The Culture of Hope Founded on Faith
Tag Archives: Faith
The Wait is Over
The last time I wrote, I talked about God’s call for me to step down and wait. God made it clear that I was entering a new season in my life. I didn’t know what that would look like, but I knew it would include recovery from something.
In June I discovered my new season quite suddenly when I had a heart attack while on vacation. After five days in the hospital, we cancelled the remainder…..
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After three consecutive scans that were clear of cancer, my husband had his chemo-port removed this week in his fifth fully-anesthetized procedure in a year. Over this past year of chemotherapy, we couldn’t see a clear mission like we had with our other two experiences of cancer in 2006 and 2018. Until, that is, after his treatments were done.
The first contact that mentioned the need of encouragement for another person with a similar cancer to Dan’s 2018 melanoma, was…..
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In Colossians 3:23-24, we are admonished with “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not unto men, knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance. for ye serve the Lord Christ.” To glorify God with a singular focus on serving Him is the primary purpose of our lives as Christians.
The admonition to do so also appears in:
1 Corinthians 10:31 – “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,…..
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It’s winter. Of course, we get snow and rain in winter. Where we used to live we frequently heard the saying, “If you don’t like the weather in Susanville, wait five minutes.” Besides the daily measurement of precipitation, each April 1 the western states measure snowpack depth and characteristics on mountain heights to determine the amount of water we can expect from the spring melt-off. This measurement determines whether drought conditions will exist and what mitigating efforts will need to…..
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In the past two weeks two different people have called what I said, on two different subjects and at two different times, heretical. Both came as a shock since I have never been accused of heresy in the more than six decades that I have been a born-again believer. Heresy is a very strong word and my understanding of the biblical term is that of taking someone outside to stone them to death. My first reaction was prayer: “Is this…..
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These devotionals are by no means comprehensive, but an appetizer for further study of the Word of God. The material I have written in these last four weeks merely scratches the surface of a topic that would require several thick volumes of commentary to cover fully.
We find comfort in the idea of our dead relatives and friends in Heaven in the company of loved ones who have died before. And it appears they will all be recognizable to us,…..
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While some information about Heaven appears throughout the Bible, the book of Revelation gives us a fairly clear picture. Like Isaiah who was also given a vision of Heaven, John expressed in human terms something that could not possibly be understood outside the spiritual context in which he saw it. What he witnessed was prophetic and hectic in that his vision was of things to come. In the middle of all the end-of-the-world activity, however, snippets of Heaven in the…..
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Someone recently asked me about what the Bible says regarding our glorified bodies in heaven. From 1 Corinthians 15:52-56, we know that “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye [when] the trumpet shall sound, the dead shall be raised incorruptible and we shall be changed. For this corruptible [body] must put on incorruption and this mortal [body] must put on immortality. So when this corruptible [body] shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal [body] shall have put…..
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We are the Body of Christ and the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are divided out to each of us are for the efficient functioning of the body, directed by the Holy Spirit. According to Merrill Unger, “A gift implies a settled and continual abilities to do something again and again” (from The Gift of Seeing Angels and Demons: A Handbook for Discerners of Spirits, pp 15-16). There are several Bible passages that, between them, build the list of…..
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Our relationship with God is not one-sided. He created us for companionship with Him. In the Garden of Eden, He was in the habit of walking and talking to Adam. When sin entered, that fellowship was broken. When Jesus died on the cross and rose again, the chasm between us and God was bridged. As Christians we have that fellowship again, in prayer. In Matthew 7:7, Jesus tells us to “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye…..