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Showing posts from May, 2015

Does God Hold Us Back?

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1 Chronicles 12 tell us that Rehoboam along with the people of the southern kingdom of Judah were established and strong, but they forsook the law of the Lord. Yahweh then appointed the prophet Shemaiah to tell the people that since they left God, God left them alone to face the invading army of Shishak, an Egyptian Pharaoh. Rehoboam and the nation’s leaders humbled themselves, and declared the “Lord is righteous.” Yahweh saw their humility, and spoke through the prophet saying, “They have humbled themselves. I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance, and my wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak. Nevertheless, they shall be servants to him, that they may know my service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries” (vv. 7-8, ESV). God forgave the people of Rehoboam’s kingdom, but the people still experienced the effect of their sin of their unfaithfulness. Shishak spared the city of Jerusalem from destruction, and “he took aw...

Is the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage reason to despair?

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I just scanned through the book Same-Sex Marriage: A Thoughtful Approach to God’s Design for Marriage (Baker) by Sean McDowell and John Stonestreet, which seeks to answer the question: “ ‘What now?’ How can the church best respond in the midst of this changing environment? What will Christian faithfulness look like once new definitions of marriage and sexuality replace those that have undergirded society for so long?”  The urgency for an answer to the question asked is understandable, for within a span of a little over two decades same-sex unions have gone from unthinkable to commonplace.Scriptures teach that God from the beginning instituted marriage to be a publicly recognized union between one man and one woman for the purpose of procreation (Gen. 1-2). The Word of God can never be broken, but the salt appears to have lost its savor. One point that McDowell and Stonestreet made that really stuck out is this: As Christians, we believe that there is something more profo...