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If you're wondering how to forgive someone after deep hurt, easy answers won't help. Chris Singleton joins Dave and Ann Wilson to share what happened after his mother was killed in the Charleston church shooting—and why he refused to let anger have the final word. Join this honest conversation for anyone carrying grief, hurt, or questions they can't seem to shake.
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Based on his book Making Your Marriage a Fortress, Gary Thomas helps couples anticipate and weather the inevitable storms of life. He says that they can grow closer to each other and God through these experiences. He provides encouragement and hope for couples who are currently struggling, as well as offering a preparatory warning to couples who haven’t yet faced a crisis and need to know that such crises are inevitable.
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Do you have a story or comment on how Focus on the Family impacted you or your family? Leave a message for Jim Daly!
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Where do you get the power to change? Is it in regular Bible reading? Church attendance? Mission trips? What brings about the change that we all long to see in our lives? Chip explores this question and provides an answer that might surprise you.
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I was speaking at a Christian workers' conference in Alaska, and a veteran missionary approached me afterward with some intriguing information. She and her husband have worked for many years with an Indian tribe in Alaska - a tribe that has an interesting custom, according to the missionary. If you're from that tribe, they said you grow up learning about your backpack. It's not a real backpack, but it's a symbol of a very real human experience. The idea is that whenever you do something wrong, a rock goes in your backpack and you carry on your back all the weight of all your mistakes all your life.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Carrying the Burden No More."
When I heard about that, I couldn't help but think what an accurate image that is no matter what tribe you are from. In a sense, we really do carry around with us the weight of the things we've done wrong, the people we've hurt, the failures, the sins. With our backpack comes this feeling of guilt, and shame, and regret. Many people carry their backpack till the day they die, but you don't have to be one of them.
In our word for today from the Word of God, there is a very moving statement of what God has done to liberate us from the load of a lifetime of our sin. Speaking of Jesus, the Bible says in Isaiah 53:4, "Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows . . . He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our inequities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him."
God says that Jesus, His one and only Son, took the backpack that was full of my sin, put it on Himself and carried it all the way to an old, rugged cross. He carried yours, too. If He hadn't, there would be absolutely no way you or I could have a chance of going to heaven. After all, when the Bible describes heaven, it says, "Nothing impure will ever enter it" (Revelation 21:27). You can't get into heaven if you've still got the backpack of your sin.
Some of us hope we might be good enough to get into heaven. Right? That's probably the main reason we get involved in our religion and our church. But the Bible makes two things very clear: One, every one of us has this backpack called sin. It says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Two, there is no good we can do that will pay for our sin. In God's own words now, "He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy" (Titus 3:5). God's bottom line is this statement, Hebrews 9:22: "Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness."
That's why Jesus allowed Himself to be pierced, and crushed, and nailed to a cross, to pay the penalty for every sin you and I have ever done, so we don't have to. I've been with a lot of people the day they finally put their total trust in Jesus to forgive their sin and make them right with God. And often they have described the feeling this way. They'll say, "I feel like a hundred pound weight's been lifted from my back." Well, it has. The deadly backpack of sin is gone.
Yours can be, too, today, if you will, in your heart, make your way up that hill where Jesus died and leave your backpack, full of the sins of a lifetime, at the foot of His cross. If you don't belong to Jesus, and you want to, oh for goodness sake, today, tell Him, "Jesus, I'm Yours."
I've actually set up our website to be a place of a new beginning where you can find right there in front of you the information from God's own Word about how to be sure every sin has been erased from God's Book, and you're going to heaven when you die. Our website is ANewStory.com. Please check it out soon today.
Jesus carried all your sins to His cross, so you don't ever have to carry them again.
The attempted cures for climate change are generally worse than the disease—especially for the poor. Demands to transform the global energy infrastructure to depend heavily on wind, solar, and other renewables are harmful to people in America and the world–especially to the poor. Meanwhile, continued large-scale use of traditional energy sources like nuclear, hydro, and fossil fuels would reduce poverty while doing less harm to the environment. Join us as Dr. Cal Beisner and Dr. David Legates combine outstanding climate science, physics, economics, environmental science, political science, ethics, and theology to present a well-reasoned understanding of human-induced climate change and how to respond to it.
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In this message from 1 Corinthians 15, Pastor J.D. takes a look at how Paul responds to some of the Corinthians who are saying there’s no resurrection of the dead. In his answer, Paul shows them that belief in our bodily resurrection is as core a Christian concept as you can get. It’s not a secondary or peripheral belief; it’s at the core of Christian hope.
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