What if we could have more confidence in prayer? What if we could pray with greater confidence and really see things change, rather than just praying with little expectation like too many of have a habit of doing, would you and I pray more or pray less? My belief is we would love to pray with confidence, except much of our praying seems more like wishful thinking than confidence.

If you find some things in scripture that are hard to swallow, or hard to apply, you are not alone. I have walked with God since 1969 and still find some things difficult that God calls me to do or believe. Some things cause me to outright argue with God or at least invoke in me desire to avoid them. Why? Because my salvation is still in progress and God is not through helping me to get a Kingdom mindset rather than a selfish worldly one. This leads me to voice a concern I have with modern preaching and teaching in the body of Christ.

This is now the fourth article exploring whether God changes his mind. What we think about God’s willingness to change things based on how and why we pray makes all the difference in the world as to if we are motivated to pray as we are challenged by scripture to pray. If you have not read articles 1-3 please do so before reading this one.

If you gave your life to Christ your heart had to go through a transformational process where you changed from wanting to live for your self-interest to wanting to please God as your top priority. If your heart didn’t change salvation was never truly realized regardless how many times you prayed the sinner’s prayer. After all, God is more interested in transformation than he is in just forgiveness.   

This is the second part in a series on the “Myths” we as Christians have embraced as if they were biblical when in fact scripture speaks otherwise. The hard part is to know what is biblical and what is not in our beliefs when the only sources we rely on are sermons on Sunday morning or various books pastors might recommend. No pastor or teacher has a market on the truth of scripture and that includes me so what I’m advocating is to study the scripture and not just rely of what others say just because they are good pastors or good teachers.

I think when we consider acting in love towards others we think about what act of kindness we could demonstrate towards them or for them, but should we, or could we, be looking at only certain obvious aspects of what it means to love others? What about things we “DON”T SEE” in others that call us to extend or demonstrate God’s love to people who may appear undeserving? What if they appear to have a weakness of faith, should we love them in spite of that weakness?

Some people want to believe that a belief in God is not necessary in order to have good morals. They believe their morals are correct because they want to believe them regardless of whether these morals are based on something more solid than just their feeling. Thinking God is necessary to help us construct good morals is different than thinking that God exists. Remember, Satan believes God exists but he and the other fallen angles don’t live or exist with any morality other than to steal, kill and destroy. (John 10:10)

Many Christians say they trust the Bible, that is until some new bit of science comes out and gives us a “NEW TRUTH” that contradicts reliability of scripture and at least causes doubt about the trustworthiness of scripture among believers. This is not excluding the “THEORY” of evolution taught in public schools long before I was in grade school in the ’50s. In times like these many professing believers, even strong ones, secretly capitulate to the intimidation of scientific information. When you question the book of Genesis and the story of creation for the theory of billions of years of evolution you already are making science as your god, not the God of the bible.

This is the third part in a series that asks the question, “Does God change his mind?” The purpose of writing this series is because many believers have been taught a mixture of concepts and doctrines so that their theology doesn’t work in real life. As a result much of what they have learned doesn’t produce the maturity God wants and expects, and our ability to change the culture is, for the most part, nonexistent. Instead of being salt and light to our culture, we are changed by the humanistic culture we live in.

Many of us probably would say very strongly that we don’t believe in myths but if we looked closer at our beliefs we might find out that our strong held beliefs are based on someone’s ideas or desires, rather than on history, fact and what comes from the word of God. Many of our beliefs have been constructed by what we have been taught rather than from what we have observed. When it comes to biblical beliefs the same holds true.  We have constructed a belief system which was gained from pastors and teachers throughout our lifetime. These people may have taught us the word of God or they could have mixed truth with myth without even realizing it.