Tag: Idolatry

By micoots
25/01/2017 0

Performing a “Time Audit” of Your Life

One of the benefits of a new year is stopping to take stock of our lives—to assess whether we’re actually spending our time doing what matters most. We’ll never live the life God intends for us unless we intend to, and intending starts with an honest look at how we’ve created our schedules.

Our Spiritual Formations team has created a great tool to help us “audit” our most precious resource—our time. Check it out:

Five Life Resources:

Spiritual – Every person’s heart yearns for something. Addi..

By micoots
24/01/2017 0

We Can’t Agree to Disagree on Homosexuality

I write a lot on the sexual ethic. Roughly half of the posts that I have written are in some form or another touching this topic – whether homosexuality, transgenderism, or sexual license in general, and I don’t think that will be settling down any time soon. Yet contrary to the chagrin of many it is one addressed with profundity in the scriptures. The topic of sexuality and idolatry are so closely united within the biblical corpus that it is not a topic which can be ignored, especially given hu..

By micoots
23/01/2017 0

Beware the Temptation of Power

I had been in ministry long enough to hear the stories. It’s a familiar narrative these days: pastors disqualified from ministry due to moral failure. For years I had listened to devastating tales of infidelity and broken families in the lives of fellow pastors. My immediate reaction, in all honesty, was typically swift judgment. I mentally distanced myself from such pastors, believing I was cut from a different sort of spiritual cloth than such sinners. How on earth could this happen? How could..

By micoots
21/01/2017 0

God Hates Deceit

If we are to be people who love, we must also be people who hate. If we are to love what blesses people, we must hate what harms them. In loving and hating in these ways, we imitate the God who both loves and hates. God reserves words like “hate,” “abomination,” and “despise” to describe the sins for which he has the greatest revulsion. We have already seen that God hates idolatry, sexual immorality, injustice, and hypocrisy. In this article we see God’s hatred for deceit.

God Hates Deceit
The ..

By micoots
18/01/2017 0

Are You a Confirmation Bias Christian?

But there’s a spiritual component at play here too. The reason we fall into confirmation bias politically is not essentially a political problem. It is a human problem, which is to say, it is a sin problem — which is to say, it is a problem of self-interest and self-worship. The truth is, you and I are prone to conducting our entire lives along the narratives constructed from confirmation bias.

confirmation bias – The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs ..

By micoots
17/01/2017 0

First Peter Chapter Four Bible Study And Commentary

Here is a Bible study and commentary on 1st Peter chapter four.
First Peter 4:1-3 “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless id..

By micoots
17/01/2017 0

Why Our Teens Don’t Know They Need Jesus

“Youth ministries too often exert more energy trying to be trendy and fun than faithfully teaching Christ. And the teaching that does take place is usually topically-driven and moralistic in content.”

For seven years, I have led a small group Bible study for teens. For seven years before that, I ministered alongside my husband to college students on the campus of a prestigious Christian university. In both contexts, I encountered students who were predominately church and youth group-going kids..

By micoots
15/01/2017 0

Letters to the Editor (Honoring the Dishonorable, Complementarian Readers, Big and Little Sins)

Letters to the Editor is an opportunity for readers of this site to respond to things I have written. Here are a few of the top letters from the past couple of weeks.

Comments on Honoring the Dishonorable
As a wife who experienced ongoing domestic abuse at the hand of a professed Christian husband and struggled in raising children within that environment for many years even as I pleaded for help from my church leadership, I read this article with much trepidation and expectation. I was pleased ..

By micoots
14/01/2017 0

God Hates Hypocrisy

God hates. Those words may sound foreign to us. They may sound improper. But the God who loves what is good must hate what is evil. The God who loves what honors his name must despise what dishonors it. The God who loves what blesses his people must hate what harms them. It could not be any other way and we would not want it any other way. Over the course of a few articles, we have been looking at what God hates by examining passages that use words like “hate,” “abomination,” and “detestable.” W..

By micoots
14/01/2017 0

Why Remember?

“One of the primary texts about the importance of remembering God is Deuteronomy 8, which belongs to the larger context of the exodus event. In the face of Israelite slavery in the early chapters of Exodus, the promises God made to Abraham appear threatened (Gen. 15:13–16), resulting in a fundamental question about whether God can deliver His people from Egyptian bondage (Ex. 9:13–16).”

Sometimes I like to ask my boys if God can do anything. By now, they understand enough theology to answer tha..