Year: 2015

If relationships aren’t built on something deeper than finding good restaurants, working at the same company, or having kids in the same activities, they will change whenever the common bond is no longer there.

What connects believers is the reality that we were all very messed-up people, broken before a holy God, yet rescued and given new life in Christ. What unites believers is deeper than anything that can divide.
–Matt Chandler

We are designed to be in relationship… in community… with others. And yet, we find that many times our community that we are building with others is not built on something lasting. But when we build it on the gospel, our relationships are built on the strongest and most solid foundation that exists. It can allow people with great differences to come together with love for one another. People who wouldn’t have been caught dead together, now greet each other with a holy kiss – as brothers and sisters in Christ – the one who has transformed them and given them a new family under one Father.

We can state the gospel clearly; we can smell unsound doctrine a mile away. If asked how one may know God, we can at once produce the right formula: that we come to know God through Jesus Christ the Lord, in virtue of his cross and mediation, on the basis of his word of promise, by the power of the Holy Spirit, via a personal exercise of faith.

Yet the joy, goodness, and unfetteredness of spirit which are the marks of those who have known God are rare among us.
–J. I. Packer

Packer’s book, Knowing God, is all about how to take that which is already in our heads and move it 18 inches lower to dwell in our hearts. He wants us to move from having lots of knowledge about God and become people who intimately know and love God – these are two very different things.

Just as I can know a lot about someone who is famous and yet not have any relationship with them, you can know a lot about God and yet not know God…not have any real relationship with Him. And only an intimate relationship of knowing God will bring you that joy, love, and peace that each of us long to have.

Pray that God will help you come to know Him and love Him and not just know things about Him.

Diseases are painful and problematic. However, Yancey rightly indicates that physical disease is much less problematic than spiritual dis-ease:

Jesus knew that spiritual dis-ease has a more devastating effect than any mere physical ailment. Every healed person ultimately dies — then what?

He had not come primarily to heal the world’s cells, but to heal its souls.
–Philip Yancey

Jesus turned upside down the accepted wisdom of the day. Pharisees believed that touching an unclean person polluted the one who touched. But when Jesus touched a person with leprosy, Jesus did not become soiled — the leprous became clean. When an immoral woman washed Jesus’ feet, she went away forgiven and transformed. When he defied custom to enter a pagan’s house, the pagan’s servant was healed. In word and in deed Jesus was proclaiming a radically new gospel of grace: to get clean a person did not have to journey to Jerusalem, offer sacrifices, and undergo purification rituals. All a person had to do was follow Jesus.
–Philip Yancey