Welcome to The Word In Life! This blog is about the practical understanding and application of Scripture in everyday life. Come along as we explore God’s written word together.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is quoted from the New King James Version (NKJV).
Ron Franklin
My wife and I had just gotten home after Bible Study. We were both in the kitchen when her cell phone rang. I could tell immediately that something had happened by the stunned expression that came upon her face. When she finished the call, she turned to me, still stunned, to tell me the news. Lou had passed away.
I was as astonished as she. Lou? No!
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Many in our science-oriented world today just don’t find the Bible to be credible when it talks about miracles. It tells of people walking on water, turning water into wine, and coming back to life after they died. Those are not occurrences we are used to seeing in everyday life.
So the question naturally arises: does it make sense to believe that these things really happened?
I think it does, and here’s why:
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One summer, years ago now, I went backpacking across Europe with a friend. We visited most of the countries on the continent and met a lot of people. And of course, many of them would sooner or later ask us what kind of work we did.
We were free to travel that summer because we were both students. She was in law school, and I had taken an educational leave of absence from IBM to start seminary studies for the ministry in the fall. But when people asked about what I did, I didn’t say I was a student. Instead, I would tell them that I was an electrical engineer working for IBM.
After seeing me respond this way several times, my friend told me something that pretty much floored me. She said that whenever I told people I worked for IBM, I did so with a subtle air of pridefulness.
That was really hard for me to believe! In fact, I was so far from believing it that I began to wonder about her motives for saying it. If you had asked me if I was a prideful person, I would have instantly, strenuously, and quite sincerely denied it. In fact, although I would never have said it out loud, I considered myself to be one of the most humble people I knew!
But I couldn’t get what she said out of my mind. As I thought about it more, I realized my friend was seeing something in me that I was entirely blind to. At that time IBM was widely considered to be the most elite company in the high-tech world. Apparently what my friend was sensing in my attitude was an unconscious conviction that working for such a company made me elite as well! Yet, I was entirely unaware of having that kind of pride, and certainly had no idea that I was communicating it to other people.
I considered myself to be one of the most humble people I knew!
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Anger is a universal human emotion. No one escapes it. It is a normal emotional response when things don’t go our way, and we are hurt, frustrated, or offended because of it.
The Bible has a lot to say, both positive and negative, about anger. Let’s take a quick survey.
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Has your conscience been bothering you about something? If it has, the worst thing you can do is to ignore it.
There are times when our conscience just won’t leave us alone.
Maybe you did something that seemed to make sense at the time, or perhaps you are planning to take a particular action and don’t see any logical reason why you shouldn’t. But still, somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s something that makes you uneasy about it. That uneasiness may well be the voice of conscience trying to save you from doing something that could end up being very damaging to yourself or others.
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Jack A. Schaap was the revered pastor of a Baptist church in Hammond, Indiana, that averaged 15,000 attendees every Sunday. Now he is a convicted felon serving a 12-year prison sentence for sexually abusing a teenage girl who came to him for counseling. His church fired him, his wife divorced him, and his reputation and his life have been utterly ruined.
After initially taking full responsibility for his crime, which included transporting a minor across state lines for sexual purposes, Schaap sank to even greater depths of moral degradation. In a doomed attempt to have his sentence reduced, he tried to shift blame from himself to his 16-year-old victim, accusing her to the court of aggressively pursuing and seducing him.
What a horrible and excruciatingly painful story! There is absolutely no excuse or palliation for the egregious offenses former pastor Schaap committed.
Yet I don’t believe there was ever a morning when this respected, and to all appearances devout, spiritual leader got out of bed and thought to himself, “this seems like a good day to take advantage of a child’s trust in her pastor, betray my wife and the sanctity of our marriage, subject my church to ridicule and shame, and totally destroy my own life.”
I suspect that when Jack Schaap thinks back over the events of the last few years, he is utterly astounded to have ended up where he is. How could this possibly have happened to him?
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A little while ago I really messed up. There was something I was supposed to do that I didn’t get done, and I felt really bad about my neglect. In fact, my mistake started weighing on me. I felt ashamed, because I disappointed the expectations of other people, and guilty because I disappointed not only God, but also my expectations of myself.
That episode brought me face to face with an issue every Christian must deal with sooner or later: how do you handle it when you’ve badly messed up? You sinned in some way, or you neglected a responsibility, or you got angry and said some things you shouldn’t have said. Whatever it was, you messed up. And now you really feel bad about it.
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Many people in our world today don’t really understand love. We say, “I love ice cream,” meaning that we enjoy it a great deal. But we may also say, “I love John,” and mean pretty much the same thing—that John pleases or benefits us. That semantic confusion makes it easy to slip into a concept of love in which our focus is more on what we expect to get than on what we can give.
Part of the confusion arises because, in English, we use the single word “love” to cover a wide range of feelings and behavior. On the other hand, the Greek language, in which the New Testament was originally written, recognizes that to truly understand what love is all about, we need to make distinctions between different kinds of love.
In biblical Greek, there are four different words, with four different meanings, that are translated into English as “love.”
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It happens all the time. You notice that someone’s attitude or attendance pattern or willingness to serve in the ministry has changed. And when you’re finally able to get them to be honest with you about what’s going on, they relate how someone in leadership said something or did something that bruised their feelings. Now, in response, they’ve drawn away from whole-hearted participation in the ministry of the church.
All of us want great relationships in our lives. Whatever kind of relationship it may be, whether with a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, parent, child, even a boss, we want it to work.
But great relationships don’t just happen—they must be built. In fact, in all of our relationships, we are, by our actions and attitudes, always in the process of either building them up or tearing them down. Every relationship requires an investment of time and effort and godly wisdom to keep it on track.
If you are anything like I am, you’ve had enough dysfunction, pain, tears, and outright failures in your life to realize that when it comes to relationships, you need help! And there is one particular passage in the Bible (out of many we might choose) that I believe provides exactly the help we need:
