By Ed Welch  

A seventy-five-year-old man wanted to talk about his past, especially his childhood and early teen years, because his past felt so present. Like many of us, he wanted to be less controlled by his past and jettison its haunting episodes.

Scripture does help us with our painful pasts, but it does more than that. It tells us to forget things we want to remember, and remember things we are likely to forget. 

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By Tony Merida

In our gospel-centered movement, we should emphasize Paul’s pattern of preaching the grace of Christ. But we should also highlight his deep commitment to friendship.

Paul’s constant interaction with his friends was a sign of maturity, not deficiency. Even the mighty apostle needed friends—and he needed them for the same reasons you do.

Click here to read three simple but glorious benefits of friendship...

By Jennifer Phillips

Brian and I recently led a parenting workshop at our church. I’d like to think we were asked to teach this course because our mad parenting skillz are off the chart, but it may have more to do with the fact that we’re the only ones who said yes. Also, we’re one of the only couples in our church whose kids are over the age of five, so there’s that. BUT ANYWAY. I digress.
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We were given the freedom to choose from any parenting-related topic, and while it may have been easier to zero in on things like “Surviving on Little-to-No Sleep,” “How to Get Your Kids to Behave in Public,” or “How to Potty Train and Not Lose Your Mind,” we knew we wanted to zero in on the heart—and not so much our children’s hearts, but what parenting reveals about our hearts. We wanted to talk about idolatry.

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The bailing trend is an understandable byproduct of a busy culture.  But is it Christian?   
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My friend lives in Toronto’s hipster west end, I on the eastern edge of buttoned-up midtown. To see each other, especially when both of us are swamped with work and family commitments, we flex the muscle of careful planning and muster herculean effort. However, several weeks ago, we planned to meet rather spontaneously for coffee on a Monday. She would be in my neck of the woods.

For a fleeting moment, our friendship had the gratuitous gleam of convenience.

Then she moved our meeting spot 15 minutes further from my house.  The gleam faded, and I bailed.  "Today has run away from me," I texted the day before, "and I don't think I have time tomorrow for coffee. I'm sorry, because I'd love to see you.  

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If you are like me, you probably find yourself more consistently confused or failing in prayer than in any other area in the Christian life. Why is that? Talking to the God who chose us, saved us, and sustains us should be the most natural and delightful thing in the world, shouldn’t it? Perhaps it should, but more often than not, it isn’t.
We all know we should pray more. The guilt within reminds us. But if we are honest, we neither want to pray more, nor are we really convinced we need to. Why? Perhaps we don’t really understand what prayer is — or we’re prone to forget.

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How to ensure 'personal sustainability.' 

​In recent years, a number of Christian leaders have rightly called lethargic and half-hearted Christians to quicken their pace, to dedicate more of their time, talents, money and efforts to serving the Lord in the local church and in evangelistic outreach at home and abroad.  I welcome this “radical,” “don’t waste your life” message to up the pace, and I rejoice in its positive impact on thousands of Christians. Some of us, though, need to hear a different message: 

“Slow your pace or you’ll never finish the race.”

As Brady Boyd warns in Addicted to Busy, “Ultimately, every problem I see in every person I know is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life.”  I’m not proposing that we put our feet up and opt out of life and Christian service. No, I’m talking about being sensitive to changes in ourselves and our circumstances and re-calibrating our pace to ensure personal sustainability.

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"If this were 1999—the year that I was converted and walked away from the woman and lesbian community I loved—instead of 2016, Jen Hatmaker's words about the holiness of LGBT relationships would have flooded into my world like a balm of Gilead. How amazing it would have been to have someone as radiant, knowledgeable, humble, kind, and funny as Jen saying out loud what my heart was shouting: Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend. Yes, I can flourish both in my tenured academic discipline (queer theory and English literature and culture) and in my church. My emotional vertigo could find normal once again.

Maybe I wouldn’t need to lose everything to have Jesus. Maybe the gospel wouldn’t ruin me while I waited, waited, waited for the Lord to build me back up after he convicted me of my sin, and I suffered the consequences. Maybe it would go differently for me than it did for Paul, Daniel, David, and Jeremiah. Maybe Jesus could save me without afflicting me. Maybe the Lord would give to me respectable crosses (Matt 16:24). Manageable thorns (2 Cor 12:7)."
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We know as Christians, on an intellectual level, that we have idols—be it family, food, football or whatever. But to see the allure of idolatry can be hard for those of us in the Western world.That’s why I appreciate the points laid out by Doug Stuart in his Exodus commentary (450-54). Stuart suggests nine reasons idolatry was attractive to the Israelites and in the cultures of the Ancient Near East.
1. It was guaranteed. If you do the right incantation, you get the right results. Just say the right words and the gods show up. Who wouldn’t want that?

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Every Christian must come to terms with the fact that there will indeed be a Man of Lawlessness and our beliefs about him will play a role in the way we think and live today.  

If you are interested in some basic information on the Anti-Christ you will find the list contained in this article, written by Matthew Holst at Alliancenet.org, informative.   

"One of the Apostle Paul’s great preoccupations in both of his letters to the church at Thessalonica is the second coming of Christ. He was not only concerned with getting the doctrine “right” but also with the great pastoral implications of such teaching.

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by Paul Tripp

Have you ever been in the middle of a difficult season and someone says to you, "Hang in there!" Maybe you've said it to a friend just recently yourself.
I think we mean well with phrases like this, and our aim is to encourage our friends or loved ones, but let's be honest: "hang in there" doesn't actually do much to lift our spirits or strengthen our resolve.
If I can be even more honest, sometimes I think we say "hang in there" because we're not prepared to minister to people who share their suffering with us. So what should we say the next time someone opens up to us?
There are many things we can say, and we need to equip ourselves to comfort those in trouble (see 2 Corinthians 1:4). But, for the sake of today's devotional, I want to examine a phrase that has given me much comfort: "I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope." (Psalm 130:5)

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