I have heard so much confusion around the promise of redemption that I hope this will clarify a few things about why we suffer the curse and its consequences and how God works through it all. Just because God works in a redemptive way with the curse doesn’t mean that He needed or wanted us to be messed up by it! Can you agree with this statement? God would surely much rather work creatively through us than redemptively for us.…
Who has the right to complain? One of the students in the recovery program at the Mission where I work made this comment, only slightly refined by me: “The only person with a right to complain about how they are being treated is the one who is treating everyone else perfectly.” The context for this discussion was the perennial poor treatment of the students, who run the program, by the “friends and neighbors,”…
There are a few things that God didn’t tell you when you were born—or even ask your permission to do! Stay with me on this wry look at an imaginary scene in heaven. Suppose the Father had seated you on His loving knee and asked if you wanted to help Him out with a little rescue campaign He was operating on planet Earth (I know that nobody is in heaven before they’re born—just play along)…
Thanking God for blessings is child’s play compared to what is actually set before us as the answer to life’s hardest problems. What do you do when you are reeling from the blows of adversity and emotional pain? The Word tells us to thank God in all things and for all things. He does not causes evil, but He can overturn it, bringing a greater blessing out of it than any evil the enemy put into it in the first…