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Part X: The Lord of the Scroll – When will the King of Kings Return?
One of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity is that our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, will one day return, gather those alive on Earth that truly believe in Him (i.e., His Church), and then move them to be with Him forever!
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Help Those New to the Bible
Are you discipling a new Christian? Do you have women in your small group that are new to the Bible? As a leader, do you ask if anyone in your small group is new to the Bible? What do you do if they are? Do you assume that new Christians or those new to the Bible will catch up by just being in your group? That is a bad assumption?! In this article, I will share with you some insights I have picked up about helping those new to the Bible. The Dilemma I recently heard a new Christian woman say, “I just get lost in our small group Bible…
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Guided By an Unseen Hand – Part 2
Just two months ago, I wrote about trusting God’s hand even when you can’t see his plan. In a short time so much has changed, and yet the challenge to walk by faith remains. After a year and a half of waiting, praying, trusting, my husband was offered a new job. But it didn’t come in the package we expected. The trials of the past year opened our hands. Eventually we told the Lord we’d go anywhere—we just wanted to be used by him to make a difference. And he answered. My husband was offered a job nearly four hours from where we currently live. We’ve both grown up in…
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End Times: I Wish We’d All Been…Discipled
I’ve seen and heard my colleague Dr. Mike Svigel, who teaches eschatology at the premillennial dispensational seminary where I also teach, say, “If your eschatology leads you to fear the antichrist rather than to hope in the Christ…or to hate unbelievers rather than to love your enemies…then get a new eschatology.” Can I get an amen? Abigail Dunlap, a Millennial friend, grew up with a family member steeped in the former sort of end-times focus to which Dr. Svigel is referring, so I invited her to write a guest-post adding her voice to the active end-times conversation (recently seen here, here, and here): The American evangelical church of the 1980s and 90s can…
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Pointing Children To Their Strengths
Today our guest poster is Lucille Williams, who has written a children’s book: “Turtle Finds His Talent” is a wonderful addition to your children’s library. Pointing Children To Their Strengths by Lucille Williams When I was in elementary school I can remember feeling extreme panic when the teacher asked the class to read out loud. We would start at one end of the classroom, and as it got closer to my turn, panic would set in. I had trouble reading as a kid, and I’d stop at “small” words as I saw “big” words coming up. During the pause, I’d try to figure out the “big” word. All this to…
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Embracing Inevitable Change
After my husband and I had completed language school and taken a survey trip, we left the expat-saturated city to set up home and ministry in a new field on an eastern island in Indonesia. When the whole team finally gathered—five families and one single man—we excitedly began to settle in, strategize, and get to know each other. Just a few months later, the phone rang in the early hours of the morning. The frantic voice of my teammate called out, “We’ve been robbed. My husband’s been cut. Send help.” He had in fact been seriously wounded and her call started a chain of events that changed our lives. What…
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You Can’t Lose His Love
Sunday School Chronicles Me: Is there anything you can do to make your parents not love you?Kids: (without hesitation) No.Me: Ok cool. Do you think there are people out there who think their parents would stop loving them?Kid 1: Yeah. I think there’s people out there who think that.Me: Can you do anything that would make God not love you anymore?Kids: (zero hesitation) No!Me: Exactly! There is absolutely nothing you can do to separate you from God’s love. Nothing. But there are people who don’t believe this. Some people belive that since they have sucky parents, then God must suck, too. Good or bad, people think God is just like…
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The “image that fell from heaven” in Ephesus (Acts 19:35)
Bonus material: Stuff I discovered while researching my forthcoming book, Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the NT: When the Ephesian silver workers caused a disturbance over the apostle Paul’s ministry cutting into their souvenir trade, the city clerk delivered a speech in which he referenced Artemis’s “image that fell from heaven.” That’s the translation, at least. It’s awkward to render into English, because the Greek has diopetous (διοπετοῦς), “Dio” being the Greek name for Zeus. Literally, the image is “Zeus-fallen.” Zeus was Artemis’s father. So what exactly was the image to which the clerk referred? It’s possible the artifact is sitting in storage in the Liverpool…
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“I don’t like surprises! I just want to know when Jesus is going to come back.”
As bedtimes so often go, my four-year-old uses the last few minutes of the day in hopes that he can begin a conversation that will require me to linger just a little bit longer. Most recently, he began a line of questioning that started with curiosity about the new heaven and the new earth, and then morphed into an intense desire to understand Jesus’ triumphant return (Rev. 21:1, Matt. 24:42-44). He did not receive the news well when I explained that Jesus says we won’t know when he’s coming back. Worst case scenario, we wait. If you have parented any preschoolers recently, then you know that waiting is not one…
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One of the Impacts of Easter in our Lives
Easter is a particular time we set as a celebration of our God of the gospel—Christ dying on the cross for the payment of our sins, God accepting Jesus’ payment by raising Him from the dead, and the Holy Spirit’s transformative work in our lives for righteousness. One of the beautiful impacts of Easter on my life took form as I reflected on a particular incident. One evening my eye began to hurt. My eye would go from feeling normal, to hurting, to back to feeling normal. After about 18 hours, I had someone look at my eye to see if anything was on it. An eyelash was slowly…