Jesus Christ is alive and living in the hearts and lives of billions of Christians. I am interested in what He is saying and doing in the lives of those who know and love Him and interested in being a familiar and trusted blogger about Him
Megatheme: Genesis
MEGATHEMES
THEME
EXPLANATION
IMPORTANCE
Beginnings
Genesis explains the beginning of many important realities: the universe, the earth, people, sin, and God’s plan of salvation.
Genesis teaches us that the earth is well made and good. People are special to God and unique. God creates and sustains all life.
Disobedience
People are always facing great choices. Disobedience occurs when people choose not to follow God’s plan of living.
Genesis explains why people are evil: They choose to do wrong. Even great Bible heroes failed God and disobeyed.
Sin
Sin ruins people’s lives. It happens when we disobey God.
Living God’s way makes life productive and fulfilling.
Promises
God makes promises to help and protect people. This kind of promise is called a “covenant.”
God kept his promises then, and he keeps them now. He promises to love us, accept us, forgive us.
Obedience
The opposite of sin is obedience. Obeying God restores our relationship to him.
The only way to enjoy the benefits of God’s promises is to obey him.
Prosperity
Prosperity is deeper than mere material wealth. True prosperity and fulfillment come as a result of obeying God.
When people obey God, they find peace with him, with others, and with themselves.
Israel
God started the nation of Israel in order to have a dedicated people who would (1) keep his ways alive in the world, (2) proclaim to the world what he is really like, and (3) prepare the world for the birth of Christ.
God is looking for people today to follow him. We are to proclaim God’s truth and love to all nations, not just our own. We must be faithful to carry out the mission God has given us.
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as though you were working for the Lord and not for people."
Colossians 3:23 (GNT)
Jesus said the greatest commandment is to "love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength" (Mark 12:30 NLT).
As we've learned, God expects every one of us to mature in all of these areas. But he also knows each one of us tends to lead in one area. This means God has shaped you to most naturally be a talker (heart), feeler (soul), thinker (mind), or doer (strength).
Today we're going to focus on loving God with all your strength.
Doers love God with their strength. They're energetic activists—the achievers, the accomplishers, the workers. They push things forward and make things happen in practical ways.
Doers are here because the world needs contribution—and doers can get the job done! They have initiative, energy, action, and a drive to achieve. In a practical sense, they often serve as the hands and feet of Jesus in the world.
But we all have flaws, and for doers, it's overwork. Most doers are always working. They have trouble stopping to think or feel because they're always busy!
Psalm 127:2 says, "It's useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don't you know he enjoys giving rest to those he loves?" (MSG). If you're a doer, consider putting that verse on the mirror in your bathroom. God wants his loved ones to get their proper rest.
As I mentioned a few days ago, when you become a believer, your past is forgiven, you have a reason for living, and you have a home in heaven. But there's something that doesn't change when you come to Christ: your personality. God doesn't slow a doer down when you come to him—he simply changes your direction. He wants to empower you.
Colossians 3:23 has great advice for doers: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as though you were working for the Lord and not for people" (GNT).
If God made you a doer, then he wants to use you to get stuff done in the world. But you're not meant to do it all, and you should never try to do it in your own strength.
It's okay sometimes to do less—not less for God, but less in other areas so you'll have more time to do what matters most.
God has a unique purpose for your life—a mission only you can accomplish. And we want to help you discover it with the SHAPE Bible study.
This six-session video and workbook Bible study, written by Pastor Rick and taught by Erik Rees, will help you discover the unique ways God takes your spiritual gifts, heart, abilities, personality, and experiences and uses them all for his glory.
The SHAPE Bible study is our thanks for your gift to help more people embrace their God-given purpose through Daily Hope, so request your copy below when you give.
Message 1: Why God Shaped You the Way He Did Message 2: Unwrapping Your Spiritual Gifts Message 3: Following Your Heart Message 4: Using Your Abilities Message 5: The Purpose of Your Personality Message 6: Employing Your Experiences
Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, one of America's largest and most influential churches. Pastor Rick is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Purpose Driven Life. His book The Purpose Driven Church was named one of the 100 Christian books that changed the 20th century. Pastor Rick created The PEACE Plan to address the five global giants—spiritual emptiness, self-serving leadership, poverty, disease, and illiteracy—through the power of ordinary people in the local church. His Daily Hope broadcast and daily devotionals are offered around the world. You can listen to the broadcast or sign up for the free devotionals at PastorRick.com.
Many colleges and universities have policies narrowing the realm of permissible speech, reducing students to silence, leaving them unsure of what they can or cannot say.
Word control means thought control; the goal is to put parameters around what people can say so that eventually, they will apply these parameters to what they think. Just dare to express a different point of view in front of others and see what happens.
Brandeis University recently posted a list of offensive words, urging students and faculty “to stop using words and phrases like ‘picnic,’ ‘trigger warning’ and even ‘rule of thumb,’ because of what a campus counseling service calls their links to violence and power to ‘reinforce systems of oppression.’”10 A list of potentially oppressive language was posted on the school’s website by its Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center.
Other flagged words include freshman, victim, survivor, addict, disabled person, policeman, and the list continues. And if there is a barbershop in your area, they shouldn’t say they welcome “walk-in customers” because some people who suffer from disabilities and are unable to walk might feel excluded.
The University of Michigan ITS department compiled a similar dictionary of acceptable terms, and other colleges and universities are following suit, making sure their students and staff know about approved guidelines. And fully on board with the wokeness of the moment, the United Nations has said that the word chairman should no longer be used.11 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has urged that baseball replace the term bullpen with arm barn out of consideration for the bovine species.12
There is a reason for this madness.
The reason is not to elevate the conversation, but to silence it. The goal is not only to deny free speech, but to produce students who graduate with ideological conformity; those who do not comply with this guidance are intimidated. After all, an unapproved word or phrase might trigger someone and cause them to feel inferior or left out.
A Christian professor at a state university told me that when she expresses a Christian opinion in meeting, she is told, “I don’t feel safe around you,” or “What you say does me harm.” This woman asked me, “What do you say if someone says they don’t feel safe around you?” She answered her own question by saying the discussion abruptly ends.
And that is the point.
This retreat into the language of “safe-ism” or “freedom from harm” is intended to close the mouths of those who might disagree with the contemporary zeitgeist—that is, the spirit of the age. Certain ideas should not be spoken. The radical left touts its commitment to tolerance, yet their tolerance extends only to the echo of their own voices. As someone has said, they are very intolerant of the three Cs that shaped America: Christianity, the Constitution, and capitalism.
Freedom of speech has been narrowed to fit into an ever-constricting tunnel.
“My pronouns are not preferred; they are mandatory!” certain activists shout. But the goal of an endless number of pronouns is to keep us demoralized and inarticulate. We fear saying even a straightforward sentence because we might inadvertently use a wrong pronoun or say something that shows we are not fully in line with woke orthodoxy. (Whether we as Christians should use people’s preferred pronouns will be discussed in chapter 8.)
Research by the Cato Institute reported that nearly half of the students surveyed in the 13–22 age group said they had stopped speaking up in the classroom because of the prevailing atmosphere of intolerance and political correctness. More broadly, “self-censorship is on the rise in the United States, with 62% of Americans saying that the political climate today keeps them from expressing their beliefs,” and “77% of conservatives…feel compelled to keep their beliefs to themselves.”13
Remember, the goal is to imprison the mind, to cause people to self-censor so that banned ideas will never be uttered. Eventually, people will not be able to object to any radical leftist ideas no matter how absurd because there will be no vocabulary for doing so; the words they need will have been banned.
To summarize: The radical left is bent on limiting ideas. Barriers are put into place so that everyone will “stay in their lane” and not veer into conservative territory. Independent thought must be banned in favor of groupthink approved by the ideology. Anyone who dares to harbor contrary ideas will be reduced to silence. They tell us they are not denying people freedom of speech, but rather, they are simply trying to promote “harm reduction.” Really?
Shame Those Who Disagree with the Accepted Narrative
The radical left believes it is morally superior to those who disagree with them. Thus, they shut down contrary ideas by accusing their opponents of a psychological and moral deficiency. They describe those who disagree as being emotionally underdeveloped. The debate is no longer about ideas, but about bigotry and hate. And outrage sells.
Are you opposed to abortion? Then you just hate women. If you are opposed to same-sex marriage, you are a bigot. If you believe the US should have strong borders, you are racist. If you oppose radical Islam, you are Islamophobic (a term coined by a Muslim to shame anyone who dares to criticize Islam). And if you are opposed to China’s dictatorial government or inquire whether COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, you are xenophobic. And if you believe that people should show an ID in order to vote, you are destroying democracy!
The narrative is that conservatives are motivated by hate; the left is motivated by noble ideas of justice and fairness. Thus, the left wants to pass hate speech legislation to shut down the expression of conservative ideas on the pretense that they are hateful and cause harm. In a strange twist of irony, the left will sometimes even justify violence as “free speech.”
And, for good measure, if you think people should honor the American flag, you are most probably a white supremacist. If you believe those who live in the US should adhere to the Constitution, or that they should have free speech, it’s because you want to defend your white power. The goal of this slander is to shame people into silence.
Historically, Russia has used the tactic of labelling dissidents as mentally deranged. In effect, the government says, “Challenge our ideas, and we will declare you mentally ill. You have an emotional or mental disorder and should be locked away in an insane asylum.” Tragically, many healthy people were put into asylums or were killed for the simple reason they didn’t obey the state’s guidelines about what constituted acceptable speech.
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison physician, psychiatrist, and English cultural critic whose father was a communist. He writes,
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity…A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to14 (emphasis added).
The bottom line: Political correctness demands all objections to the leftist narrative be reduced to a psychological disorder that requires therapy. Ultimately, the goal is always the same: to define what is acceptable thought and what is not. Approve only words and ideas that have passed the woke guidelines.
I should add what a wise attorney once told me: When the discussion goes from ideas to shaming and personal attacks—which are an attempt at avoidance—you have actually won the debate. Your opponent is resorting to accusations knowing they cannot win in a respectful exchange of ideas.
The radical left says, “You disagree with me? See a therapist.”
10 Bernadette Hogan, Carl Campanile, and Bruce Golding, “Brandeis warns students not to say ‘picnic,’ ‘rule of thumb,’ calling words ‘oppressive,’” New York Post, June 24, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/brandeis-warns-students-not-to-say-picnic-rule-of-thumb/.
11 United Nations @UN, https://twitter.com/UN/status/1262322788687323136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1262322788687323136%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Freason.com%2F2020%2F05%2F18%2Funited-nations-gender-neutral-language-twitter%2F.
12 “PETA’s Call to the ‘Bullpen’: Rename Outdated Term ‘Arm Barn,’” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, October 28, 2021, https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/petas-call-to-the-bullpen-rename-outdated-term-arm-barn/.
13 Emily Ekins, “Poll: 62%of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share,” Cato Institute, July 22, 2020, https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share.
14 Jamie Glazov, “Our Culture, What’s Left of It,” FrontPage Magazine, August 31, 2005, https://archive.is/WBcUY.
If you are wondering where the pages that contained the words "excerpt", "Introducing" or other words indicating I was quoting a book have all gone, I migrated all of them over to Posts and Posted them all on August 18 and August 19 2024. I did that so you could use the search widget that is built in to the blog on the upper right hand corner. You will be happy to know that there are more of them than just the batch that were migrated, there were also lots of posts that contained the same words that did not have to be migrated over, they were there all along. I am really enjoying doing introductions and excerpts because it really makes for powerful and fascinating reading when I do them. You get the feeling you are in a bookstore holding a book in your hand looking at the table of contents and deciding whether or not to buy the book.
Jesus Christ is alive and living in the hearts and lives of billions of Christians. I am interested in what He is saying and doing in the lives of those who know and love Him and interested in being a familiar and trusted blogger about Him
Dallas Theological Seminary Fighting Human Trafficking video on youtube
Human Trafficking Victims Program Introduction
She said two urls that are no longer the urls to use. The first one, www.dhs.gov/humantrafficking automatically becomes www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign The facebook site was the old site which does not automatically update to the following, the new facebook site is http://facebook.com/dhsbluecampaign Click this link to search all of the DHS site for mentions of the Blue Campaign
2,380,500 views May 27, 2015
This song is on the album "Sovereign" From Michael W. Smith Sky Spills Over · Michael W. Smith Sovereign ℗ 2014 The MWS Group, under exclusive license to Sparrow Records Released on: 2014-01-01 Producer: Christopher Stevens Composer Lyricist: Michael W. Smith Composer Lyricist: Christopher Stevens Composer Lyricist: Ryan Smith
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