People who build close friendships experience great pain because it’s part of the package of friendship. When you build deep connections with people there is always the potential of being wounded by them, or the loss when they are gone. Every person we build friendships with will suffer loss because we all are destined to die. Physical death causes great pain if there was also great love connected with that relationship. It shows the value we attributed to that life. What’s worse is if the friendship we built over time ends up betraying our trust and then the loss is doubly painful.

If a person reads the four gospels at face value, they will quickly see Jesus was not trying to get big crowds by using some fancy teaching or preaching method, but rather by making the truth simple and accessible for the common person. He did share stories to illustrate biblical truth, but often he would explain God’s blessings were tied to a person’s obedience. If a person did decide to follow him he would explain that being a follower was more than just coming to hear a weekend message. Following Jesus meant that he expected his disciple would be 100% committed to him and not just acting like it was a part time job.  To follow Jesus meant you were becoming a “Radical Person”.

Many Christians who believe in the forgiveness of Christ often struggle with guilt and shame, even after coming to a saving experience in Christ. Shame is that awful thing that hinders our trust in the Lord and becomes a roadblock to intimacy with God. In a previous article, I dealt with guilt, but in this article I want to deal with the fruit of guilt, which is shame. Shame is the emotional feeling that can stop our development emotionally, physiologically and practically as we seek to develop our God given abilities. If a person has unresolved guilt, or what I call “Shadow” guilt, shame chains us to our yesterday. 

God designed us to have and desire good relationships with others but finding good friends can often be a challenge. Unfortunately, when we are young many parents don’t teach their kids what to look for in friends and so we tend to find or make friends based more on our geographical location rather than being selective about who we invite into our inner circle of relationships. Finding good friends can be a real challenge!

Many Christians today believe that if they pray and have faith then God is obligated to preform a miracle or give them what they ask for in prayer.  However, this mindset often fails to take the whole of scripture into account when trying to understand when and if God will move on our behalf with a miracle. I believe Christians today have a patch work understanding of scripture and not a cohesive understanding of what God is communicating in his word.

How often does Jesus say something that you say you agree with and yet you don’t understand what he meant by what he said ? I want to say this happens more times than we want to admit, yet we gloss over our lack of comprehension. Why do you think we miss so much but don’t dig for more understanding? I hate to say it, but it’s all about how much time and effort we give to the words of God.

Ask anyone who has had a disease or crippling physical problem and they all will say they would loved to be healed and would do almost anything to get healed. Yet there are millions who have never received what they longed for or prayed for. People in many different age groups from young and old will tell you the doctors and medicine don’t seem to be able help them even with all our advanced discoveries. Some sicknesses and problems in life we don’t seem to recover from, so people have to live with chronic illness for the rest of their natural lives. I know this isn’t a popular thing to say but many people, Christian or not, will not receive their healing. In many Christian circles, especially if you believe prayer makes a difference, this seems contrary to what they have been taught in scripture.

As we grow in our trust of God in our daily walk there are some  things he may choose to hide from us. The reasons for such actions I’m sure are many, yet to understand the basic reasons would be helpful to us so that we can know if God is withholding truth because we are not prepared for it, like the early disciples who walked with Jesus in ministry.

The Church has been wrestling with the concept of grace for ages. In fact, ever since the reformation of the 1500s when Luther, Calvin and Zwingli helped usher in the start the reformation from the corruption of the Catholic church, theologians and pastors have wrestled with the simply awkward definition of Grace as “Unmerited Favor.” To be honest, many doctrines the church has embraced and taught today came out of an over-correction of errors that the Catholic church was steeped in. When there is an over-correction of concepts often the new “Version” is flawed as well. The word and concept of “Grace vs Works” is one of them.

We live in a strange time in history because we live with so many images of people who are “Inauthentic” and just pretending to be genuine.  For example, news commentators and politicians continually craft an image or narrative instead of being authentic about who and what they believe about God and life in general. It seems that modern culture has increasingly traded good character for a good image.  The really sad thing is that can be expected from the world but many pastors have gotten in lock step with the world when it comes to working on their image more than their character.