From December, 2012
My Bible and notebooks are riddled with quips, quotes, and thoughts from various messages, revelations, and sermons. These little guys are far too short to be their own posts, so I’m ready to clean out my Bible and throw out this hodge-podge of brain bites, just as they are. I hope you get something from some, if not all of them!
You can’t do anything to be born. In the same way, you can’t do anything to be born again. [cf. John 3]
Abraham never received his inheritance, his offspring did. The only property he died with was Sarah’s tomb. If we think we need roots in this world, we will be depressed; we’re all about inheritance NOW.
The whole world suffers; Christians are patient.
“We want to be saved from our misery, not our sin.” -Sproul
“The reason marriage is so painful, yet so beautiful is because it is like the gospel, which is painful yet beautiful.” -Tim Keller
God hates temples.
I think the reason torture and murder scenes in films scare us is because we deserve every one of them. There is no bad thing we don’t deserve [because of our sins], but Christ took them instead. This is another reason that fearing anything BUT Him is a sin. We deserve the torture we see in violent films, yet Christ took them all for us. Not only can we stop fearing death, but we can stop fearing torture and even pain because Christ went through them all before, and we can claim the victory. {note: this doesn’t mean some of you won’t be physically tortured, or otherwise for your faith. It simply means we can’t fear it anymore. We have the ultimate victory in Jesus.}
Christian joy is a deep delight in the Lord that ruins us for anything else.
Sushi.
Mass teachings of Jesus’ was not for evangelism–it was about the kingdom. He did evangelism [and discipleship] in small numbers.
Marriage to God (beulah) is a covenant made and remembered. Transubstantiation is unnecessary, just as a wedding ring is not the marriage.
One essential belief that all Christians must possess is that what God has for us in heaven is better than what we want for ourselves; better than the pleasures we could seek out on our own. It sounds crazy, but we have to believe that heaven will be better than this world. Many believers would say they believe this with their mouths, but few live like it.
When God says “I am merciful,” He is not bragging like the disgusting Xerxes character in the film 300. He is revealing parts of His character to men.
It is foolish for us to look forward to anything, or to long for anything we had in the past. We have everything we could ever hope for right now in Christ. God is a God of the present; of the here and now. He loves us and has saved us as we are NOW. Therefore, looking forward to the future, rather than delighting in His gift of grace now is mere foolishness. Everything else in this world that we could ever hope for is a trinket addition to the enormous gift that is salvation in Jesus alone.
David was a king so passionately in love with God that all the kings that followed were measured by him.
In order to experience seasons of rich harvest, we have to go through seasons of deep ground breaking, and the tearing up of old soil.
The gospel will cease to amaze me on the day I stop sinning.
“Unmarried Christians who practice chastity need to remember that God desires your person, your body, more than any man or woman ever will.” -Sarah F. Winner
You would never drink polluted water, so why do that to your spirit?
We will never experience an emotion that God has not already felt to an exponentially deeper degree. God’s intense passion is an invitation for us to feel more deeply and grieve, and hate sin, and love others, and rejoice more deeply. We worship a passionate God!
You necessarily have to listen to heavy metal when you read Isaiah and Jeremiah.
So there ya go.
e
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