The Hope of Healing

Tuning in online to Sunday mornings service I was struck by a question the guest speaker asked while teaching from I John 2 which warns us concerning antichrists. The question was a simple one. What is your Messiah? Not who but what. As I thought through that question it became clearer and clearer. Not only what John and today’s speaker was getting at, but how many times in my life the answer pointed to something other than Jesus. “Children, it is the last hour,…

Many people view discouragement and disappointment as the same thing, but there’s a slight difference. Disappointment is an emotional response to a failed expectation, whereas discouragement, or despair, usually comes from prolonged disillusionment or continued hardship. Since we cannot experience perfect success in a fallen world or keep ourselves from suffering, there’s no way to avoid all disappointments in life. However, we don’t have to yield to.…

If your life isn’t what you want it to be, it may be because you’re telling yourself the wrong story. You are not the mistakes you’ve made. You are not the labels put on you by other people. You are who God says you are. Anything less is false humility. If you want to change your life, start by changing your story! If you want to win the day, you’ve got to flip the script. How? The Bible is a good starting point. Scripture is more than our script; it&rsquo…

I read an email this morning and clicked the forward button to send it to a dear friend. He’ll love this one, I said to myself…… until I realized. He went home to be with the Lord on December 27th. My heart ached again. Not for him, he’s having a great time. But for me, I’ll miss him. The third person in my circle of either close friends or once close friends died just a couple of days ago, one succumbing to complications brought on by the.…

Here’s what I am learning: A grateful heart is a heart that is free. An ungrateful heart is a heart that is bound. Gratitude inevitably leads to freedom. The root of the word gratitude is the Latin word gratis, which means free. If gratitude and freedom are connected etymologically, wouldn’t it make sense that the two are connected spiritually as well? When we cultivate hearts bent toward seeing the good we’ve been given, it frees us from the sludge of…

“Dear Father in heaven, I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there, and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope.” That prayer is whispered by a broken-down George Bailey, the character played by Jimmy Stewart in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life. In the now iconic scene, Bailey’s eyes fill with tears. They weren’t part of the script, but as he spoke that prayer Stewart said he “felt the,…

Christmas Eve is my favorite night of the year.  There is such a sense of wonder, anticipation, and holiness upon this night.  Nobody on the earth or under the earth had any idea what was about to happen - God had quietly moved all the pieces into place, all the anticipation was coming from Heaven.  The time had come.  Imagine what it was like to have been there, when the holy light of herald angels exploded above the shepherds keeping their flocks that night.;…

We stared at the piles of donated shoes as we entered a local homeless shelter. The director had invited our youth group to help sort through the heaps of used footwear. We spent the morning searching for matches and lining them up in rows across the concrete floor. At the end of the day, we threw away more than half of the shoes because they were too damaged for others to use. Though the shelter couldn’t stop people from giving poor quality items, they refused to…

I have a simple prayer for you today. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. Romans 15:13 (ESV) And that's the memo. Steve