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Hope & Blessing Through a Simple Meal
Isaiah 58:10 | … And if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. (NIV) In our nation, it is common to assume that we’ll have access to three meals a day along with snacks and dessert. Many of us don’t think twice about purchasing a fancy drink from the local coffee...
Beautiful Churches
What makes a church beautiful? Peru and Mexico, in the midst of their poorer cities, still have large cathedrals filled with costly items. The cathedrals in London are awe-inspiring with their massive size and intricate architecture. However, many of the churches in India, and Rwanda are small and plain. Often there are no benches, so the people happily sit on the floor. You won’t see people lining up outside of them to take a tour. If you walked by one of them, you may not even know it was a church, it is so plain. The book of Haggai addresses a...
Building and Remodeling
When you see a house that was started but never finished, you wonder why the owner never completed the project. Did he run out of money or was there some major event, a divorce or sickness or death, that was the reason? In the Bible, the book of Ezra introduces us to a building project in which the people lost interest. The situation was corrected when the prophet Haggai appeared on the scene.To remember the theme of the book of Haggai, use this acrostic: How About Getting God’s Abode Improved. Here’s some context: about a century earlier, after losing a...
Running with the Mountain Goats
If you search the internet for images of mountain goats, you will see them standing on what appears to be sheer vertical walls. That is because they have special hooves designed to find traction on the smallest of footholds. They show no signs of the fear of heights. The classic book, Hinds Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard, is an allegory of the Christian life (similar to Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan). The Bible, in the same way as Hinds Feet, likens the person who trusts God in the midst of difficult circumstances to that of a sure-footed mountain goat. “As...
How Will God Use You?
Have you ever wondered what God thinks of you? I mean, now that you have become one of His children through faith in Jesus Christ. Perhaps we get an idea from God’s interaction with Gideon in the Old Testament. If you remember, at the time of Gideon, Israel was antagonized by marauding bands from the nearby nation of Midian. These groups would sweep in every summer and steal the bounty of the harvests from the Israelites.To preserve some of the grain, Gideon was threshing it in a winepress, trying to remain hidden from the Midianites. God dispatched an angel, who...