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.

This is a question I've had for some time. The answer comes from understanding the difference between our justification and sanctification/ongoing fellowship with God. When we come to faith in Christ, all of our sins are legally forgiven. We don't need to continually pray for forgiveness from sins in a salvation sort of way. Instead, when Jesus tells us to pray "Forgive our sins" in the Lord's Prayer ("our daily bread" implies we are to be praying the Lord's Prayer daily, which includes forgiveness of sins), He seems to be meaning forgiveness in the sense of how our daily sins disrupt our fellowship with God, displease Him or are bringing on Fatherly discipline. "Restore to me the joy of your salvation." (Psalm 51:12) "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit." (Ephesians 4:30) "If our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God." (1 John 3:21). We need to confess our sins to God (and at times to other believers when the sin has become more powerful in our life) after coming to Christ not to re-attain our salvation, but to re-gain our intimate fellowship with the Lord.

“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

Let's get to know each other! You can use this simple format: Hey, I'm from _______________________. For fun I like to ___________________________________. My favorite book of the Bible is: _________________________________________. (If you don't have a favorite book of the Bible yet, change it to "My favorite holiday is: ______________________.")

I was reading Philippians 2:12-13 this morning. It says, "Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and power to do what pleases Him". We know that our salvation is by faith alone, and yet our sanctification (growth in Christ) is a partnership between God's work and our work. When Philippians says "work hard to show the results of your salvation", what does it mean? What are the things we should be working hard on to show the results of our salvation?