May 31, 2019 by Joey Phillips 0 comments
Vaccines, PayPal, and the Parable of the Weeds
The Parable of the Weeds provoked some thoughts on Christian ethics from Joey...Keep Reading
The Parable of the Weeds provoked some thoughts on Christian ethics from Joey...Keep Reading
Janelle Garrett writes about idolatry and why our spouses make for terrible gods. Is your spouse (or children or friend) functioning as an idol? ...Keep Reading
A twisted seed writhing forth, converging in the soil Bringing darkness, birthing fear, mindless in its toil Distorts the call of shameless grace, rejects the call of hope It cannot see the barren soul from which its blackness sloped...Keep Reading
For hours our group of foreign and Chinese teachers drove south through rice paddies and terraced tea hills to the famed Yellow Mountains of east central China. My initial fascination worn thin through endless unfamiliarity, I felt I had been dropped on another planet and wished I could switch off my senses. But we kept driving and entered the town of Mt. Jihua (pronounced jo-hwah), ringed by eighty-one temples. Throngs of Buddhist worshipers crowded the streets for the September pilgrimage....Keep Reading
A man is working hard in obscurity. His intent is to work in obscurity because any attention was bad attention (or so he thought). But he drew the attention of the Lord, who came to him and instructed him that he would be used to rescue his people from their oppressors. The Lord filled the man with strength and bravery, and miraculously everything the Lord said would happen did happen, because of the obedience and bravery of this man....Keep Reading
Dad (Benny) continued our series "Age of Heroes" with the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three men thrown into a fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. As Dad explained, the story is a story of faith on trial....Keep Reading
Our culture gets it wrong when it comes to women and image. That is no surprise, and much has been said on the topic. Recently the Huffington Post did a piece on what tabloids would look like if they treated men the way they treated women. Westminster College has a well-researched article about beauty standards, women in the media, and how women internalize the “thin-beauty” standard....Keep Reading
Identity is who you are. It tells you what you are worth, why you are here, and how you should live. It provides roles and boundaries for your relationships; it provides goals and parameters for your lifestyle; it gives significance to your thoughts, desires, and behavior. Identity is something that can and should be ascribed to each of us by God alone, and the identity He has given us is image-bearers. We bear God’s image, which means we are His designated representatives to the rest of creation and to each other. We were created to know Him and, knowing Him, to help others know Him by relating to them in such a way that we show them a little bit of what God is like. Our painful experience, however, is quite opposite of this edenic view of humanity. Most people we know are, by nature, nothing like God as He says He is or as we need Him to be. In general, people are callous, selfish, hurtful. Rather than nurturing the things and people God created (Gen 2:15), we use them. Rather than demonstrating a loving commitment to the good of others, we demonstrate a loving commitment to ourselves. This is the unraveling of humanity described by Paul in Romans 1:18-33. What makes us so divergent? How do we become so anti-God and anti-others? How are we getting our identity so wrong?...Keep Reading
What are some of the idols in your heart? What are some good desires that have been twisted by your internal idol factory into a substitute for God? As we identify the ways that we are like Ananias, let's do what Ananias and Sapphira did not do, and refuse to serve them....Keep Reading