Archive for the ‘AA:Melinda’ Category
Preparing for Christmas
Advent began yesterday. Advent is an antidote to the distractions of the busy Christmas season. Often we get distracted from the significance of the holidays in all the preparation. And the day itself (and eve) comes and goes without focusing on it.
Take time this year to prepare in a signficant way for Christmas. Observe the four weeks of Advent by reading relevant Bible passages that reveal God's ancient plan to send His Son as the key to His salvation plan. Observe customs that will focus your mind and heart. There are lots of resources to do this, but I recommend these highly. I'm using them this year.
Thankfulness
Mark D. Roberts has an insightful post about cultivating the attitude of thankfulness, and attitude that supercedes our circumstances. And as an illustration, he relays the story behind the composer of a very familiar Thanksgiving hymn, "Now Thank We All Our God." Read the rest of this entry »
Blind Faith?
The Bible doesn't ask us to make a leap of faith or have blind faith. Biblical faith is entrusting ourselves to what we have good reason to believe is true. God didn't ask for blind faith - He gave reason to believe. Here are a couple of examples.
God makes a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, which requires Abraham to exercise faith. God reaffirms it in Genesis 15 and gives Abraham tangible reason to trust Him and the promise. God literally cuts a contract with Abraham according to the custom of the day. Abraham could reflect back on this when circumstances required faith. His faith wasn't blind or wishful, it was based on a contract. We often do things based on contracts - it's a common occurrence in our world. It gives us reason to place our faith in someone else to fulfill their end of the agreement and we act accordingly to keep our end. We invest ourselves, our time, our resources into something because we have faith in the other person due to the contract. In Abraham's case, the contract was unilateral - it was all God's to keep. But the contract gave Abraham reason to trust God.
Fast forward to Matthew 9. Jesus tells a paralytic man that his sins are forgiven. The scribes question Jesus' authority to do this. Jesus didn't answer that they should just trust Him blindly. He healed the man to give them reason to believe He had the authority to forgive sins. Jesus gave a tangible reason to believe what wasn't tangible.
Now every time an exercise of faith is called for, we aren't promised some tangible proof. There's already abundant evidence and reason to place our faith in God. And these are only two examples. Jesus rising from the dead and witnessed by literally hundreds was the penultimate evidence that makes it entirely reasonable to place our faith in Him as Savior.