Building on the Foundation

We live in a rough world, a world bent on our destruction and the destruction of our hearts. In our daily lives, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death constantly because any moment might be our last. I’m not trying to be dramatic; that’s simply the truth. Very few deaths are expected, and most happen completely out of the blue, so not only might every moment be our last moment, but it might also be someone we love’s last moment. There are a lot of things that could be said about that, but the main lesson to draw is that we need to make every moment we have with those we love count because we might not get another one. Someday we will have seen someone for the last time on this earth and not even realize it. That’s a bit of a sobering thought when you recognize that our time with those we love is temporary. Losing someone can be one of the greatest emotional struggles we will face in our lives and the pain is one of the deepest and longest-lasting pains in this world. It...

Lately, I've gone back and studied something a little more in-depth than I have in the past that has a tremendous bearing on our spiritual walk with God. I've studied this in the past, but I didn't have the same context in my own life then that I do now. It has to do with some commands from God, and with marriage. Now, when God gives us a command or tells us to do something, that means that whatever He is telling us to do is against our natural nature. It's not something that would be natural for us to do without Him telling us to go do it.  This statement might appear a bit confusing on the surface so let me explain a bit more. Think of breathing. God didn't have to tell us to remember to breathe every ten seconds, it's a part of our natural, uncorrupted, God-given nature. God didn't have to tell us to sleep at night, that's natural for us to do. We get tired, so naturally we go and sleep.  Now, no one likes to think that without being told to do somet...

You will often see a warning on movies if it contains nudity or even partial nudity. In a lot of places, indecent exposure still even carries a fine! Not that that gets enforced nowadays. We often hear that we shouldn’t look at porn and that it’s important for us to wear modest clothing in the Christian world. Why is that? Who determines what is modest for us to wear, and who gets to determine what nudity is? Does the Bible have a standard of modesty, or is modesty simply a standard set by the culture around us? Just writing that last sentence makes me cringe inside.  Let’s start by looking at what qualifies as men's and women’s clothing. This may seem unrelated, and it is. What does the Bible say about what constitutes men's or women's clothing? Deu 22:5 "A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all who do so [are] an abomination to the LORD your God. That’s pretty much it. The determining factor of what...