Building on the Foundation

  A man once told me, “Job died thousands of years ago, but his friends are alive and well to this day.” God recognized Job as the most righteous man on earth, “a blameless and upright man” who feared God and shunned evil (Job 1:8; 2:3). But He wanted to see what this man was really made of, so He allowed Satan to put Job through a wringer of adversity. In the midst of his affliction, Job’s three friends showed up to comfort him (Job 2:11). Rather than comforting him, however, they added to his affliction. Job must have sinned some terrible sin, they said, or else he wouldn’t be suffering. Job knew of no evil he’d done, nor could his friends tell him what his sin was , but they assured him he was an evil man who deserved all his suffering. They picked Job’s life apart, trying to find something, anything, that he might’ve done to deserve God’s punishment. Have you ever had friends like this? Known people like this? We probably all know nitpickers who live to tear others down. They s...

God loves us. He desires the best for us, and He wants us to choose Him. He doesn’t force Himself on us; He simply stands at the door and knocks, because we have to make a choice. That’s part of the burden of having free will. We get to make a choice, but with this freedom comes consequences. We get to make our own choices, but that means that we must bear the consequences of choosing poorly. He’s knocking on the door, but we have to choose Him and open the door to Him; not once, not twice, but every day of our life because there is something else also knocking at the door. Let’s take a look at Genesis 4:7. Genesis 4:7 NKJV — “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.” Our adversary also lies at the door, just hoping to trip us up like a bad doormat. Sin can’t destroy us unless we choose sin over Christ. We get to choose who we let in the door, and unfortunately, more often than not...

  Some people, judging from their life choices, apparently enjoy being miserable, because they keep making the same choices that lead to misery. If you're one of these folks who aspires to be miserable, I’ve put together a how-to guide so that you can easily achieve maximum misery. This post will probably anger a few folks, because most of us, if not all of us, have made some of these choices. Make no mistake, though; I, too, have made plenty of these very choices over the years. Now, this post is just for fun, and it’s often exaggerated for effect. But hopefully it will make us all think about our life choices and make better ones. So let’s get started. Here’s your handy, ten-point guide on how to be miserable! 1. Disobey God This one is the most important of all. God gave us instructions for our own good (Deut. 10:13), so obviously you must ignore those in order to be truly miserable. If you find very plain instructions in God’s Word, ignore them. Tell yourself they don’t apply i...

  From time to time, you might hear someone say that God isn’t logical, or that logic is “man’s reasoning” and shouldn’t be used. In this case, of course, they attempt to contrast “man’s reasoning” with God’s reasoning. As demonstrated in a previous blog post , these statements are presumptuous and impudent against our Creator. It is Almighty God who is logical and reasonable, and man who tends to be illogical, irrational, and short-sighted. So here are a few examples of logical reasoning in God’s Word. There are far too many examples to list all of them — entire books, such as Ecclesiastes, are filled with logical reasoning — but we’ll look at some of them. First, one of the simplest forms of logical reasoning is an “if-then” statement. If one thing is true, then it logically follows that something else is also true. If you start with a correct premise and reason logically, then you will arrive at the right conclusion. If you start with a wrong premise and reason logically, then y...