“You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3 We seem to do OK with the first commandment, but two verses down we encounter God’s statement that He’s a jealous God. “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” Exodus 20:5 What are we to make of this? Jealousy is not an admirable trait in […]
As we’ll see in the following Joshua 5:13-14 passage, this is the wrong question. Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” “Neither,” he replied, […]
If you’ll remember, three weeks ago Padraic was talking to Matthew about what Jesus said at the Last Supper: “Whoever has My commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him (John […]
The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. James 5:16 Who is righteous, Lord, but one who is rightly related to You? Who is rightly related to You but one who walks one step behind You. Who walks one step behind You but one who loves You more than these?John 21:15 Who loves You […]
Faith increases with experience and decreases through forgetfulness. That’s why the Israelites picked up 12 stones from the middle of the Jordan River when they passed through and piled them up on the other side as a remembrance of God’s intervention in their lives. God intervened in the lives of His chosen people with ten […]
“The centurion replied, ‘For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes ; and that one, ‘come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this, He was astonished.” Matthew 8:8-10 The centurion recognized and […]
The 12 apostles walked with Jesus for three years and knew him as well as any man can know another. And they loved Him dearly, perhaps even Judas until his sinful nature took over. Paul, the appointed 12th Apostle, spent three years with Jesus in the Arabian Desert and came to know Him as well […]
You are what you fill your mind with – negative or positive, the world or Jesus Christ, what you want to do or what God wants you to do. If you want to change who you are, you must first change what you fill your mind with. If you want to be more godly, you […]
If He had said, “Here it is,” I would have looked at it.If He had said, “There it is,” I would have searched for it. But how do you hear his voice unless you listen for it? Andhow do you listen for it unless you still your own mind. Beas the prophet Samuel when he […]
The left bookend is the world as God meant it to be in the beginning. It is referred to as the Garden of Eden or simply Paradise. Through the sin of Adam and Eve, Paradise was lost and replaced by the wasteland of a cursed and fallen world where death, disease, and destruction hold sway. […]