Last week, Chris posted about Setting Captives Free, a ministry devoted to helping people find victory over habitual sin. This week they’ve unveiled a complete website redesign! The site has a new look, is easier to use, and has all of the old site’s excellent content. Stop by and take a look!
Over the long weekend I took a few hours to go outside with just me, my Bible and a notebook. I sat on the tree stump on the bank of a river, intent on reading Romans and reflecting on the past few months of my life.
After about a fifteen minutes of pure focus, a family of geese that had been steadily making their way towards me began to get too close to ignore. They looked at me. I looked at them. I turned my attention back to Romans only to look up a few verses later. And then again. And then again.
By the time I was in the thick of Romans 7, I finally put my Bible down and just watched them. Watched how the parents directed their young. Watched as the babies waddled among the rocks, picking at anything that looked edible. Watched as their necks stretched and contorted. Became fascinated to see them move and navigate the shore. Shortly after the geese finally left, a duck wandered by. And after the duck decided to float down the river, a pair of old men with their dogs meandered by, and after that the temperature dropped and it was cold and my legs fell asleep and I was hungry…
Romans remained relatively unread.
It struck me that despite doggedly trying to escape the distractions of life I had wandered into yet another world full of interesting things to look at. What had started as an escapade into nature in order to reconnect had become a descent into yet another tumult of stimuli.
I recall other times where I’ve sat in a room, or a chapel attempting to be silent, attempting to pray and found myself overwhelmed by how distracting the quiet is or how often someone else in the room sighs.
This is, unfortunately, just how it is I think. Regardless of where we are or what we’re doing there will be distractions. Loads of them. And when we do nothing to cultivate a sense of focus through our daily devotions and prayer life when God does show us time in our schedules to think and pray (like on beautiful Memorial Days) despite our best efforts we’ll have little recourse to give that time back to God.
Today, during my normal foray into the internet after a long weekend (read: too much to read and do) I ran across no less than three posts about how distracted we are.
It always seems to work so well the first few days. You’re stuck in a bad habit, a sinful cycle—and you want out. You do the natural thing: you excise all the junk food from the house, turn off your computer for good, or throw away your last cigarette and then you grit your teeth saying, “Enough!”
And then, a few days later, you find yourself stocking up at the grocery store, wearily turning on your computer or buying a whole carton.
Shortly thereafter you wonder what went wrong. This was supposed to be the time quitting actually worked!
This attempt at freedom from sin is referred to as “white knuckling” by the ministry Setting Captives Free. It’s the idea that we can overcome any habit through will-power alone, and it rarely if ever works. In fact, it often leads us even deeper into sin. The only true way out of our bad habits is through the Grace offered to us by Christ, by replacing the parts of our life that keep us from loving God with that Grace.
Here’s an excerpt from their article White Knuckling vs. Subdued by Grace:
Grace woos us. Grace pursues us. And then grace subdues us. And the condition of this person, who has been won by grace, is one of delighting in freedom from past sins, joyous and happy to be worshiping Christ instead of idols, and pleasant and peaceful to be around. He is not “white knuckling” anything, but rather he is enjoying his Sabbath rest in Jesus’ finished work on the cross.
Now this is not to say that there is no more battle to be fought against sin; indeed, the battle just begins when we are changed by grace. The flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, so that often we do not do what we want. We are truly in a battle. But now it is a battle in which we are empowered to fight by God’s grace and enabled to win by God’s Spirit. Though we stumble and falter, we now have all the resources of God Himself on our behalf: the power of His Word, the presence of His Spirit, the help of His body, even the ministry of His angels (Hebrews 1:14).
Oh what a difference there is in the life of those who are subdued by God’s grace, versus those who white-knuckle it.
When was the last time you really studied the Old Testament? Sure, most of us know the famous stories and characters—Adam & Eve, Noah, King David, Jonah, etc. But the vast majority of verses and Bible passages that Christians look to for guidance come from the more familiar New Testament.
There are some perfectly legitimate reasons for that, of course. But the Old Testament is much more than just a series of stories setting up the “important” part of the Bible. The latest issue of Uplook magazine has just been posted online (in PDF), and its focus is on revisiting the Old Testament. It’s got articles by Shawn Abigail, James Martin, and Jack Baker about how to read the Old Testament, where we find Christ in the Old Testament, and how the Old and New Testaments are intended to relate to each other.
You can download a copy of the new May issue (and take a look at back issues) at the Uplook website.
What would you guess are the top ten most-read verses of the Bible?
Over at the BibleGateway.com blog, we’ve published a list of the top 100 most read Bible verses. We pulled our data from 25 million searches between March and April, limiting the results to searches done on 3 or fewer verses.
The results might not surprise you, but it’s still interesting to see what people are reading.
Here’s the top 10:
Jump over to the BibleGateway.com blog post to see the rest.
And just for kicks, the least read passage of the Bible is 1 Chronicles 23-27, which details the organization of the priests and officials under King David.
Do any of the verses that made it surprise you? Do you have a favorite that you don’t see on the list?
The Digital Evangelism blog has a post up today about understanding followers of Islam. The Christian witness to Muslims is complicated these days by a huge array of challenges—political and cultural as much as theological—but Christians can be more effective in sharing their faith if they take the time to understand exactly what Muslims believe and what is important to them.
Of the various articles linked to in that blog post, I found this one about understanding “shame-based” cultures the most interesting. It illustrates how important it is to consider local culture and beliefs when presenting the Gospel—in this case, the importance of ritual cleanliness in Muslim culture—and how failing to respect non-Western cultural values can sometimes put additional roadblocks in between Muslims and the Gospel message. And it also challenges us to consider whether we can’t learn something from the Islamic emphasis on ritual purity and defilement; the essay’s author, Bruce Thomas, suggests that those concepts aren’t as foreign to a Christian worldview as you might think.
It’s an interesting set of articles for anyone interested in cross-cultural evangelism.
We all have at least one thing that we love to do. It makes us feel alive. It makes us feel valuable. It’s the one thing you can fall back on when times are rough.
A recent post from the Lies Young Women Believe site asks if you’d be willing to lay “It” down for Jesus.
Sometimes we get really addicted to what we “do.†We love it. And we think it is what makes us “all that and we feel insignificant without it. Doesn’t’ matter what “it†is. Swimming. Singing. Getting A’s. God doesn’t mind that we love it or excel. He probably enjoys watching our pleasure. But I think that sometimes we have to lay it down.
[...]
I think that Peter knows a little about that. He was quite a fisherman. In fact, her ran back to his fishing business for comfort after he denied Christ. Jesus shows up and says, “Hey, I want to make you a fisher of men!†Jesus got how much Peter loved his fishing. He also wanted Peter to have more. So, Peter gave it all up to go for it all. Ironic, isn’t it.
What’s your “it”? Would you willfully give it up for God?
Military families are all too familiar with the emotional pain and difficulty that comes from extended separation. Over the last several years, thousands of families have had to soldier on while a mother or father was deployed overseas to Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.
In their “Hope for Homefront Heroes” article series, Officers’ Christian Fellowship is talking about the different issues faced by the spouses of deployed soldiers. In their latest article, Cindy Wesley talks about how she and her children handled the pain of separation from her husband while he was in Iraq. She shares the lessons she learned raising kids alone during those periods of separation, and offers advice for other parents who find themselves in the same situation.
The OCF site has many more articles about this and related topics. If you’re the spouse of a deployed soldier or know somebody who’s struggling to get by during a deployment, take a look at the support OCF can provide.
Dale and Jonalyn Fincher of the the Soulation ministry were interviewed recently on the Association of Christian Schools International radio program! During the interview they talk about what drove them to start up an apologetics ministry with a focus on students and young people, and why it’s so critical to engage people intellectually and spiritually with the Christian faith.
You can listen to the radio interview at the Soulation website. Dale and Jonalyn are an extremely eloquent and thoughtful pair; if you have any interest in student ministry or apologetics, it’s well worth giving the short interview a listen.
We all know that part of the process of growing up is a journey from dependence to independence. In fact, the people who are considered most mature in Western culture are those that can take care of themselves with a minimum amount of support or input from others. Yet Christ has called those that follow him to be continually submissive to God and to others.
It can make for quite a conundrum: we want to be able to take care of ourselves, but God calls us to submit our lives to Him and to others.
A recent post from the Lifetime Guarantee blog explores these tensions between dependence and submission. It begins by talking about all the great things we’d miss out on if we didn’t need anybody else (things like love, community and friendship), and continues by discussing how that helps us relate to God.
Here’s one of my favorite quotations for Meeting Our Needs:
Every need we have has a tempting counterfeit. Counterfeits can look and feel amazingly real, but they’re deceptive. They promise what they cannot deliver. They may provide temporary satisfaction, but they are usually self-focused and fall way short of the incredible plan God has for meeting our needs.
Do you trust God to meet your needs his way? In His strength, you have the power to turn away from the counterfeits and seek satisfaction in the real thing. We have to admit our needs and see Jesus as the only option for meeting them.
What are some of the counterfeits you settle for in life? Where do you seek satisfaction when you should be finding it in God or others?
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