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 ...

(*The following is an excerpt from a chapter entitled "Family and the Gospel" from my new book, still in progress, " Gospel Glasses:  Seeing this World through the Lens of the Good News ")          Parents, do all that you can to make Jesus and His Gospel priority in your homes.  Talk about Him, model Him, discuss Him, and pray to Him together.  Do this all with your kids.  And as our kids are concerned, we must not give into the temptation of pacifying their tantrums and mistakes with bargains or negligence. This is not to be done to insight fear or to provoke our kids to anger (Eph. 6:4); abuse of any kind is never a part of God’s design for the family.  But we cannot afford to bypass the appropriate corrections when they disobey and/or dishonor us.  God makes it clear: Children must obey and honor their parents.  In so doing your duty as a Christian parent, you will not only “ train your child in the way he/she should go...

"And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches.  But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you." - Romans 11:17-18 Romans 11 is a powerful chapter.  Specifically in verses 16-36, we find a timely message about God's goodness and severity in light of His plan of redemption for both Jews and Gentiles.  When we see "goodness" and "severity", what is being referred to are God's eternal, unchanging characteristics of grace/mercy/benevolence (goodness) and His rigor/stiffness/finality (severity).  God is equally both and perfectly displays each characteristic.  His actions of goodness toward us, as well as His actions of severity are always performed righteously. In terms of the above passage, when we consider the goodness and severity of ...

We live in a society that, for the longest time, has promoted both directly and indirectly the belief that an individual is god. You are the god of your life and I'm the god of mine. Anything I choose to believe and live by, that is somehow my own truth and code and my truth is always right. The same is true for you. Furthermore, there is no standard of morality, justice, or righteousness because we have permitted ourselves to be both judge and jury of our lives. We live through our feelings first and our minds second. All of this creates a combustible concoction prepared for chaos. When man is sovereign, he neither sees nor believes there is a need for God. It is equally remarkable and tragic that we as a society have become so self-absorbed that we believe and trust in our own sovereignty. We have cast God aside - our Creator, the Divine, the Almighty Jehovah God, Yahweh, the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent One in the heavens. The arrogance! Our lac...