Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas from our family to yours! May your holiday be blessed as you celebrate the birth of our Savior!
Light thoughts of sin breed light thoughts of the Saviour.
C. H. Spurgeon
Does The Bible Have A Central Theme?
Finding The Threads That Run Through The Bible
Reading the Bible daily has long been a habit of mine, and as a minister, I spend a lot of time in deeper study as well. Over the years, I have picked up several threads that seem to run through the Bible consistently. But is there one single grand central theme? I think there is.
I have posed this question to several different people over the last several months, and have come up with a variety of answers. Some have suggested that each book of the Bible has a distinct and independent theme. I can’t argue with that, although I feel that it is an incomplete answer. Others have been more vague, and said that the theme that runs through the entire Bible is simply Jesus. That, too, is correct, although it is overly simplistic, in my opinion.
So is there a central theme? And if there is, what is it?
The Bible is a very interesting and complex piece of literature. Comprised of sixty-six different books, and more than forty different authors, it has been compiled over a time span of centuries, from the earliest books written until the final pieces were completed shortly after the lives of Jesus, the apostles, and their contemporaries. With such a span of time and people, how can there possibly be a consistent theme?
The answer to that is simple. While the involvement of several human components stretched over time, the inspiration of it all was one source: the Holy Spirit. God was intimately involved in the writing of Scripture, so much so that one could say that, ultimately, the author of all Scripture is God himself.
Coffee Break – 12.10.2018
Your Monday Dose Of Inspiration - Christmas 2018 Edition
Two weeks until Christmas! Have you finished your shopping yet? If not, you’d better get moving!
Today Is Dewey Decimal System Day!
Go visit a library and explore something new today.
Coffee Geek Gift List: Under $40 – This is a pretty comprehensive list for the coffee lover for Christmas. And the best part, this list stops at forty bucks. To be sure, you could spend more, but this is a great place to start!
The Coffee Compass Holiday Gift Guide – This is another nicely curated list of coffee gear for this year’s holidays. There are several items on this list that I have added to my own wish list.
The Art Of Manliness – The AoM store is one of my favorite places to browse. You will probably find several ideas for any men you might know in there.
Huckberry – The Huckberry stocking stuffer store has a lot of really cool stuff.
Where Is Christ Found In The Old Testament? – Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of Christ, but he was predicted and foretold long before his birth. This video takes a look at just where he can be found in the pages of the Old Testament.
The future has many names. For the weak, it’s unattainable. For the fearful, it’s unknown. For the bold, it’s ideal.
Victor Hugo
Boundaries For Your Soul by Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller
A Book Review for The Randleman Review
We are an emotional culture. We might even be an obsessively emotional culture. And with such a wide and volatile range of emotional thoughts and feelings, we are in desperate need of establishing control in this area of our lives.
Unfortunately, this is something that many people don’t realize, or if they do, they have a vague and indistinct understanding of the need for something more in their inner lives. That is why a book such as Boundaries For Your Soul is so critically needed by so many people. Because of the range and depth of our emotions, we can become overwhelmed easily and feel like we are sinking in over our heads with no hope of help.
What authors Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller have done is create a blueprint of what we need, how we can find it, and what it can do for our emotional inner life. With their insights, we can stop allowing our emotions to control us, and begin to exert more control over those emotions instead, and use them to our benefit. And by placing God at the foundation, they offer a solution to our emotional problems that so many other “self help” book fail to do, because such help can come from no other place than the one who created us and our emotions.
Hugging Your Kids In Public
Godly Men: Being Deliberate With Our Wives and Kids
We had the opportunity to go see a Christmas program by Word Of Life Ministries when we lived in Florida, called Sights & Sounds of Christmas. As a minister of a church in their local area, we actually got to attend the dinner and show for free, and greatly enjoyed the opportunity.
I have a large family, so events like this can quickly become expensive. We are grateful for their generosity while we lived there. It was a wonderful production, and our whole family loved it and had a great time.
We arrived early, since seating was on a first-come basis. As we were waiting, another family walked it and hovered in the lobby, also waiting for the doors to open. They were a nice looking family. But they didn’t really attract my attention at first. Just a father and mother, with four typical kids. The girls were chatting together, and the oldest son, who seemed to be sixteen or seventeen, had ear buds in.
But a few minutes later, I glanced up to see the father and son talking in a corner. This wasn’t any kind of “he’s in trouble” talking, and it don’t look serious. It looked to me like the dad just pulled his son away from the crowd to have a moment together.