"Very present," in the person of our great Savior, the Lord Jesus, who cries out, "Come, thirsty soul, and drink! And then find that you become a spring for my Living Water."
Yesterday I talked about 3 kinds of good fear, fear that isn’t sinful and is actually good and pleasing to God. Today . . .
And sinful? Well maybe in some cases. (But then again in most of these cases, probably not.) Continue reading “What does “fear of man” really mean? And other observations about fear”
When Helena Knowlton of Confusion to Clarity first began talking to me about fear in the cult she came out of, I knew I wanted to write about fear. But since I wanted to have a better grasp of the concept, I spent time studying fear in the Bible. (This study covers only the New Testament. I want to do the Old Testament eventually, to cover all the excellent Scriptures there.)
So, it may not come as a surprise, but there’s more than one kind of fear. Continue reading “Is your fear sinful . . . or actually pleasing to God?”
That error in the title—did it make you wince? Take a minute to focus on it in all its awfulness, that apostrophe that shouldn’t be there.
That’s the way I felt the entire time I was reading this book over the Thanksgiving break I spent at a friend’s house when I was 19. Here is the exact cover. Continue reading “Faith in All It’s Splendor”
In March I was privileged to speak at the Awaken Network’s conference on abuse. My topic was Biblical bitterness, showing how in the Bible “bitterness” refers to one who has been poisoned and is grieving, and “bitterness” also refers to one who is doing the poisoning. Both are called “bitter,” but only one is sinful.
Megan Cox of Give Her Wings (with whom I also did a recent interview on this subject) said, “This is such good news.” Finding out that the Scriptures teach something different from the heavy burden of guilt and shame that church people often lay on the backs of the oppressed—well, that really is good news.
You can view that talk here:
Inspired by Andre Henry’s powerful post “To All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep,” I wrote about the impact of losing friendships in the Christian community.
All of us have a journey that brought us to where we are today. Many of us left a wake of blood and tears, people we had to leave behind, or who left us. I want you to think for a moment about each of those people. If there was one person you could have back—if abuse and mistreatment were not a factor—who would it be?
This is written to those in my life. Continue reading “To All the Christian Friends I Could Not Keep (guest post by Ryan Ashton)”
It was all the way last Monday when this Christian Post article (which you can see here) was posted, which is light years in the world of blogging, but I’ve always been light years behind, so here we are.
The article is worth reading in its entirety as a good example of the accusations used by those who tell us not to accuse. (FWIW, I don’t believe in name calling unless it’s warranted, like what Jesus did to the Pharisees.) Greg Gordon, the author of the article in question, makes accusations like these:
Like feeding fresh bloody fish to a group of swarming sharks, the frenzy ensues as web links are made and a new viral news article is born at the great expense of the character of a Christian leader as well as the testimony of Christ.
We never pray or fast for these individuals, we simply feed on their demise for our daily entertainment.
These bloggers consider themselves judge, jury, and executioner at the same time.
Do you ever feel, when you watch a movie, that there was an underlying reason for it, maybe a bit of propaganda, so to speak, that it wanted to promote? It may be only a small part of the movie, but it makes a profound impact. (An example that come readily to mind is a 1944 drama about the life of Woodrow Wilson, the purpose of which seemed to me to focus on the death of Wilson’s dream, the League of Nations, in order to push American viewers to become more willing to enter the United Nations.)
I could be wrong, but that’s the way I felt when I listened to this sermon by Michael Vanlaningham from March 31stat Harvest Bible Chapel in the Chicago area. It seemed to me that the underlying reason, the bit of propaganda, began at about minute 25 when he began to focus on forgiveness. Continue reading “That forgiveness talk at Harvest Bible Chapel”
Before I began to work regularly on untwisting Scriptures at this blog, Here’s the Joy, I was regularly doing that over at BJUGrace. That was the blog some friends and I set up to discuss the GRACE report on Bob Jones University and serve as a platform for abuse survivors who wanted to speak. (It was also where I first began, in 2014, to expose false teachings and show what the Bible teaches instead.) Continue reading “Because it’s appropriate for a victim to name her offender”
I’ve mentioned on my Facebook page that I had a new book coming out in March. I’m glad to announce that it’s out now and is available for purchase. Continue reading “New book for help with praying when you’re under spiritual attack”
Years ago when we were visiting a large and well-endowed fundamentalist church here in Greenville, South Carolina, the Sunday school teacher went on a bit of a tirade about how wrong it was to come to church to “get.”
“You’re only supposed to come to church to GIVE,” he rebuked us. He went on to express his disgust with people who come to church wanting something, Continue reading “You should come to church to “give” and not to “get””