Taking Care of Home

When your faith feels weak and you're not sure you'll make it through whatever season you're in, the Bible carries a specific and personal promise: God will make you stand. Not because you become stronger or because you find better spiritual disciplines but because He is able to make you stand and He will do it.

If anyone in Jesus’s day was famous among their peers for righteousness, it was the Pharisees. Their whole brand (so to speak) was that they were the ones who did the right things.

The living have a calling the dead do not. When Hezekiah survived a terminal illness, his first response was not relief — it was praise. He understood something that every suffering believer needs to hear: we who are still alive have a unique and irreplaceable calling to worship God, not after our suffering ends, but from inside the middle of it.

Meekness is one of the most misunderstood words in the Bible. It does not mean weakness and instead means power under control, submitted to God. Jesus used this word to describe Himself, which tells us everything about what it actually looks like in a person's life.

God's love for us did not begin with us. Before we ever reached out to Him, He loved us first, and He proved it by sending Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

That’s one of the key ideas John has been trying to teach us in his letter, and it’s what he’s emphasizing in the second half of 1 John 4.

One of the really important things we have to do as Christians is figure out if it is God speaking to us, or if we are hearing some other message.

The first thing on our minds when we remember God, and we remember that God has saved us is that He loves us.

We saw in 1 John 2:12-14 that one of the reasons John is writing his letter is because he wants to affirm the faith of those who “know the Father.” In other words, an essential part of what it means to be in a saving relationship with God through Jesus is that we know God–not just that we know things about Him, but that we actually know Him experientially in relationship.

No matter how close you’ve grown to Him, or how long you’ve been in relationship with Him, God thinks you are worth pursuing.

In 1 John 2, John reminds us of two things. First, John’s call (from 1 John 1) to live in the light of obedience to God’s commands instead of in the darkness of sin should empower us to not sin.

He doesn’t only dwell in light, although He is described that way too. John says that He Himself is light. He is purity and perfection without limit, flaw, or hidden error. He’s perfect. He is the thing that all of us should be striving for.