Be Thankful!

Thanksgiving! A time to thank God for all the blessings that He has given to us. Even though we should thank our loving Father every day, it’s nice to have one holiday that’s dedicated to reflect on our blessings. As Christians, we should have a better understanding than most people about what it means to be blessed, whether or not we understand every minute detail about the first thanksgiving. Because we know what God has done for us, we should have a lot to be thankful for. We have salvation, we have comfort, grace, mercy — all these blessings which come through Christ’s death on the cross, and our Father’s mercy.

While those are important things to be thankful for, I wanted to take some time to talk about something that we don’t usually talk about when we “count our blessings.” And that is, the new covenant that we live under.

I’m thankful for the new covenant. Sure, that’s similar to the grace and mercy that we talked about, but I want to take our thoughts down a different road. I’m grateful that we’re not under the Old Law today, but I’m even more grateful for the fact that we are under the New Covenant!

Letting Your Light Shine on Facebook

Everybody knows that Facebook is big. But did you know that Facebook has over 500 million members? 50% of those members log on any given day. In a month, people spend 700 billion minutes on Facebook.

The average user has around 130 friends. You might have more or less, they might be mostly people from church, or mostly people from work, but these are people that can see your posts, your pictures, your information — and it’s easy to access all that stuff. As Christians, it’s our job to shine our light to those around us. Facebook can be a great resource, and a major help when it comes to spreading the gospel, but… do we really use it for that? And in fact, many Christians do more harm than good. Christians today are being influenced by internet culture and they’re giving in to the ways of the world — it’s happening in real life, and it’s happening on Facebook.

Tags: christianity, direction, facebook, sin, world, worldliness

Intro to Romans – Romans 1

I’ve been studying the book of Romans recently, and I’ve discovered a lot of really cool things. Reading through this book, it’s easy to see the divinity behind the Bible — people, simple minded humans, can’t come up with the stuff written in this Book. There’s a lot of really great passages, as well as some provoking examples for Christians to follow.

This post is meant to be an intro to the book of Romans. If you’re wanting to study the book of Romans in depth, or if you’re wanting an overview of this book, I hope you’ll find this study useful.

In the first couple of chapters, Paul talks about Jews and Gentiles, and illustrates some key things about God’s amazing plan. To me, Romans is a good book to study with newer (not brand new) converts — there’s a lot of really good foundational stuff, but some things — especially at the beginning of the book — might be a little complicated for a new believer.

In this intro, I’ll be covering the first chapter of this book. (Note: this post was originally going to cover the first six chapters — but there’s just so much great stuff in Romans that I couldn’t fit it all in one post! :D) Again, this is an intro to the book of Romans. I encourage you study this book in depth; there’s a lot of really good content in here.

Tags: christianity, gentiles, intro, jews, paul, romans, sin, study

Judging

“Bah, Christians! They’re so intolerant. They’re always thinking that they’re better then everyone else. Can’t they just let us live our own lives? They should stop judging everyone… hey, even I know the Bible says that you shouldn’t judge, otherwise you’ll be judged, too!”

I find it somewhat humorous that even sinful, worldly people can quote Matthew 7:1 – Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Also, many people know that “God is love” and Christians should being loving, too. And they confuse hate for sin with hate for people.

Tags: accountable, christianity, convict, hate, judging, sin, war