Category Archives: Bible

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New Every Morning

The end of the year is quickly approaching, and the focus on the minds of most people is increasingly how to make next year a better year than this year. My wife and I have already had several conversations about this very topic as 2015 draws near.

Mountain Sunrise

With the dawn of a new year, it seems like an appropriate time to make a fresh start, a new beginning. The beginning of a new year is the logical time to do this. I seek to reevaluate myself and the passing year every December, identifying goals and strategies that I want to have in place for the coming months.

Each year in December, I take a deep an hard look at my Life Plan. I examine my successes. I identify my weaknesses. I see what needs to change, what needs to be prioritized, or re-prioritized, and chart out my course for the coming year.

My wife and I look at the new year for our family. What can we do together to make our family stronger? What can we eliminate from our lives to make our family less busy and stressed, and strengthen ourselves?

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Classic Bible: My Favorite Passages From Ezra

This is part of the Classic Bible: Favorite Stories & Passages series. Read more from the series!

Ezra is one of those books that you don’t hear much about from the Old Testament. It’s not as well known as some of the other books, like Jonah or Daniel. But Ezra has a lot of great information in it, and we can benefit from it when we study it.

Second Temple, credit Wikipedia

The book of Ezra is closely tied in with Nehemiah. These two books are tucked away, almost hidden in the historical books of the Old Testament. What we can gain from reading this book, though, is critical historical information. These books, along with portions of Chronicles and Esther, give us some insight into the life of the nation of Israel after the exile to Babylon.

Ezra is considered to be written by Ezra himself, although whether he actually wrote it, or simply compiled it from various other sources is not clearly known. The events described in Ezra and Nehemiah are written of after the fact, indicating that these events were complete, and finished. That gives us a possible date of between 400 and 300 BC, depending on which commentaries you read.

With the historical focus of Ezra and Nehemiah being on the life of Israel after the exile, the specific focus of Ezra is the rebuilding of Jerusalem and especially the temple. As Israel struggled to develop their identity again, after being gone for so long, they needed Ezra’s, and God’s, help to do so.

Here are a few of my favorite passages from the book of Ezra:

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12 Ways To Live As Citizens Of The Kingdom Of God

As a minister, I’ve been asked a wide variety of questions, some valid, others not so much. Probably one of the questions I hear most often is how to grow as a Christian, or how to grow in righteousness.

Kingdom

Psalm 15 is a brief, and yet detailed account of this very thing. In the previous psalm, David wrote about the folly and the wickedness of mankind. In this psalm, though, he looks at the other side of the coin. He describes what a citizen of the kingdom of heaven looks like.

Over the years, a wide variety of books have been written about this topic. Some of them are worth reading, others are not. Some give some excellent pointers, others seem to offer very little help at all.

But David’s brief description in this psalm offers several key characteristics to develop, and a few to avoid as well.

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Understanding The Purpose Of Man

Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the question, “What is man?” It’s not a new question. And it’s a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently, with a new role in life as a lead minister, the size of my family growing, and the fact that I’ve reached the mid-point of my life.

What Is Man?

A few weeks ago, I took my son to Oklahoma and we went fossil hunting. We stayed with a friend of the family, and went with him to teach an astronomy lesson to a group of people that Friday night. My son and I were able to view several planets, various stars and star formations, a binary system, and even the Ring Nebula!

It was pretty cool. But my son made a comment in passing, that he felt small and insignificant because of the vast grandeur of the universe.

I know how he feels. It’s slightly overwhelming. Several years ago, I met a man who severely struggled with his faith because of the same reasons. He had watched one of Louie Giglio’s videos that examined God’s creation of the stars. This man’s question was, if God could create such a colossal universe and fill it with so many incredible things, then who was he to think that he held any significance at all in God’s mind?

It’s a common question. And it’s been asked for centuries.

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A Study In Contrasts

I’ve been using a pretty comprehensive plan for reading through the Bible for a few years now. This plan exposes me to every single word of God’s message to mankind at least once per year, and many passages much more than that. In fact, some parts get read once a month, or once every couple of months.

Flowing Stream

When I started using this strategy to read the Bible, I had the foresight to purchase a new Bible at the same time. I did this, because I wanted a good study Bible, with good notes and references, to go along with my reading. An unexpected benefit of this purchase has been seeing how many notes and thoughts I’ve added to the margins since starting this plan.

There is a large amount of my own notes, highlights, underlines, and references that have been added over the past few years. It’s kind of cool to look through this Bible and realize that all of this is from the past three years. It’s amazing to see just how much God’s word has impacted my life as a result.

Looking back through this Bible, one of the most impacting portions of Scripture on my life has been the book of Psalms. There are notes and highlights and scribbles and thoughts scattered all throughout these pages. Simply looking back through my own notes in this one book is somewhat overwhelming.

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Waiting On The Second Coming

One of the things I hear very often, especially when I’m around people who love to study prophecy and the end times, is that it is likely that the Lord will return “within our lifetimes.”

Stopwatch, Second Coming

My personal opinion of this is that it just might be the case. However, we can’t be dogmatic about it, because we simply don’t know. People have been saying the exact same thing for a very long time, since the time of Paul the Apostle. So, while we can’t know the day or the time that Christ will return, there are a few things that we can do to make sure that we are ready.

People have been anticipating the coming of the Lord since Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians, and Christ himself referenced his return several times. Paul had to address believers in Thessalonica who were quitting their jobs. Their reasoning was, “If Christ is returning soon, why work?” In response to this, Paul had to lay down the law, and state that those who don’t work, won’t eat (2 Thessalonians 3:12). Even so soon after the time of Christ, people were looking for the end of days.

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Classic Bible: My Favorite Passages From Daniel

This is part of the Classic Bible: Favorite Stories & Passages series. Read more from the series!

As a kid growing up in church, the events that unfold throughout the book of Daniel are some of the most familiar lessons that I was taught. Along with Jonah, this short book of prophecy contains some of the coolest displays of God’s power in the Old Testament.

Lions

The book of Daniel takes place in Babylon, while the Israelites were held in captivity. Daniel and the other prominent people in this book were taken from their homeland and brought to serve in the king’s court in a land foreign to them.

The author of this book is most likely Daniel himself, writing sometime around 530 BC. That he is the actual author is alluded to by Christ himself in Matthew 24:15.

With so much going on in Daniel’s life, the lives of his friends, his countrymen, and his nation, this is the perfect setting to see God’s faithfulness at work. With that in mind, here are a few of my favorite passages from the book of Daniel: