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Knowledge of God Matters.
Which do you think shows up more in the Bible—faith or knowledge? If you do a concordance search, you will find something surprising. Knowledge (including knowing, know, etc.) shows up far more than faith does.
Of course, without faith, it is impossible to please God, but knowledge is far more important to God than people realize. Listen to (more…)
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Sincerity is Not Enough
Devotion and Sincerity are admirable. But when it comes to questions of reality, we know this is not enough.
In our “follow your heart,” “You do you” and personalize everything to my own preferences world–this can be confusing.
Every day through Spotify, Netflix, and YouTube–People are discipled by our culture to think that right and wrong, gender, sexuality, and spirituality are determined by what I—as an individual–choose to believe. That’s the height of freedom right? Wrong.
Why? Because we all know that we’ve been sincerely wrong. Remember all those tests you took that your teacher had the audacity to count certain answers incorrect? Remember how sincere you were on the SAT and ACT? They didn’t care.
Or think of it this way. I am not a fan of heights. Why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?
But if I did, I would assure you that I would have all the sincerity in the world when I pulled the ripcord on that parachute.
But if that chute was improperly packed, I am going to have a very bad day.
Sincerity doesn’t change reality.
If we live in God’s Universe—and I think the evidence for that is very strong by the way—then God sets the rules and defines reality. And we either cooperate with it or slam into it when our beliefs are wrong.
And the best way to navigate reality is to read the designer’s manual—the Bible. It teaches us what is true and how to live.
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Why Ideas Are So Powerful
Ideas have always been and continue to be our Enemy’s favorite method of undermining the work of God.
Dallas Willard comments on what happened in the garden of Eden:
“Ideas and images are … the primary focus of Satan’s efforts to defeat God’s purposes with and for humankind. When we are subject to his chosen ideas and images, he can take a nap or a holiday. Thus when he undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but with an idea. It was with the idea that God could not be trusted and that she must act on her own to secure her own well-being.”
Two observations. First, both Adam and Eve fell for the bad idea that God really can’t be trusted. Second, once ideas take root, they have a mind of their own and pick up speed like a snowball rolling down a hill!
That is why God’s Word reminds us:
“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”–2 Cor 10:3-5
Notice that part of our (more…)
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Does the Bible really teach that Jesus is the only way to God?
That’s a good question. Our culture is definitely headed in the direction of pluralism and relativism.
For example, 6 out of 10 teenagers today agree with the statement “many religions can lead to eternal life; there is no one true religion.” Prominent religious leaders like the Dalai Lama agree when he says, “the essential message of all religions is very much the same.”
There are different parts of this question worth looking at and responding to, but I want to focus on what the Bible says. Because if the Bible teaches that Jesus is the only way to God, then it doesn’t matter what our increasingly secular thinks.
It turns out (more…)
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What Are Spiritual Disciplines?
Right off the bat, we need to acknowledge that Paul commands us to discipline ourselves “for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7 – 8 NASB; cf. 2 Peter 1:5 – 10).
They are essential for our growth and not optional when it comes to the Christian life.
A discipline is “any activity I can do by direct effort that will help me do what I cannot now do by direct effort.”
For example, we practice scales on a piano to learn to play music — not to get really good at playing scales.
I don’t practice grammar to get really good at grammar. I study vocabulary and grammar so that I can learn to speak a new language and experience the whole new world that language opens up.
The eternal kind of life is (more…)