Forged By Faith

Jonah 2:8 NIV What have we missed? As I get older I find myself more and more convinced of some of the sheer nonsense that we’ve come up with seeking to assure ourselves that our mistakes, our wrong choices, our past fears and present worries aren’t wasting for us opportunities that we may well never have again. Such ideas as this common adage you see tossed around from time to time that tells us that “we’re not strong enough to ruin God’s plans for us.” It’s a most hopeful outlook to be sure and indeed one in which I do believe as I do believe that His will will be done and there’s not a single thing anyone can do to change it. But again, as life goes on and we continue getting plenty of things quite willfully wrong within it, well, seems I’m pretty certain that while we may not be strong enough to ruin God’s plans for us, time will prove that we are well stupid enough to spend a good portion of our lives running away from them. And in truth this is something we’ve all chosen, again w...

Judges 10:13-14 NIV But when And no, as we discussed yesterday, such is not a question but in fact now a promise as was at first given us as it was given them who had then the opportunity to turn and repent via the manner prescribed which involved them going out to those insisting they die. And yes, that remains in every way the horrific request as it comes not as an idea in which He’s tried to suggest that such might happen to be one of many options that can work, all of which can save you and me. No, rather this is a guarantee that both trouble is coming and the only way to survive it is to at first admit we’ve ourselves lived to invite it. Then to welcome it to the tune of whatever turmoil or tragedy such degeneracy may demand. I’ve been reading through Jeremiah for days now, those many chapters leading up to the world’s favorite 29:11. Indeed, not there yet on this run through, but what I have come to is this conclusion in which, as we’ve discussed in the past, context matters more...

Isaiah 40:18 NIV With what images have we replaced Him? See, there are so many of these such questions that both need to be asked and yet never are by we who already know the answers so very well that we’ve no intention of admitting that we do. Why? Because for us to admit that we too, despite all the warnings strewn throughout His Word and even our own pasts as met within the many mistakes we’ve made ourselves, even still that we’ve still gone along within that lane within which they then “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles”, it’s as foolish as faithfulness as any could imagine. And yet we’ve all managed to somehow still imagine it both so well worth trying that we have and that only because we’ve too considered it to be without cost or consequence that could ever come from our, again, having been ourselves wrong plenty of times in the past. Just never quite wrong enough to have produced problems...

Psalm 135:18 NIV And so will those As is all of all who’ve indeed ever now found themselves to be lost in the awe and allure of what are basically only the enemy’s lures as left for those lost to find in what’s for all been a faith as has long been sadly placed inside of things that had themselves neither sight nor sound, breath or belief, love and thus life. No, I sit here still myself surrounded by things that are but addendums unto a life, but alas aware that for a good while there they were allowed to be more of myself than I ever cared to be. No, looking back on a life in which was lost life itself as outsourced to things sourced from the soil, it’s a special miserable to be sure. Thankfully He’s called us expressly to understand that we’re not necessarily bound to go back that way. Rather He, all throughout the Word, asks us to surrender, to sacrifice, to count as loss all for that we’ve lived in what becomes again a love alive as was always meant to be what defines a life as op...

Genesis 3:5 NIV “And you will be like God”, a seed of selfish idealism that still has humanity almost entirely disinterested in the humility found in forgoing the delightful deceptions of sin. One of our greatest attributes is our highly advanced degree of selective hearing. It seems to be something that we humans have been constructing and perfecting since the very first of our kind that walked this earth. Our ability to only hear very specific bits and pieces of a message, story or movement has allowed us to custom build a belief system that has the appearance of being founded upon a solid truth, just with the added benefit of our not feeling responsible for knowing or following the whole truth. As soon as that wicked trickster told us we could be like God, well then we started wondering why we should stop at settling for being under Him. Why should we actively agree to the limits He set in place if we can rise to His level and find freedom from those limitations? Why stop just becau...