Category: Weekly Devotional

Courageous or cowardly

Courageous or cowardly

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Courage has always been required for one to follow Jesus faithfully. How much courage has depended, and does depend, on when and where one follows Jesus. There have been seasons in American history when it didn’t take much courage to follow Jesus because that was the mainstream way to live. Early in the life of the nascent church, it took enough courage to follow Jesus to give your physical life to be faithful to him. All of the Apostles, save one, were martyred. Only John the beloved was allowed to live out his full years and die a natural death,

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Sometimes the small miscellaneous statements are the most profound.

Sometimes the small miscellaneous statements are the most profound.

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It has been my experience that in most cases, when people look seriously at Scripture, those final words of greeting or salutation at the end of a letter are overlooked as just personal comments without much value for us all. Preachers will often dismiss these sections since they don’t usually contain any meaningful doctrinal statements. But this section today has so much powerful material in small packages I want to go through and comment on them phrase by phrase.

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The Day of the Lord orders the world aright

The Day of the Lord orders the world aright

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Tornado damage to a community is a natural analog to the nature of our whole world. It is broken, shattered, and in disarray. Everyone understands that our world is broken. That is why we work so hard to fix it. Whether we are talking about the natural world and natural disasters or whether we are talking about societal disasters like political corruption, commercial corruption, or family destruction, it is broken.

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The second coming will be loud and proud

The second coming will be loud and proud

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The second coming of Christ will not be like his first coming, both in character and purpose. The first coming of Christ was essentially an infiltration of humanity. There was no big noise for the whole world to hear or other demonstration that God had taken on flesh. Jesus just snuck into the human experience, being born as a human baby. There were some supernatural accompaniments. The angels announce his birth to the shepherds. The star the Maji followed, and the voice of God to the Maji. All in all, the Savior’s birth was a pretty quiet affair.

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Love has a purpose. Know what it is?

Love has a purpose. Know what it is?

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Ask any Christian what holiness means, and you may get a range of answers. If you ask a conservative Presbyterian (like a PCA or Orthodox Presbyterian), you will get one answer. Ask a liberal or progressive Presbyterian, like Presbyterian USA, and you will get a quite different Presbyterian answer. Ask an Assembly of God (AoG) member, and you will probably get a quite different answer. Ask a Nazarene and you will probably get an answer much like the AoG Christian (because their roots come from the same holiness movement). If you ask a few Southern Baptists and you will get the full range of answers since the Southern Baptists aren’t quite as homogenous as the other denominations. So, that leaves us with a question with no singular answer.

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My story in brief…

Christ first came into my life at the age of 5 during a series of evangelistic meetings in our tiny country Quaker church house in Gate, Oklahoma. Since then it has been a process of “Stumbling forward by grace, through faith in Christ.” I experienced a significant personal revival at the age of 19 and have been much in love with the Lord ever since…five decades-plus.

My passion is to enjoy the Lord by encouraging others to make progress in their lives…living life successfully. I do that primarily through my disciple-making efforts and through my writing.

I spent about 20 years in public ministry and at the age of 40 decided that I had allowed my passion for ministry to impede my prior duty to my family, so I stepped aside. I found a new career as a financial advisor and now make my living serving my financial planning clients.

I now consider myself to be a bi-vocational minister of the gospel.

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