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Asking God Questions
In the past, irreverence and disrespect tended to flood my mind when I thought about the rightness of asking God questions. Who am I to ask the sovereign, good, wise, loving God questions? However, I have been reflecting on the idea of asking God questions and now am growing to view it differently. The best place to go when you want God’s perspective on something is to prayerfully look at the Bible. So, I started there. In the New Testament, Zechariah (the father of John the Baptist) after hearing the message from Gabriel (God’s messenger) about bearing a son in his old age, asked “How shall I know this?” Gabriel…
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With God, Nothing Is Impossible.
The story of the first Christmas begins like many others, long ago in a faraway place. Dr. Luke has a special friend, and he wants him to know the story of the birth of Jesus. We don’t know much about this friend, but Dr. Luke wanted him to understand how it all took place. So what friend do you want to know about the Christmas story? Dr. Luke begins by telling us that long ago, in the reign of King Herod, a man named Zechariah was busy serving as a priest in the temple when an angel named Gabriel appeared. God had sent him to tell Zechariah that God had…
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The Angels Of Advent
You can’t consider Advent without acknowledging the role of angels. Intricately woven into the story of the birth of Christ are these created beings – often pictured by the artists of old with wings, flowing robes and long hair. Consider three of the prominent roles angels played. Preparation was put in place to ready the participants in the nativity story. Can you imagine the orchestration behind the scenes in heaven within the Trinity and with the angels as the drama began to unfold? God was getting His message out – revealing His heart, His plan to the ones He had chosen for this certain invasion into earth. In the exact,…
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The Voice of a Father
Leadership is broken because leaders are unbroken Christmas. The scent of a beautiful green tree filling the house decorated with colorful balls, shining lights, shimmering tinsel, and topped by an angel. Decorations generously spread from room-to-room, symbols of wonderful family memories passed down from generation-to-generation. I love Christmas and all it represents. One thing I get tired of, though, is pundits who annually quote Bible verses they don’t understand about peace on earth and good will toward men when they have no grasp of how to fill that longing… The human heart cries for deliverance from suicide bombings and ceaseless streams of refugees risking their lives in rickety boats…
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The Sign of Silence
Leadership is broken because leaders are unbroken Four-hundred years of silence. Not a sound. Not a word. Not a prophet. Not a spokesman. Not the screeching of a chair or the clearing of the throat as a speaker mounts a rostrum. Nothing. Just silence. And the nation was getting restless. Oh, they had enough through what God had said previously to live with hope and anticipation. They had His covenants and His promises and His faithfulness. He had kept many of His promises already. He had released them from Egypt and returned them to the Promised Land; He had delivered them from Babylon and once again restored them…
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“Mary” Christmas!
“…conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary…” As someone who has spent years attending women’s Bible studies, I’ve gone through my share of books on women in the Bible. But ironically, not one of them has included Mary, mother of Jesus. Apparently, we Protestants overreact so much to the veneration of Mary in other traditions that we risk eliminating her altogether from our own. Considering that our Savior was the offspring of her womb, she is the only parent of Jesus named in the magi story (Matt. 2:11), and no other human besides Jesus and Pontius Pilate is named in the Apostle’s Creed, that seems like…
