Tag Archives: religion

Moody Global Ministries

Moody Global Ministries – Today in the Word – SHUNNING SHAME

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Read Hebrews 11:39-12:6

Superheroes have never been more popular. Comic book sales are the highest they’ve been in decades; superhero movies make millions of dollars, and superhero television shows have millions of viewers. People love to imagine a character with extraordinary abilities who is not constrained by gravity or fire or limited strength like the rest of us mortals.

We might be tempted to think of the people listed in Hebrews 11 as superheroes of faith. But a closer look at their stories in other parts of Scripture reveals that they struggled with fear, doubt, and susceptibility to shame just as we do. They were human beings just like us, and they looked ahead to a reward so valuable that they persevered in focusing on and trusting God.

These individuals are included in this passage as examples of faith not because of their personal accomplishments but due to their belief in what God would accomplish for them. They fixed their eyes on that prize and ran for it, even as the world unleashed its abuse, degradation, mockery, and rejection. Their very refusal to succumb to shame put their enemies to shame. In God’s opinion, the world wasn’t worthy of them.

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Denison Forum

Denison Forum – PRINCIPAL DIES SAVING THE CHILDREN SHE SERVED

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Susan Jordan was principal of an elementary school in Indianapolis for twenty-two years. Tuesday she was standing outside with her students when a stationary school bus inexplicably accelerated and jumped a curb. She pushed several students out of the way before the vehicle struck and killed her. A fire department spokeswoman said, “Up to the minute she was alive, she was helping the kids.”

Her superintendent said of her, “Quite frankly, ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about a legend.” He described Jordan as “a phenomenal individual that truly cared about children.” Last May, dozens of students, faculty, and staff made a video about her. The students called her “friendly, focused, smart, organized, inspirational, dependable, determined, positive, and awesome.” The district closed all schools yesterday in her memory.

When the bus careened toward her students, Susan Jordan didn’t have time to decide whether she would risk her life for them. In that moment, her reaction revealed the sacrificial commitment she had already made.

Like her, the time for us to decide our life priorities is before they are tested. Only then can we be ready for challenges when they come.

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Charles Stanley

Charles Stanley – Overcoming Insecurity

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Romans 8:33-39

No quick solution exists for overcoming insecurity. First, we have to acknowledge we feel insecure. Then, we should try to identify what generates those feelings. Finally, we must decide to overcome that state of mind. Drifting into security is impossible; we must work toward it.

Having a sense of security involves more than just building self-esteem. Jesus Christ is our genuine source of strength and confidence. If we attempt to overcome our insecurity without Him, we’ll simply be masking it with our own efforts.

The way we see ourselves isn’t necessarily the way we truly are. Instead, we have to ask how the Lord sees us. To shift our focus from ourselves and our mistakes, we must get into God’s Word. Therefore, to overcome insecurity, we must first deal with any doubts we may have about the Bible. Scripture is so powerful that when we read what God says about us, our thinking starts to change, and we can step out of insecurity’s destructive mindset.

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Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread — What Is It?

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Read: Exodus 16:11-31

Bible in a Year: Exodus 16-18; Matthew 18:1-20

When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” —Exodus 16:15

My mother taught Sunday school for decades. One week she wanted to explain how God supplied food for the Israelites in the wilderness. To make the story come alive, she created something to represent “manna” for the kids in her class. She cut bread into small pieces and topped them with honey. Her recipe was inspired by the Bible’s description of manna that says it “tasted like wafers made with honey” (Ex. 16:31).

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John MacArthur

John MacArthur – Strength for Today – Trusting in God’s Power

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“I pray that … you may know … the surpassing greatness of [God’s] power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:18-19).

The same divine power that created, sustains, and controls the universe secures your salvation.

God’s power is awesome! David wrote, “Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, indeed everything that is in the heavens and the earth; Thine is the dominion, O Lord, and Thou dost exalt Thyself as head over all. Both riches and honor come from Thee, and Thou dost rule over all, and in Thy hand is power and might; and it lies in Thy hand to make great, and to strengthen everyone. Now therefore, our God, we thank Thee, and praise Thy glorious name” (1 Chron.29:11-13).

In Ephesians 1:19 Paul focuses on one key feature of God’s power: His ability to secure the salvation of His people. And he prays for you to understand the surpassing greatness of that truth.

The Greek word translated “power” is dunamis, from which we get dynamite and dynamo. This power is active, dynamic, and compelling—and it is mightily at work on your behalf. You might not always sense it, but it’s there nonetheless.

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Wisdom Hunters

Wisdom Hunters – Value Virtue 

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Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Colossians 3:13-14

Those who criticize the Christian ethos as outdated, narrow minded and meddling, forget that the virtues they seek to marginalize are a timeless value system that provides them the freedoms they enjoy. Yes, freedom of speech is a freedom only exercised where liberty has been bought by blood and retained by virtuous living. One generation can quickly forget past generational struggles and sacrifices that developed present day prosperity. Devalued virtue leads to decadence. But, a culture that values virtue expands liberty and creates opportunities for all.

Scripture identifies virtue as the very heart of God: patient forgiveness bound together by love’s unifying perfection. The Lord’s ultimate virtue was the payment of His son Jesus on the cross in exchange for the sins of the human race. Love gives. Love forgives. Love unifies. Voices that dismiss Christian virtues are not motivated by love, but by selfish agendas. A life behaving badly looks for ways to justify their disingenuous actions. However, a life that values virtue seeks to know God and grow in His heart of love. Virtue’s value is defined by the inordinate price paid by God.

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Turning Point

Today’s Turning Point with David Jeremiah – Stand Guard, Stand Firm

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So it was, from that time on, that half of my servants worked at construction, while the other half held the spears, the shields, the bows, and wore armor; and the leaders were behind all the house of Judah.

Nehemiah 4:16

Recommended Reading

Nehemiah 4:15-23

In September 2015, one of America’s largest evangelical seminaries refused future employment to a faculty member whose views on marriage and sexuality differed from Jesus’ teachings in Scripture. Imagine the months of research, deliberations, prayer, and counting of costs involved in such a decision. But in the end only one thing mattered: What saith the Lord?

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Joyce Meyer

Joyce Meyer – Retire from Self-Care

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. . . Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ [give yourself up to Him, take yourself out of your own keeping and entrust yourself into His keeping] and you will be saved. —Acts 16:31

God wants to take care of you, and He can do a much better job of it if you will avoid a problem called independence, which is really self-care.

The desire to take care of yourself is based on fear. You are afraid of what might happen if you entrust yourself totally to God and He doesn’t come through for you. The root problem of independence is, you trust yourself more than you trust God.

People love to have a backup plan. You may ask God to get involved in your life, but if He doesn’t respond as quickly as you’d like, you take control back into your own hands.

But God has a plan for you—and His plan is much better than yours. So give yourself to Him and see what happens.

From the book Ending Your Day Right by Joyce Meyer

http://www.joycemeyer.org

Campus Crusade for Christ

Campus Crusade for Christ; Bill Bright – He Orders Your Steps

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“The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and He delighteth in his way” (Psalm 37:23, KJV).

Miriam Booth – a beautiful, brilliant, cultured woman – daughter of the Salvation Army founder, began her Christian work with great promise. She had unusual success. Before long, however, disease struck her and brought her to the point of death. A friend visiting her one day said it seemed a pity that a woman so capable should be hindered by illness from doing the Lord’s work. “It is great to do the Lord’s work,” she replied with gentle grace, “but it is greater to do the Lord’s will.”

Are you looking for direction, for purpose, for meaning to your life?

The psalmist wanted to make it very plain that the person who is “good,” the one who is clothed with the righteousness, the goodness of Christ, can have the absolute assurance that His steps, one by one, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, are ordered by the Lord (planned and directed by Him).

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Ray Stedman

Ray Stedman – True Security

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Read: John 10:22-42

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. (John 10:27-29)

How can you tell a true Christian? Jesus says, They follow me. That is, they obey Jesus; they do what he commands. This does not mean that they always do so instantaneously, without struggle. All of us struggle at times with what our Lord says; all of us resist at times. Sometimes the word needs to be brought clearly and sharply into focus in our life. But the point of it is, once we see what Jesus wants, the attitude of a true sheep is, Lord, even though it hurts, even though it costs, I will do what you say. I will follow you.

Why do sheep act this way? What has made the difference? Three things: First, Jesus says, I give unto them eternal life. That is stated in the present indicative tense: I keep on giving to them eternal life. What holds us to Jesus? It is the life he gives, the peace, the joy, the love that we feel, the sense of inner serenity, the forgiveness, the sense of belonging and being guarded and kept and loved, that is what brings us. It is a quality of life which comes so continually to us that we would give up anything else rather than give that up. We are drawn because he keeps on giving us life, eternal life, God’s kind of life.

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Words of Hope

Words of Hope – Daily Devotional – The Fruit of Faith

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Read: Matthew 7:15-20

Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. (v. 20 NIV)

Jesus’ strong words in Matthew 7:21 may sound like salvation by works, but Jesus didn’t mean that. We are saved not by our obedience, but by Christ’s. We must simply trust him as Savior and Lord.

What Jesus meant is that trusting involves obeying. Or as he puts it in our reading for today, obedience is the natural fruit of faith in Jesus as Lord. When your faith in Christ yields the fruit of obedience, you know that you know Christ. The proof is in the doing.

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Presidential Prayer Team

Presidential Prayer Team; C.P.- Temporary Life

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“Nothing is certain,” it is said, “but death and taxes.” This amusing statement is pretty much true. How easy it is to make plans, counting on every day to be predictable, and then an event comes along and rattles life as you know it.

Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.

Proverbs 27:1

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Greg Laurie

Greg Laurie – The Law of Sowing and Reaping

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Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. —Galatians 6:7

There are laws that govern everything we do in life. There is the law of gravity, discovered by Newton, that basically says things tend to fall downward. Or, to put it another way, what goes up must come down. Then there is the law of thermodynamics, which effectively says that all things are breaking down. And of course, there is Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong (and usually at the most inopportune time, I might add).

Then there is the biblical law of sowing and reaping, which we find in Galatians 6:7–8: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.”

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Kids 4 Truth

Kids 4 Truth International – God’s Spirit Helps Us Speak His Truth

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“That we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” (1 Corinthians 2:12b-13)

When Peter had to prepare oral book reports for school, he always asked his dad for help. Peter thought every sentence his dad said sounded perfect for his report, and he knew that he would never have been smart enough to think of them on his own. It just seemed like his dad always knew just the right thing to say.

When it comes to speaking about God, the Holy Spirit gives us the perfect things to say. The Bible says we are supposed to be speaking about what God has “given to us.” But we are not supposed to speak with “man’s wisdom” – including our own wisdom and our parents’ wisdom. The Holy Spirit teaches us the wisdom that we need to use. He is our teacher.

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The Navigators

The Navigators – Jerry Bridges – Holiness Day by Day Devotional – The Generous Landowner

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Today’s Scripture: Matthew 20:15

“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? ”

God’s reward is out of all proportion to our service and sacrifice. In the kingdom of heaven, God’s reward system is based not on merit but on grace, and grace always gives far more than we have “earned.” as R. C. H. Lenski wrote, “The generosity and the magnanimity of God are so great that he accepts nothing from us without rewarding it beyond all computation. The vast disproportion existing between our work and God’s reward of it already displays his boundless grace, to say nothing of the gift of salvation which is made before we have even begun to do any work.”

In the parable Jesus told in Matthew 20:1-16, a landowner was progressively more generous with each group of workers he hired throughout the day. Each worker, regardless of how long he’d worked, received a day’s wages. He received not what he’d earned on an hourly basis, but what he needed to sustain his family for a day. The landowner chose to pay them according to their need, not according to their work. He paid according to grace, not debt.

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The Navigators

The Navigators – Leroy Eims – Daily Discipleship Devotional – Meeting with God

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Today’s Scripture: Leviticus 1-3

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. – Mark 1:35

In today’s passage we find a lesson that could do more than anything I know to end spiritual burnout among Christians. We see the tabernacle set up to be a place of fellowship and communion between God and His people. It was there they rendered their various religious duties to God. It was also there that God revealed His will to them.

Leviticus 1 begins with the words, “The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting.” The word translated “called” means God spoke in a still, small voice. No lightning and thunder as on Mount Sinai. This was the gentle voice of God.

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BreakPoint

BreakPoint –  Which Christianity: Following Scripture or the Huffington Post

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The big religion story of last year? Christianity is in decline in America. The sensational headlines were based on data from the Pew Research Center. But as Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Research observed in the USA Today, the folks writing the headlines must not have read the study.

It turns out that almost all of the reported decline took place not among evangelicals, but in mainline Protestant denominations, which have been in freefall spiritually and numerically for decades. And no wonder. The “Christianity” preached in many of them sounds more like the Huffington Post opinion pages than the Bible.

Take the Episcopal Church, which in 2003 began ordaining openly gay clergy, and in 2015 created a marriage ceremony to bless same-sex couples. Earlier this month, a majority of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion voted to suspend the at a meeting in Canterbury voted to suspend the Episcopal Church’s voting rights over its support for homosexuality.

This decision, along with the statement from the primates reaffirming one-man-one-woman marriage was due in large part to the leadership of the African bishops. As Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church in North America explained to me and Ed Stetzer on “BreakPoint This Week,” African Anglicans retain the traditional, biblical beliefs of the missionaries who planted their churches generations ago. And they feel abandoned by their American and European counterparts.

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Moody Global Ministries

Moody Global Ministries – Today in the Word – REDEFINING SHAME

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Read 2 Timothy 1:8-2:15

What would you think of a man dressed in an orange jumpsuit with cuffs on his wrists and ankles? If flanked by uniformed police officers, we might see him as a dangerous criminal. But if held between black-hooded ISIS militants, we might think he was a martyr.

The same situation can be a cause for shame or honor, depending on whose interpretation we accept. This is the essence of Paul’s message to Timothy. Paul was wrestling against the shame of his incarcerated status. Both Roman and Jewish officials had treated him as though he were dangerous. Many of his fellow Christians, influenced by public perception, had subsequently turned away from him (1:15).

But when Paul raised his eyes above the world’s view of his life, he saw God smiling on his chains. In God’s economy, these were chains of honor, proving his love for Christ and commitment to His gospel. As long as he held on to a heavenly perspective, Paul could resist the world’s shame.

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Denison Forum

Denison Forum – GROUP IS ‘MUCH MORE DANGEROUS’ THAN ISIS

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A terrorist group you’ve probably never heard of may be the greatest threat America faces.

A new report on threats to America has been issued by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. It claims that Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda, is “much more dangerous to the U.S. than the ISIS model in the long run.” Why?

ISIS is alienating Muslims worldwide with its horrific executions, rapes, and forced allegiance to its ideology. Al-Nusra is following a more gradual strategy. It provides services to Syrians, builds strong relationships with local communities, and focuses primarily on fighting the al-Assad government.

According to Middle East expert Fred Kagan, the group is “quietly intertwining itself with the Syrian population and Syrian opposition. . . . They are waiting in the wings to pick up the mantle of global jihad once ISIS falls.”

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Charles Stanley

Charles Stanley – The Landmine of Insecurity

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Psalms 40:1-5

Insecurity may not sound as explosive as landmines like pride or jealousy, but it, too, is a very dangerous pitfall. A great deal of damage can result in the life of a person who habitually feels insecure. Such feelings can develop from many different kinds of situations. We may experience tragedy, like the loss of a parent in our early life, or we may grow up in an environment that throws us off balance. Sometimes we feel insecure because of major failures we’ve experienced.

Whatever the root cause, the effects are often similar. We may be indecisive because our fear of making the wrong choice leads to avoid decisions altogether. Sometimes we have a difficult time establishing lasting relationships because we are afraid we won’t be a good friend. Or we might keep our distance from fear of rejection—people frequently perceive this as pride or snobbery.

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