Anxiety
When we are gripped with anxiety, we are good for nothing! The Greek word the New Testament uses for this vice paints the picture of a mind that is scattered and divided, having trouble concentrating on the tasks at hand. Ancient literature often depicts the problem as a mind that is incapable of rest – an agitation that prevents us from good sleep.
It is important to realize that God prohibits his children from tolerating this kind of unproductive thought pattern. Philippians 4:6-7 calls us to dispel our scattered concerns with the discipline of prayer. Read once more the simple exhortation from God’s word and allow it to redirect your mental energies today:
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
Compartmentalization
It is easy to compartmentalize our lives. While sitting in church we can approvingly nod at the biblical lessons that call Christ’s followers to sacrifice, deny themselves, and leave behind earthly pleasures to store up treasure in heaven. But come Monday morning…
Real Trust
Trust in God is often expressed by our restraint. We are expected to recognize that God is present, aware and lovingly involved in every difficult situation we face. It is required that Christians curb many of…
Communion
The Bible tells us that we need to take a good, long look at what is going on in our hearts when we partake in the Lord’s Supper. “Let a person examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup…
Praying Well
We may imagine it an easy thing to pray a simple prayer. But it turns out to be an incredible challenge to pray often and pray well. Even so, God calls his people to a kind of continual and thoughtful communication that saturates every…
Hard Work
The Bible has a lot to say about working hard, being disciplined, and fighting all slothful tendencies. The Christian work ethic we derive from the teaching of both the Old and New Testament leaves no room for leisurely lives…
Don’t Drift
Hebrews 2:1 tells us that “we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” Much like a leisurely float down a meandering river, if we choose to relax in the Christian life we can be assured that the tide of our culture…
Four Things God Cannot Do
For years on playgrounds everywhere church kids have been stymied by the agitator’s questions, “Can God do anything? And if so, can he make a rock so big he can’t move it?” While children may struggle with the answer, I hope the rest of us do not…
Opportunities
Followers of Christ always need to be on the look out for opportunities to stand up for Christ and to speak up for his cause. And the more sinful the culture, the more critical it is that God’s people exploit…
Hard Truth
We all work to make our lives as comfortable and pain-free as possible. We buy all sorts of appliances and gadgets to make hard jobs easy, and seek out any available remedy to alleviate our bodily aches and pains. And this makes perfect sense. Only a masochist would…
God-Breathed
The Bible is a “God-breathed” book (2Tim.3:16)—which vividly depicts a set of written words that are so closely associated with the Author that they are to be pictured as though God himself were speaking them with the breath of his own mouth. As such, the written “word of God” is described…