Along the Way w/ Bro. Ryan

"So Samuel said, 'When you were little in your own eyes, were you not head of the tribes of Israel?  And did not the Lord anoint you king over Israel?  Now the Lord sent you on a mission......Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord?......you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel.'" - 1 Samuel 15:17-19a, 26b God had warned the Israelites long before Israel's first king, Saul, reached this breaking point in 1 Sam. 15.  He had warned Israel that if they turned away from His leadership and sought out a human king 'like all the other nations,' it would end in disaster and heartache.  This, unfortunately, is exactly what happened.  Israel demanded a king, they hastily accepted any responsibility if it went wrong, and the Lord gave Samuel the prophet permission to put a king over them. Saul was apparently a humble man at the start (1 Sam. 9:21).  He came from a wealthy family (1 Sam. 9:1), ...

" Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery,' 'You shall not murder,' 'You shall not steal,' 'You shall not bear false witness,' 'You shall not covet,' and if there is any commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law ." - Romans 13:8-10 This passage of Scripture explains to us just how love fits into the Law of God. Generally, when the subjects of Law and love are discussed in Christian circles, they are often pitted against each other or even divorced from one another. We naturally think of the Old Testament containing a different message than the New, perhaps even presenting a different God between the two testaments. This is actually a mistake. First of all, we know that God ...

"Then the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the people of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; and they forsook the Lord and did not serve Him. So the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel..........And the children of Israel cried out to the Lord, saying, 'We have sinned against You, because we have both forsaken our God and served the Baals!'" ( Judges 10:6-7, 10 ) We read several times during the times of the Judges that Israel followed after the idols/gods of their pagan neighbors, they would be punished by God, then they would repent, and then redo the whole cycle again. We sit here and read this and think of them as a bunch of fools. Why did they make this mistake over and over again? It was common practice in the ancient Near East to worship the gods of your foreign neighbors because it was believed those gods (“ B...

" giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light ." - Colossians 1:12 Reader, are you qualified today? We understand the phrase "to be qualified" from our daily vernacular. We must qualify for loans, for homes, for events, for jobs, for sports teams, etc. There's a multitude of things we must meet certain criteria for or we will fail to qualify. It has been a popular human belief, really since the dawn of human existence, that man deserves to go to heaven based upon his/her own merit or goodness. We will quickly compare ourselves to others - our deeds, thoughts, speech - aiming to prove we are 'better than the next guy.' We create standards of morality in our own minds, and hearts and based upon those standards we then determine who is 'good' and who is 'bad' in society. Once those determinations have been made, we qualify some and disqualify others based upon ...