by | Faith Lived Out, Spiritual Warfare
Meet my friend Jennifer. Well, kind of. She’s the one in the blue shirt and white shorts, leading Skeeter the dog, with her arm around me.
I wish you could’ve been there that day. They say ” a picture paints a thousand words,” and that’s definitely true with this one. I’ll do my best to bring the story to you.
It was June of 2010. I’d just finished running my first 5k race at the 2nd Annual Freedom Run. I was two months from completing a year-long residential discipleship program, where God had totally flipped my life upside down. And I was 145 lbs. lighter, both physically and spiritually. I was no longer wearing the weight of the world on my shoulders. For the first time in my life, I truly understood freedom in Christ.
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by | Faith Lived Out, Spiritual Warfare
I have a co-worker who loves to read policies and procedures for fun. For fun! Who does that? She will print them off and take them home for some “relaxing” reading. The very thought of doing something like that makes me nauseous. That’s just not my idea of fun.
But I’m grateful she enjoys it or else I’d have to read those policies. And if you don’t put it in picture form or make a music video out of it, I won’t make it past the first page. Instead, I am able to rely on my handy-dandy policy-reading peer to tell me what rules not to break. Now I know. Case closed.
My friend Marge is a paramedic. She can talk about blood and cuts and broken bones while she passes the mashed potatoes at the dinner table. I hear about someone breaking a tooth and I pass out. I’m not a big fan of seeing blood either. She gets a strange thrill when she’s riding in the back of an ambulance at the speed of light. Me? Not so much.
But I’m grateful she has a passion to save lives and talk about things that make my stomach turn, because when I call her thinking I’m dying of a tumor, she’s quick to tell me to stay off Google and to drink water. I don’t have a tumor. I’m just dehydrated.
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by | Faith Lived Out, Spiritual Warfare
This is fourth and final part of a series I’m teaching on the Sin of Ignorance. You can read
Part One here. Read
Part Two here. Read
Part Three here. I hope you’ll join me for the whole series and walk away with the tools necessary to be set free.
We live in the most fast-paced culture in history. We have everything we need and want at our fingertips and still sometimes it’s not enough. There’s a fast food restaurant I drive by a few times a week that expects their team members to get their drive-thru done in 2:30. That’s from the time the order starts until the time the customer drives off. And they expect the order to be perfect. But what they don’t take into consideration is the traffic. The restaurant is right along the busy highway and you often have to wait to pull out due to traffic. So what happens? Cars get backed up in the drive-thru line, even though their orders have already been fulfilled. However, until they drive over a specific point in the line and the timer resets, the clock is still ticking.
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by | Faith Lived Out, Spiritual Warfare
This is part three of a series I’ll be teaching on the Sin of Ignorance. You can read
Part One here. Read
Part Two here. I hope you’ll join me for the whole series and walk away with the tools necessary to be set free.
We can also be ignorant to sins we’ve committed because we simply didn’t know. Perhaps you’re thinking, “But everyone knows right from wrong, so how could we do something and not know it?” The answer is simple. Because we were ignorant to the knowledge.
Known as one of the most influential preachers of all time, Charles Spurgeon translates the word “ignorance” to “inadvertence” in his November 25, 1877 sermon on the sins of ignorance.
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by | Faith Lived Out, Spiritual Warfare
This is part two of a series I’ll be teaching on the Sin of Ignorance. You can read
Part One here. I hope you’ll join me for the whole series and walk away with the tools necessary to be set free.
Ignorance isn’t just a lack of knowledge in understanding something. It’s more than that. Ignorance can also be defined as the want of knowledge.
When I first became a Christian, I had no idea spiritual warfare existed. I knew there were “spirits” because I’d watched enough ghost stories to entertain me. I didn’t know then that I’d need to be set free from those open doors in my life. (More on that later.) I believed the devil was real because I’d heard about him on occassion. However, I had no idea just how real he was. I assumed he walked around in red yoga pants with a pitchfork. Beyond knowing there was a battle between good and evil, I truly had no idea just how real that battle was. I was just beginning to drink the spiritual milk Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians.
Though I’ve seen people come to Christ and be radically delivered, I’m not sure that’s the norm when it comes to becoming a Christian. Most of us start out drinking spiritual milk, unlike Paul who was knocked off a donkey and had a pretty radical transformation. But God knew that was just about the only way He was going to change Paul’s heart. Doing an altar call on a Sunday morning just wasn’t going to work for him.
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by | Faith Lived Out, Spiritual Warfare
This is part one of a series I’ll be teaching on the Sin of Ignorance. I hope you’ll join me for the whole series and walk away with the tools necessary to be set free.
Do you remember that old saying, “Ignorance is bliss?” Eighteenth-century poet, Thomas Gray wrote those words in his poem “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” right before he finished the last line with “’Tis folly to be wise.’” It is foolish to be wise? Really? Gray wrote the piece using first-person point of view, through the eyes of a former Eton alumni. This former student realized that life gets pretty real after college and he encouraged the current students to focus on the now, have fun, don’t take life too seriously, and remain oblivious to the trials they will face.
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