A little while back I had a desire to go deeper in my understanding of Scripture. With the constantly shifting sands of culture, I felt a strong pull to gain greater clarity and perspective on many of the issues we’re facing today from a truly biblical perspective. I’ve always had that desire to varying degrees, but God was doing something new. At some point as I was thinking and praying about what to do about this pull, I felt the Holy Spirit prod me with the idea- “obey what I’ve already shown you”. Even though overall I felt like I was living aligned with Scripture, there was one nagging area of my life I was struggling with that I essentially did not want to surrender to Lord. It was not an area that I wanted to willfully disobey, but it was something I was struggling to figure out how to obey. So I began praying that God would help me. In this case, I had to realize I could not obey this particular truth from Scripture in my own strength. I needed His help. And He worked on me. He always seems to give me the grace to obey His Word when I am truly willing. It brought me great peace and joy when I began to obey even though it was counter to how I felt in my flesh. Fast forward to last week I was watching something where professing Christians were debating ethical topics. I was sitting there thinking, “How do these so called Christians have such confusion over what Scripture teaches even though they seem to have a reasonable knowledge of it?” I was reminded about what the Holy Spirit had prodded me on months earlier and something I’ve been reading in a Christian Ethics book lately: Our own disobedience can deceive us and limit our ability to understand Scripture properly. James 1:22 says “Be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves”. The implication here is that we can know a lot about the Bible and still not truly understand it, not because it's unclear, but because of our own disobedience to it. That was a revelation to me. That truth has helped me develop a healthier fear of the Lord in the sense that I always need to be striving to obey Scripture in my quest to learn more of it and to avoid heeding voices who claim to know a lot about Scripture but who’s lives aren’t a reflection of it.

“So skilled is error at imitating truth, that the two are constantly being mistaken for each another. It takes a sharp eye these days to know which brother is Cain and which is Abel." -A.W. Tozer

Last night at my Bible study, we were asked to share 10 things we feel like Christians should be doing. No googling. Just from your own thought process. It was a good exercise to see what came to mind. So I thought I would do it in here. Post 5 things you feel like Christians should be doing. Here are 5 that I had on my list. This is not exhaustive. 1) Be a part of a local church 2) Lead and love your family 3) Be in community with other Christians 4) Use and grow in your God given gifts, talents and resources 5) Study the Bible