God Centered Life

Many world religions say things urging us to work to get saved. But the Christian faith is the opposite to buying or working your way up to heaven. It's all about Christ.

A high view of God's sovereignty must drive us to our knees in prayer. Often when people emphasize that God is sovereign, the thought is that they don't need to do anything themselves. But the Bible says the opposite and that we need to pray.

On the one hand, God said that the blessing for all nations would come through Isaac, but on the other hand, God told Abraham to kill Isaac. In the hall of faith chapter in Hebrews, it says that Abraham reasoned that God would raise Isaac from the dead, so he trusted Him enough to obey.

Why does stuff happen even to people who who follow God zealously? Even Abraham was given a very difficult test in being asked to trust God and sacrifice his promised child. In our difficulty and suffering, we need to trust God too.

There's a bit of Sodom and Gomorrah in all our hearts. The point of this story in the Bible is to show the depth of depravity of the human condition. Unless we have a deep understanding of our sin, we will not have a deep experience of grace.

Some of us like long hikes, and others of us drive around parking lots trying to find the closest spot. Here Paul looks at the metaphor of walking in Galatians.

Many of our problems come about through not bravely saying what we think to God. Our fallen natures make us hesitate to be honest with God because we're afraid of judgment. Only grace and the love of Jesus can persuade us that we can have a relationship with God.

Family is important, but we can't look to others to meet all our needs. This is true both for the tight-knit family as well as those that struggle with co-dependence. If you look for your fulfillment in another person, it will tend to drive you apart.

Our culture insists that you make your own luck and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps in order to get ahead. But what if luck (or blessing) is not earned, but granted? God determined to bless the whole world through Abraham, which is fulfilled in Christ through faith.

We often think that God confusing the languages at the tower of Babel was only a judgment, but He also had a plan to spread the people throughout the earth. God stops their doomed approach to reach heaven and achieve salvation so that they might find the right approach.