Learning

I would like to know why we have gotten out of the habit of going to church each week and why our culture is so stuck on being entertained?
It seems we work for pleasure. Everything I see advertised is trying to sell me something that will entertain me. A car with all this stuff that will keep me safe while I try to entertain myself with music or phone conversations; restaurants that will also entertain me while I eat; movies; shows; things to do...
I believe we expect this in church too. Somehow church is "boring" unless we are entertained.
What happened to learning? Why did a generation arise that believed that once High School or college was finished that learning had to stop? I thought that the purpose of High School and college was to teach you to learn and to give you a drive, style and awareness of learning.
Maybe it's just me. I can't learn enough and I don't want to stop learning, especially when it comes to God and my relationship with God. I want to keep on learning and growing so I know God better and so I can help others have a stronger relationship with God and other people.

Sinning More

I have been wrestling with the sin of omission this week.
I have been very aware of the places and people I have left hanging in my life. You know; the person you see in the hospital, they go home and you fail to follow up an their progress. The family you see at the Funeral Home, they leave and you never call to see how they are dealing with their grief.
I believe that people without faith deal with this with one of two responses; "oh well" or depression, seeing themselves as totally worthless and incapable of anything even remotely resembling anything close to a decent human response.
People of faith know about grace. Grace is a wonderful thing. In one breath grace convicts you of the area where you need to grow and also tells you you are loved and worth the life of the Son of God. Grace shows me where I need to grow, not what a worthless creature I am. It shows me how to be closer to God, not a hopelessness in how far away God might seem. Grace lets me know that i need to change but also that I am accepted just as I am.
God loves us just as we are and shows us how we can be more like God through our thoughts, words, and actions. How is God working in and through you as a result of the sin in your life?

Sin

So many of us see ourselves as unworthy of God's love. Somehow we believe we have been forgotten by God or have so many mistakes, or our mistakes are so bad that God just doesn't care about us any more.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Look at these words from Romans 9:22-26

²² What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? ²³ What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— ²⁴ even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? ²⁵ As he says in Hosea:

   “I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people;
   and I will call her ‘my loved one’ who is not my loved one,”^[i]

 ²⁶ and,

   “In the very place where it was said to them,
   ‘You are not my people,’
   there they will be called ‘children of the living God.’”^[j]

 

You can see that God desires us to be in relationship with God, our mistakes do not matter. God has 

called us his people. 

Live in this confidence from scripture