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Christian Living

Do You Live in a Spiritual Silo?

Aligning Ourselves with Like-Minded People Results in Isolation and Division An issue in the corporate world is business silos. This is where a department or unit puts up walls that separate them from the rest of the company. The leaders of these silos of information and function do so to maintain control and assure them […]

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Christian Living

What Is a Christian Cohort?

Align with Other Believers to Build Ourselves Up and Serve Others In my post about spiritual mastermind groups I talked about the benefit of aligning ourselves with other like-minded followers of Jesus to walk with on our spiritual journey. Now I’d like to look at the word cohort and apply that too. Let’s call this […]

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Christian Living

Jesus Is Our Rabbi

We Must Exercise Care with the Labels We Use for Our Spiritual Leaders Rabbi is a title I expected to find scattered throughout the Old Testament. It seems like a very Old Testament word. It’s not. It’s a New Testament word. Rabbi only appears in the Gospels and then just three of them: Matthew, Mark, […]

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Christian Living

It’s Not My Fault: Playing the Blame Game

Blaming Others for Our Mistakes Comes from Our Sin Nature Jeremiah prophesies judgment against the people in Jerusalem for their idolatry. God has had enough, and he will punish them for turning from him and pursuing other gods. Specifically, many women are burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out their drink offerings […]

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Christian Living

We Need a Balanced Bible Perspective

How We Read Scripture Influences Our View of God and Our Relationship with Him In a prior post I said that not all Scripture is the same. I placed the books of the Bible into eight groups. This formed a hierarchy of importance, starting with the Gospels. Though this is a most helpful guide in […]

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Christian Living

God’s Guardrails Are to Benefit Us and Not Limit Us

Running Barefoot in the Snow In my book Bridging the Sacred-Secular Divide, I tell the story of our children running barefoot in the snow. Here’s what happened. One day I painfully realized that whenever our children asked for anything, the default answer of my wife and me was no. It mattered not how legitimate their […]

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Christian Living

Give Us Our Daily Bread

Carefully Consider What You Ask of God Each Day When You Pray When Jesus’s disciples asked him to teach them how the pray, he gave them a prayer (Luke 11:1-4). Though many people recite this prayer exactly as the Bible records it (also see Matthew 6:9-13), a better approach is to use this prayer—often called […]

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Christian Living

How Content Are You with God’s Blessings?

The Bible Tells Us to Live a Life of Contentment Though some people in our world struggle to have the basic requirements for life, many others enjoy an existence that meets all their needs and beyond. This is a given for many people in most developed nations. They don’t need to seek God for their […]

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Christian Living

Holy Trinity: The Great Three in One

3 Illustrations of the Trinity A commonality among most who call themselves Christian is the understanding of God as Trinity—the Holy Trinity— that is, a singular entity existing as three persons: Father, Son (Jesus), and Spirit. That is confusing, but recall that Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” (John 10:30). Two common illustrations […]

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Christian Living

When You Give…Not If You Give

Jesus Expects Us to Help Those in Need, But Are We? In Jesus’s engaging teaching that we call the Sermon on the Mount, he talks about giving to those in need. He says, “When you give . . . ” He doesn’t say, “If you give . . .” (Matthew 6:2–4). It’s clear that Jesus […]