constantly because any moment might be our last. I'm not trying to be dramatic, that's simply the truth. Very few deaths are expected, and most happen completely out of the blue, so not only might every moment be our last moment, but it might also be someone we love's last moment. There are a lot of things that could be said about that, but the main lesson to draw is that we need to make every moment we have with those we love count because we might not get another one. Someday we will have seen someone for the last time on this earth and not even realize it. That's a bit of a sobering thought when you recognize that our time with those we love is temporary. Losing someone can be one of the greatest emotional struggles we will face in our lives and the pain is one of the deepest and longest-lasting pains in th...

Modern Christianity has developed a catch-all word to excuse themselves from keeping God’s law. A word, to be sure, that is actually found in the Bible but is grossly misunderstood. My purpose with this post is not to fully explore all the avenues of grace and its most significant component (for that would take all day and then some) but merely to define and, applying a bit of logic, establish its connection to the law and establish which law. Starting out, we are going to establish a definition of grace. Webster's 1828 dictionary defines grace as GRACE, noun [Latin gratia, which is formed on the Celtic; Eng. agree, congruous, and ready. The primary sense of gratus, is free, ready, quick, willing, prompt, from advancing.] 1. Favor; good will; kindness; disposition to oblige another; as a grant made as an act of grace 2. Appropriately, the free unmerited love and favor of God, the spring and source of all the benefits men receive from him. 4. The application of Christ's righteou...

  We all have people in this life that we find hard to be around, people that we strongly dislike and would enjoy seeing trip over a rake or two. Most of us probably have great reasons for thinking what we think about these people, too. They may have hurt us, or said something nasty about us, or they were downright awful to us, but our reasons for holding it against them are pretty good solid reasons, at least, they are in our minds. As humans, we are great at holding grudges, and we are awful at letting things go. What's the harm in holding things against someone? Our thoughts don't hurt anyone, do they?  It's true that our thoughts don't really affect the other person, at least right away. Eventually, it might lead to us being nasty towards them or hurting them, but they probably deserved that pie in the face anyways. We are Christians, though, and as Christians, we have an obligation to be Christ-like (that's what Christian means). Being Christlike means we walk ...