Category: Faith
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The need for burning conviction in the goodness of God
Without a conviction of God’s goodness, it’s not possible to develop the clear focus and the strength of faith to pursue the breakthroughs that the earth itself aches for.
How we see Him defines how we think and how we live. The way we understand Him is the way we will re-present Him.
When I talk about the goodness of God and His greatness displayed in Jesus, I don’t forget that He was also the one who chased the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip. This, too, is love, as Jesus hates whatever misrepresents the Father! The religious leaders of His day used their position for personal gain instead of in service of the people. In the same way, it is a misrepresentation of the Father to say He permits sickness to discipline us. This is not true any more than it is to say He uses sin to discipline His children. For sickness is to my body what sin is to my soul. It’s time for those moneychangers to get chased out of the temple. (more…)
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Why doesn’t God just fix the world’s problems?
Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
C.S. LEWIS, Mere ChristianityGod is usually blamed for the evils that exist in the world because if He is God, He can remove any problem quite easily because He is big and powerful. But to rid the world of sin and its consequences would require something extremely dramatic—removing all sinners. And apart from being born again, how many of us would be left? C. S. Lewis once made a statement that has helped me quite a bit throughout the years—“once the author steps on the stage, the play is over.” He can fix it all in a moment. But when He does, time stops, eternity begins, and the final line has been drawn in the sand. His answer would be quite painful. His patience, which we see in full operation right now, is so that we can gather as many into the family as possible. His long-suffering is beyond all of our abilities to comprehend and comes at great personal cost. (more…)
