Sunday review: June 20-25
“Following God is not safe,” Dean wrote this week. But following God IS the most fulfilling way to live. Posts this week encourage us to keep our eyes on God and learn to see how he’s working in and through us day by day. Choose one to read again, and to share with a friend.
June 20
I’m pretty sure that faithful followers of Jesus shouldn’t go around agitating folks as an evangelism strategy. That isn’t consistent with the fruit of the Spirit or with the life of Jesus. But followers of Jesus must never become complacent and ignore the whole ministry of Jesus, especially his emphasis on preaching the good news to the poor and those the world has forever treated as disenfranchised.
Read more.
June 21
It’s worth noting that throughout Scripture both before Jesus came and after the resurrection, following God is not safe according to the world’s way of understanding safety. Choosing the upside-down way of Jesus means we must learn that the ways of Jesus run against and not with the ways of the world and systems of men. Elijah would have to learn this from his experience in Cherith. We will have to learn the same in our wilderness seasons and likely more than once.
Read more.
June 22
God’s grace is the beginning and the end of our stories. We live and breathe by God’s grace. Our transformation from death to life is by God’s grace. Our eternal home is secured by God’s grace. And it is logical then to trust that it isn’t by our strength, our intelligence, or our past accomplishments that our next steps resolve well. It is God’s grace that finishes what God’s grace began. This is our great confidence.
Read more.
June 23
What if we each realized that no matter what we are going through in our hardest times, someone is watching us as we faithfully trust God to meet our needs? How many times have you personally watched someone you know endure great stress, financial hardship, sickness, relationship failure, or loss of a spouse and found that your faith grew because of how they endured and persisted, trusting God and even giving God glory in the midst of it all?
Read more.
June 24
When people are willing to come to the feet of Jesus in humility and desperation, their attitude moves the heart of God.
Read more.
June 25
The letter of James, close to the end of the New Testament, offers the promise I’ll choose to believe: “The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results” (James 5:16, New Living Translation). I’ll say to praying friends, invariably more righteous than I (but none more earnest), “Keep it up!” Because I realize, when I stop to take stock of our situation, God is keeping his promise. All this praying is producing something, a result that is indeed . . . wonderful.
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Photo by Thought Catalog at Unsplash.com
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