Posts Tagged ‘Endurance’
Endurance — Partaking in the Divine Nature
The word patience, as it is usually employed, means the ability to tolerate or to suppress irritation at delay or discomfort. But this patience is not precisely the quality that the apostle Peter had in mind when he wrote in his second epistle that Christians were to add to their faith “patience.” (2 Pet. 1:5,…
Read MoreEnduring to the End: Five Keys
Jesus said, And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved (Matt.10:22). One of the keys to enduring to the end is found in the root word of “endure” (hupomeno) which is to “abide” (meno). We must have an abiding relationship with…
Read MoreBearing the Yoke in Your Youth
Armchair sociologists are already calling them “Generation C.” A recent article in The Atlantic, put it this way: “Generation C Has Nowhere to Turn: Recent history suggests young people could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.”1 The article went on to describe the depressing consequences of COVID-19 crisis. Young people, especially…
Read MoreThree Reasons We Cannot Quit
Jeremiah 20:7-13 The Confessions of Jeremiah, part 4 I can imagine someone in Jeremiah’s day thinking, “Jeremiah has lost his emotional stability and sanity. He needs crisis counseling, so let’s have a talk with him and tell him it is time for him to quit and pack it in.” They could have said things like…
Read MoreThe Man from Uz and His Problem
Don Johnson There are plenty of sad stories in the news all the time, but sometimes the story is so jarring that it touches our collective consciousness in a way to bring out much commentary, expert and inexpert, about the problem of depression and what to do about it. I have to admit, I don’t…
Read MoreA Good Soldier of Jesus Christ (2)
Mark Minnick [From yesterday’s introduction:] It would be hard to find any preachers of the last two centuries any more acquainted with outright warfare for Christ than Charles and his brother John. Their earliest journals are not only almost monotonously replete with references to it, but often the entries nearly spurt blood. Here are samples…
Read MoreA Good Soldier of Jesus Christ (1)
Mark Minnick We have a full thirty of them in our church’s hymnbook: songs by Charles Wesley. But it would take nearly eight hymnbooks of equal size to hold all the church songs Charles wrote. They amount to over six thousand, ten times those of Isaac Watts. So it’s understandable that we might envision that…
Read MoreWith Job in the School of Suffering
Layton Talbert God’s people can experience different kinds of suffering. First Peter focuses on a class of suffering that, humanly speaking, we do not deserve. We call it persecution — suffering for our faith in and faithfulness to Christ. Lamentations portrays another type of suffering that is deserved. We call it chastisement — suffering the…
Read MoreThe Value of Suffering
Steve Pettit Suffering is one of the main avenues by which God brings revival. Perhaps no one understood this concept more than the apostle Paul. His writings are full of references to God’s power entering through the pathway of pain. In 2 Corinthians 12:7–10, he mentions his “thorn in the flesh,” a physical infirmity. He…
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