Couples Bible Quotes

The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

I often think . . . that the bookstores that will save civilization are not online, nor on campuses, nor named Borders, Barnes & Noble, Dalton, or Crown. They are the used bookstores, in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine, and Pascal.

I like how you call homosexuality an abomination." "I don't say homosexuality's an abomination, Mr. President, the bible does." "Yes it does. Leviticus-" "18:22" "Chapter in verse. I wanted to ask you a couple questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that can I ask another? My chief of staff, Leo Mcgary,insists on working on the sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it ok to call the police? Here's one that's really important, cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Red Skins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?

The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me. - Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp

As we walked home, I knew from far away the trees would've looked nice, the grass would've looked green, and we would've looked like just a couple of boys walking home, armed with Midwest love and Bible Belt morals. But up close, the trees were scorched, the grass was dead, and the boys were on the verge of tears with the belts of those morals tightening around their necks, threatening to hang them if they dared step off the stool of masculinity.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, `What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature.

Sure the bible might be the greatest story ever told, but the most popular story is about a couple who has a good time fornicating, but then stops for one reason or another while it is still a novelty.

There's something not quite Christian about it," Tony said. He sat back in his chair and looked up to where his Bible sat on the shelf. "I can't put my finger on why exactly, but it doesn't seem right for a couple of young ladies to be out there in the middle of the night, obsessing over their telescopes.

President Josiah Bartlet: Good. I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination. Dr. Jenna Jacobs: I don't say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does. President Josiah Bartlet: Yes, it does. Leviticus. Dr. Jenna Jacobs: 18:22. President Josiah Bartlet: Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important 'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town: Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads? Think about those questions, would you? One last thing: While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tight-Ass Club, in this building, when the President stands, nobody sits.

It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.

Darwin’s theory, laid out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, suggested that people and apes shared a common ancestor, and, coupled with recent discoveries of fossils revealing that humans had been on earth far longer than the Bible stated, helped irrevocably to sever anthropology from theology.

You really wanna take care of North Korea? I’ll tell you what to do: grab a couple of devout Christians and dress em’ up as Kim Jong-un and drop their asses into North Korea armed with Bibles and methamphetamines. They’ll either convert everybody or call em’ sinners and murder every last one of them. Problem solved.

The bible may be the greatest story every told, but the most popular story is about a couple fornicating that stops for one reason or another while it is still novel.

she read a couple of passages from the Bible, which I know is the done thing. I’ve been to many funerals now, and an awful lot of people have walked through the valley of the shadow of death.

But the [Eden] story takes a dramatically different turn: it tells of the couple succumbing to fear, blame, and the will to power, which from Cain and Lamech to today continues to engulf the world.

You watch the Appalachian snake handlers on the Discovery Channel, and they look as weird as the guy on Coney Island who hammers six-inch nails into his nostrils, or Nick Nolte after a couple of vodka tonics.

And he had a couple of Bibles in need of customized repair, and those were an easy fifty dollars apiece – just brace the page against a piece of plywood in a frame and scorch out the verses the customers found intolerable, with a wood-burning stylus; a plain old razor wouldn’t have the authority that hot iron did. And then of course drench the defaced book in holy water to validate the edited text. Matthew 19:5-6 and Mark 10:7-12 were bits he was often asked to burn out, since they condemned re-marriage after divorce, but he also got a lot of requests to lose Matthew 25:41 through 46, with Jesus’s promise of Hell to stingy people. And he offered a special deal to eradicate all thirty or so mentions of adultery. Some of these customized Bibles ended up after a few years with hardly any weight besides the binding.

Every husband knows that nuclear energy is not the most powerful force on earth. It’s not even a close second. The most powerful and awesome force on earth is a woman’s emotions. Nothing can match it in sheer intensity and shocking impact. I truly believe that one twenty-minute outburst from a woman could power a small town for three days.

he disclosed that he had been set upon by two Bedlamites, both of whom had jumped out from behind a bush, roaring at him like a couple of ferocious wild beasts ... The Sergeant cast a doubtful glance at Lieutenant Ottershaw, for, in his opinion, this had a false ring. His men, as he frequently informed them, put him forcibly in mind of many things, ranging from gape-seeds, hedge-birds, slush-buckets, and sheep-biters, to beetles, tailless dogs, and dead herrings, but none of them, least of all the two raw dragoons in question, had ever reminded him of a ferocious wild beast. Field-mice, yes, he thought, remembering the sad loss of steel in those posted to watch the Dower House; but if the young gentleman had detected any resemblance to ferocious wild beasts in his assailants, the Sergeant was prepared to take his Bible oath they had not been the baconbrained knock-in-the-cradles he had posted (much against his will) within the ground of Darracott place. But Sergeant Hoole had never, until this disastrous evening, set eyes on Mr. Claud Darracott. Lieutenant Ottershaw had beheld that Pink of the Ton picking his delicate way across the cobbles in Rye, clad in astonishing but unquestionably modish raiment, and holding a quizzing-glass up to his eye with one fragile white hand, and it did not strike him as remarkable that this Bartholomew baby should liken two overzealous dragoons to wild beasts.

No longer are the riches of the Bible known only to an educated elite. But it has also had negative consequences. It has made possible individualistic interpretation of the Bible; and that, coupled with the elevated status given to the Bible by the Protestant Reformation, has led to the fragmentation of Christianity into a multitude of denominations and sectarian movements, each grounded in different interpretations of the Bible.

The Dangers of Dating There is a new phenomenon that has hit our society. It is called dating, and everyone is doing it. Dating has turned into a huge money-maker. Now, we have television shows dedicated to dating. We have internet dating sites, speed dating, and music that encourages it all over the world. Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t say anything about dating. I realize there are many happily married couples whose marriages are a result of dating, but I want you to understand that there is great danger in dating. I’m not referring to courting or a betrothal. I’m referring to worldly dating, which consists of premarital sex, deep emotional connections, a great deal of kissing, and heavy petting, etc. This system of dating is recreational in nature, and it has no real purpose besides fulfilling lust, loneliness, and perversion. Never forget that it’s satan who convinces us to fill a legitimate need, illegitimately. Nonetheless, let’s examine some of these dangers now.

Dad and Mom had a lesbian couple living in our chalet for several years in the early 1970s. One was Dad’s secretary, the other Mom’s helper. They shared a room. Fortunately, my parents were hypocritical and acted as if, no matter their official religious absolutes, the higher call was to ignore what the Bible said in favor of what they hoped it meant. Thus, without ever saying it, it seems to me my parents were affirming that the Bible should be read as if Jesus was the only lens through which to see God. The result was that Francis and Edith Schaeffer were nicer than their official theology.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the State through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment—an attitude which has never again left me, even though later on, because of a better insight into the causal connections, it lost some of its original poignancy.

I love my country. Holy shit, do I love America. In many ways, it is the glorious result of some very open-minded thinking on the parts of our forefathers (and the ladies advising them) a couple of centuries ago. But that right there’s the rub, y’all. We’re a group of human beings, which means we can never be done trying to improve ourselves, and by default, our systems, including our government. Now, here’s the deal: Invoking the Bible in any public school or at any government function? Un-American. Making a witness in a court of law place his or her hand on the Bible? Un-American. Disputing legislation based upon what it says in your holy book? NOT PATRIOTIC.

FOR ALL COUPLES What aspects of your past did you hope remarriage would “cure”? Which of the following emotions have you felt in the past? Which still haunt you from time to time? Anger. Bitterness. Depression. Sadness. Longing. Hurt. Resentment. Guilt. Fear. Pain. Rejection. In what ways did you experience disillusionment, and at what point did you realize things weren’t working out like you expected? How have you adjusted your expectations? In what ways was your remarriage another loss for your children? How can you be sensitive to that loss without being guilt-ridden (or easily manipulated because you feel guilty)? Look again at the list of uncharted waters on page 19. Which of these represent areas of growth for you or your stepfamily? What areas do you consider to be the priority growth areas right now? In what ways have you or your stepfamily members experienced God’s leading or his healing hand? Be sure to share with your stepfamily how you see him at work in your lives. What Scriptures have been helpful or inspiring to you recently? If you haven’t been reading the Bible much lately, how can you begin to do so again? Share a time with your spouse when you weren’t sure the work was worth the effort. If that time is now, what do you need to help you stay determined? If you trusted God to bring you through, what would you be doing differently than you are now to work in that direction? Which, if any, of the Promised Land Payoffs have you experienced to some degree already?

Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work, only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion. In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten. Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage. Where will the family patterns collide? In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low. Where will they go now? In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end? But the skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays. Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all? Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers? Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own! At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. What few prepare them for is the upcoming struggle, the conflict over the unanswered question: the two shall become one, but which one? Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

Parenting pressures have resculpted our priorities so dramatically that we simply forget. In 1975 couples spent, on average, 12.4 hours alone together per week. By 2000 they spent only nine. What happens, as this number shrinks, is that our expectations shrink with it. Couple-time becomes stolen time, snatched in the interstices or piggybacked onto other pursuits. Homework is the new family dinner. I was struck by Laura Anne’s language as she described this new reality. She said the evening ritual of guiding her sons through their assignments was her “gift of service.” No doubt it is. But this particular form of service is directed inside the home, rather than toward the community and for the commonweal, and those kinds of volunteer efforts and public involvements have also steadily declined over the last few decades, at least in terms of the number of hours of sweat equity we put into them. Our gifts of service are now more likely to be for the sake of our kids. And so our world becomes smaller, and the internal pressure we feel to parent well, whatever that may mean, only increases: how one raises a child, as Jerome Kagan notes, is now one of the few remaining ways in public life that we can prove our moral worth. In other cultures and in other eras, this could be done by caring for one’s elders, participating in social movements, providing civic leadership, and volunteering. Now, in the United States, child-rearing has largely taken their place. Parenting books have become, literally, our bibles. It’s understandable why parents go to such elaborate lengths on behalf of their children. But here’s something to think about: while Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods makes it clear that middle-class children enjoy far greater success in the world, what the book can’t say is whether concerted cultivation causes that success or whether middle-class children would do just as well if they were simply left to their own devices. For all we know, the answer may be the latter.

Some time ago, the concept of the “carnal Christian” became popular among some evangelical groups. The basic idea was that someone could be saved, and yet living no differently than an unbeliever day after day. In their lives there would be no hunger and thirst for righteousness, no patterns of obedience, little or no prayer or Bible reading, spotty church attendance, coupled with a love for the world, and a worldly mindset hostile to the Christian faith. Yet, because these people had “prayed the sinner’s prayer” or gone forward at a Billy Graham rally, or “asked Jesus into their hearts” at a youth camp, they were supposedly Christians. This shallow idea of conversion was coupled with the biblical concept of “once saved, always saved,” and a poisonous concoction resulted. Once that concoction was downed, the person became seriously ill with spiritual self-deception. The end of that road is hell. If anything gives you complacent comfort in a sinful lifestyle, it is a devilish component of the problem.

Expressions of Passion, INTERCESSION. This scripture indicates the “birthing” kind of prayer passion when one prays for revivals or for a nation. Such prayer is usually not public, just as childbirth is not. The text parallels severe labor pains preceding a birth with those private times the Holy Spirit may produce involuntary, regular groaning coming from an intensity of desire. This prayer becomes powerful as it couples with God in faith, knowing something very significant is being brought about in the spiritual realm. It is often accomplished by intensity of speech and weeping. God assures us that such travail in the Spirit brings results in His time. Don’t fear such passion of travail and tears when praying for nations, missionary organizations, churches, denominations, spiritual leaders, people groups, individuals, or lost souls. The Father’s heart is being exposed by the Holy Spirit through an intensified burden where words are inadequate. Permit the Holy Spirit to enable it in His times and seasons of stirring you in private intercession.

The biggest problem we faced was people stealing our nets and fish. Sometimes the thieves would ruin the nets by cutting the fish out. The first time it happened, I asked my dad if we should call the police, but he said, “Son, where we live, I am 911.” He policed the river and would awaken many times during the night to check out boats he heard motoring by. I was with him during a few confrontations after we caught people in the act of stealing our nets. They were the most intense moments of my childhood. How my dad handled these situations was in a way a reflection of his growth as a Christian. He started out with a shotgun and a threat to use it if he ever caught them stealing again. But then one day when we caught two guys red-handed, Dad raised his shotgun and gave one of the best sermons from the Bible I’ve ever heard. Toward the end of our commercial-fishing career, he would have the gun but not raise it, give the sermon, and then give them the fish. He would tell them, “If you wanted some fish, all you had to do was ask.” I actually saw grown men shed tears over this approach, and a couple of them came to the Lord.

The ideal relationship is one in which the people are deeply in love with one another and are sexually compatible. However, perfect relationships are relatively uncommon. It is important to point out here that spiritual love and sexual love can, but do not necessarily, go hand in hand. If there is a certain amount of sexual compatibility, often it is limited; and some, but not all, of the sexual desire will be fulfilled. There is no greater sexual pleasure than that derived from association with someone you deeply love, if you are sexually well-suited. If you are not suited to one another sexually, though, it must be stressed that lack of sexual compatibility does not indicate lack of spiritual love. One can, and often does, exist without the other. As a matter of fact, often one member of a couple will resort to outside sexual activity because he deeply loves his mate, and wishes to avoid hurting or imposing upon his loved one. Deep spiritual love is enriched by sexual love, and it is certainly a necessary ingredient for any satisfactory relationship; but because of differing sexual predilections, outside sexual activity or masturbation sometimes provides a needed supplement.

Honest to God, I hadn’t meant to start a bar fight. “So. You’re the famous Jordan Amador.” The demon sitting in front of me looked like someone filled a pig bladder with rotten cottage cheese. He overflowed the bar stool with his gelatinous stomach, just barely contained by a white dress shirt and an oversized leather jacket. Acid-washed jeans clung to his stumpy legs and his boots were at least twice the size of mine. His beady black eyes started at my ankles and dragged upward, past my dark jeans, across my black turtleneck sweater, and over the grey duster around me that was two sizes too big. He finally met my gaze and snorted before continuing. “I was expecting something different. Certainly not a black girl. What’s with the name, girlie?” I shrugged. “My mother was a religious woman.” “Clearly,” the demon said, tucking a fat cigar in one corner of his mouth. He stood up and walked over to the pool table beside him where he and five of his lackeys had gathered. Each of them was over six feet tall and were all muscle where he was all fat. “I could start to examine the literary significance of your name, or I could ask what the hell you’re doing in my bar,” he said after knocking one of the balls into the left corner pocket. “Just here to ask a question, that’s all. I don’t want trouble.” Again, he snorted, but this time smoke shot from his nostrils, which made him look like an albino dragon. “My ass you don’t. This place is for fallen angels only, sweetheart. And we know your reputation.” I held up my hands in supplication. “Honest Abe. Just one question and I’m out of your hair forever.” My gaze lifted to the bald spot at the top of his head surrounded by peroxide blonde locks. “What’s left of it, anyway.” He glared at me. I smiled, batting my eyelashes. He tapped his fingers against the pool cue and then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. What’s your question?” “Know anybody by the name of Matthias Gruber?” He didn’t even blink. “No.” “Ah. I see. Sorry to have wasted your time.” I turned around, walking back through the bar. I kept a quick, confident stride as I went, ignoring the whispers of the fallen angels in my wake. A couple called out to me, asking if I’d let them have a taste, but I didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, I headed to the ladies’ room. Thankfully, it was empty, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the first number in my Recent Call list. “Hey. He’s here. Yeah, I’m sure it’s him. They’re lousy liars when they’re drunk. Uh-huh. Okay, see you in five.” I hung up and let out a slow breath. Only a couple things left to do. I gathered my shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. I looped the loose curls around into a messy bun and made sure they wouldn’t tumble free if I shook my head too hard. I took the leather gloves in the pocket of my duster out and pulled them on. Then, I walked out of the bathroom and back to the front entrance. The coat-check girl gave me a second unfriendly look as I returned with my ticket stub to retrieve my things—three vials of holy water, a black rosary with the beads made of onyx and the cross made of wood, a Smith & Wesson .9mm Glock complete with a full magazine of blessed bullets and a silencer, and a worn out page of the Bible. I held out my hands for the items and she dropped them on the counter with an unapologetic, “Oops.” “Thanks,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I put the Glock back in the hip holster at my side and tucked the rest of the items in the pockets of my duster. The brunette demon crossed her arms under her hilariously oversized fake breasts and sent me a vicious sneer. “The door is that way, Seer. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.” I smiled back. “God bless you.” She let out an ugly hiss between her pearly white teeth. I blew her a kiss and walked out the door. The parking lot was packed outside now that it was half-past midnight. Demons thrived in darkness, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

Papa always said that in the beginning men and women roamed the world together, equal in strength - like lions and tigers -" "And giraffes?" interpolated Colonel Race slyly. I laughed. Everyone makes fun of that giraffe. "And giraffes. They were nomadic, you see. It wasn't till they settled down in communities, and women did one kind of thing and men another, that women got weak. And of course, underneath, one is still the same - one feels the same, I mean - and that is why women worship physical strength in men - it's what they once had and have lost." "Almost ancestor worship, in fact?" "Something of the kind." "And you really think that's true? That women worship strength, I mean?" "I think it's quite true - if one's honest. You think you admire moral qualities,but when you fall in love, you revert to the primitive where the physical is all that counts. But I don't think that's the end, if you lived in primitive conditions it would be all right, but you don't - and so, in the end, the other thing wins after all. It's the things that are apparently conquered that always do win, isn't it? They win in the only way that counts. Like what the Bible says about losing your life and finding it.”. “In the end," said Colonel Race thoughtfully, "you fall in love - and you fall out of it, is that what you mean?" "Not exactly, but you can put it that way if you like.

Shortly after I returned home from the Ukraine, I became severely ill with what doctors believed was a parasite. I couldn’t hold my food down and lost a lot of weight. Different doctors kept prescribing me antibiotics, but none of them seemed to help. For a couple of months, I was poked and tested in a variety of ways, only to have more questions surface than answers. Then I was sent to an ear, nose, and throat doctor for an evaluation. I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of toddlers, when my name was called. By the time I got into the examination room I knew I’d had enough. “Hey, I’m outta here,” I told the doctor. “I’ll take my chance with the resurrection.” Well, a couple of weeks later, my insurance agent called me. He was one of my lifelong friends and sounded concerned. “Hey, Jase,” he said. “Your insurance company wants you to see a psychiatrist.” Apparently, the ear, nose, and throat doctor recommended I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation based on my refusal to be examined, along with my speech on the resurrection! Apparently, he thought I was crazy. I convinced my buddy that I didn’t need a psychiatrist and eventually got over my illness. I would later read a passage of scripture in the Bible that caused me to smile in reflection on the entire ordeal. Second Corinthians 5:13 says: “If we are out of our mind, as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

In 2022, New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren decried a culture of divorcing for unhappiness, writing, “I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage. There’s an older couple I know who are in their fifth decade of marriage. They are funny and kind and, by almost any standard, the picture of #relationshipgoals. Early on in our marriage they told us, ‘There are times in marriage when the Bible’s call to love your enemies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.’ ” Life is, of course, not easy, and no one is going to like their partner every day. But Warren’s column makes misery in marriage sound like a necessary evil of being partnered with a man. It’s not. I refuse to believe that it has to be that way. I have two dear friends who I have known for over twenty years; we fight sometimes and disagree. Between us we’ve had three divorces and four marriages and three children. Never once have they felt like the enemy to me. And if it is that way, if the experience of being with a man means I hate him for at least a third of our marriage and he hates me, too, I’d rather not have it. No, thank you. There is no benefit to that martyrdom. To me, columns like Warren’s sound like the mentality that enables hazing rituals and cults where they sacrifice one of their own every fortnight. I was miserable, so you should be, too. I do not want that curse. I want happiness.

One night, Kevin and I were at a pool hall where we saw a guy playing pool by himself; this guy looked like a hustler. He asked me if I wanted to play for twenty dollars. “I’ll tell you what,” I told him. “You can play my buddy Kevin. If you win two out of three games, I’ll give you twenty dollars. If he wins, you have to leave with us and go to a Bible study.” The guy looked at me like I was nuts. He walked around the pool table a few times, pondering my offer. I took a twenty-dollar bill out and placed it on the table. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” What he didn’t know was that Kevin is quite the player and that I don’t make bets with eternal consequences on the line unless I know we’re going to win! Of course, my buddy Kevin beat him. In fact, Kevin broke and ran the table in two straight games. The other guy never even took a shot! To my surprise, the guy followed through on his bet, although he didn’t seem too happy about it. As we walked to my truck to leave, he threw a full can of beer across the road and declared he was ready for a change in his life anyway. I thought that was a powerful statement since he didn’t even know what we were going to share with him. He knew how we rolled, despite our presence in such a rugged place. We studied the Bible with him for several hours and baptized him the same night. What I didn’t know was that the guy was sentenced to prison for an earlier crime the very next day! I wouldn’t see him again until he showed up unannounced with his Bible in hand at my house on Christmas Day a couple of years later. “Hey, I just got out of jail,” he told me. “Did they let you out or did you escape?” I asked him. “I was released,” he said. He then tearfully thanked me for sharing with him and let me know that was the best thing that could have happened to him before the two years of prison. Obviously, neither one of us believed our encounter had been an accident. He came to our church a couple of times over the next few months, and I continued to study with him. After a while, though, he quit coming around and I lost track of him.

According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.

In Western culture today, you decide to get married because you feel an attraction to the other person. You think he or she is wonderful. But a year or two later—or, just as often, a month or two—three things usually happen. First, you begin to find out how selfish this wonderful person is. Second, you discover that the wonderful person has been going through a similar experience and he or she begins to tell you how selfish you are. And third, though you acknowledge it in part, you conclude that your spouse’s selfishness is more problematic than your own. This is especially true if you feel that you’ve had a hard life and have experienced a lot of hurt. You say silently, “OK, I shouldn’t do that—but you don’t understand me.” The woundedness makes us minimize our own selfishness. And that’s the point at which many married couples arrive after a relatively brief period of time. So what do you do then? There are at least two paths to take. First, you could decide that your woundedness is more fundamental than your self-centeredness and determine that unless your spouse sees the problems you have and takes care of you, it’s not going to work out. Of course, your spouse will probably not do this—especially if he or she is thinking almost the exact same thing about you! And so what follows is the development of emotional distance and, perhaps, a slowly negotiated kind of détente or ceasefire. There is an unspoken agreement not to talk about some things. There are some things your spouse does that you hate, but you stop talking about them as long as he or she stops bothering you about certain other things. No one changes for the other; there is only tit-for-tat bargaining. Couples who settle for this kind of relationship may look happily married after forty years, but when it’s time for the anniversary photo op, the kiss will be forced. The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.” You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing. If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage. It Only Takes One to Begin

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

We are facing a war every day. The enemy of our souls, Satan, desires to steal our faith. He couldn’t care less if we read and memorize the whole Bible, go to church every week, and help the poor. If the enemy can discourage and prevent you from praying and believing God, he has you conquered. Discouragement, as well as lack of prayer and joy, will eventually devastate your belief system and your marriage.

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

When He Has Lost Vision for Tomorrow Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. PROVERBS 29:18 KJV WHEN YOUR HUSBAND loses his vision for a bright tomorrow, it means he has lost sight of his purpose and his reason to get up in the morning. He has misplaced his sense of God’s calling on his life and his reason to keep fighting the good fight. (Or perhaps he never had a sense of his purpose and calling in the first place.) He may also have lost his reason to keep working and trying. He can even lose his drive to face the day. Having a husband who has lost sight of his future—or your future together—is not a good thing. The Bible says people can’t survive without a vision. That’s why the enemy of our soul comes to steal away the vision we have from God, so that he can kill our hope and destroy our sense of purpose. But your prayers for your husband to have a clear vision for his future and your future together can restore all that and make an enormous difference in his life. Lack of vision happens gradually. It creeps in a day at a time, a thought at a time, a disappointment at a time. And it can happen to anyone. We get too busy. We get discouraged or exhausted. We work too hard for too long. We try to do right, but things keep going wrong. This could be happening to your husband right now without either of you even realizing it. If you’re not certain how your husband feels about the future, ask him and then pray accordingly. If you can tell he has lost his vision, your prayer can help him find it and be able to hear from God again. My Prayer to God LORD, I pray You would give my husband a clear and strong vision for the future—not only his future, but also our future together as a couple. If the many challenges he has faced, or the disappointments he has experienced, have accumulated enough to take away his sense of hopeful anticipation, I pray You would help him to see that his future is in You and not in outside circumstances. Give him the understanding he needs to know that the value of his life and purpose are not determined by external situations. Enable him to see that success is not in how well things are going at the moment, but it’s in how close he walks with You in prayer and in Your Word. Help him to understand that true vision for his life and our lives together comes only from You. When my husband is feeling hopeless, I pray he would realize that his hope is found in You. Where his vision has become clouded because of futile thoughts, wrong actions, or advanced apathy, I pray You would enable him to comprehend that he is wholly dependent upon You for proper thinking and right actions. Where he has overworked or overworried, I pray You would revive him again. Even if he doesn’t know specifics about his future, help him recognize that he has a bright one. Don’t allow him to waste away in his own disappointments. Restore his spiritual sight so he can see that his future is found in You. In Jesus’ name I pray.

Here we are able to reach a major conclusion of this study. None of these major figures who constituted the inner circle of Jesus would have become or remained followers of Jesus after the crucifixion if there was no resurrection and no resurrection appearances of Jesus. The church, in the persons of its earliest major leaders, was constituted by the event of the resurrection, coupled with the Pentecost event! The stories of these figures, especially their post-Easter stories, are the validation of this fact. There would be no church without the risen and appearing Jesus.

Molly the Hoverdog was about ten feet away, behind the couch and her incredibly hot new owner. I held out the candy, which immediately caught Molly’s attention. I tossed the candy on the floor and quickly ducked back out. Molly floated over to it, tilted in midair until her snout was just over the white morsel. She lapped it up. For a moment, nothing. John was about to supply the “it’s not working” when, with a wet, tearing KERRRAAAAACTCH sound, Molly exploded like a meat piñata at a birthday party for very strong, invisible children. A couple of cops behind us cheered. Drake walked up. “What the hell was that?” John answered for me. “It was a TestaMint. Little candies with Bible verses printed on them. You can get them at your local Christian bookstore. We were sort of hoping it would just drive the evil out of her, but . . .” John shrugged, businesslike. These things happen sometimes.

I need to learn what God says about marriage.” Alisa sighed. “I don’t think it means the husband can just arbitrarily order the wife around. She isn’t a slave. She is a partner, as the Bible says, ‘a helpmeet’ which is another word for ‘helpmate,’ you know, like a partner.” “Oh,” Annabelle said. “I think I am getting it now.” “I think marriage is meant to be a mutual respect, but God has to come first for each of you, individually, before you can work together as a couple for Him.” “That makes more sense,” Annabelle

long tradition of seeking coded messages in the Bible, or the Torah. Even Sir Isaac Newton had believed that such a code existed, but in fact, Jewish priests and Bible scholars from the more distant past had a tradition of seeking interpretation of their world in the holy books. There were even a couple of words to describe the results; exegesis and eisegesis, meaning, respectively, insightful and false interpretations.

CHOOSING CONTENTMENT All that we have comes from God: our spouses, children, families, friends and jobs. That includes our houses, property, furnishings, cars, clothes, family heirlooms and all other personal belongings. God gives us these good gifts for our use and enjoyment. There is nothing wrong with these things, but sometimes our attitudes toward our things can cause problems for us. Throughout history, people have had the desire to get more stuff. But in our culture today, the media shows us how much we don’t have. Because we are exposed to people in different social standings, we can compare what we have to what others have. In previous generations, people compared what they had with their family or neighbors (who probably had similar things); today we have TV shows that portray the lives and belongings of the megarich. When we begin to focus on what others have, we become obsessed with material things. We are tempted to live beyond our means. We become stressed as we work harder and longer in order to buy more stuff. It is easy to wonder why others have more than we do, especially if we’re struggling to keep up with payments on our house, cars and loans. We say, “Other people are just like us, but they have so much more than we do. It’s not fair! Why doesn’t God bless us like he does them? Why should we always have money problems?” Maybe we become upset with our spouse and insist that we should do better than we are doing, or that our children should have the same opportunities that other children have. Jealousy, anger and ambition can eat away at a marriage when we think we should have more than we do. But the stuff we want may not be what God has allotted to us. He has promised that he will provide all that we need but not necessarily all that we want. So one tough spiritual lesson we need to learn as married couples is to shape our wants to match God’s allotment, not the other way around, and to choose, like Paul, to be content whatever our circumstances (see Philippians 4:11). Finding contentment with God’s allotment to us helps ease the stress of getting and spending. It lightens the load of acquiring more and more. And it may help us to grow together as a couple as we learn to enjoy each other’s company without the pressure of reaching for bigger and better toys, vacations, houses or recreational vehicles. When we begin to treasure each other, our hearts will be there also.

What’s more, Miss Princeton sided with the Methodists.” “No!” the preacher from Wyoming exclaimed with a hint of amusement. “She also discussed politics in the churchyard.” “Shocking,” exclaimed the reverend from Colorado with mock gravity. Gregory studied the others; were they not taking him seriously? “And she made the children laugh during Bible class. Can you imagine? Laughing in church? And when I disapproved of a young couple holding hands during the Doxology, she called me a stuffed shirt.

Surprisingly, the Bible moves from cosmic majesty in Genesis 1 to a common everyday reality in Genesis 2: a young couple falling in love. So we might wonder if marriage is out of its depth here alongside the creation of the universe. Or could it be that the Bible sees in marriage more than we typically do? For now, we will put that question on hold, as we attend first to what Genesis 2:15–25 clearly teaches about marriage.

Hagar and Ishmael Depart 8So the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the same day that Isaac was weaned. 9And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, scoffing. 10Therefore she said to Abraham, “Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, namely with Isaac.” 11And the matter was very displeasing in Abraham’s sight because of his son. A Slave of a Wife Becomes a Mother! (Gen. 21:9–11) Sarai’s condition of childlessness caused her to give her female servant to Abram for procreation (Gen. 16:1–3). It is obvious from Sarai’s words, “perhaps I shall obtain children by her” (16:2), that she saw herself as the one who would be providing any eventual son from this union, even though the servant Hagar would be the mother of the child. Ancient marriage contracts obligated wives to provide a son for the married couple. Contracts dating from the mid-2nd millennium have been discovered in the city of Nuzi which specify that if a wife bore no male child she had the obligation to provide a child via a female servant. If a child was thus born to a servant, the child would be considered the child of the wife in regards to the contract. Thus, even a barren wife could fulfill her marital contract. Abram’s reluctance to send Hagar away, when Sarai became jealous of her (Gen. 21:9–11), reflects another aspect of the Nuzi tablets. Servants who provided such children were not supposed to be sent away, but rather treated favorably. So it was that it took the voice of God to convince Abram to listen to Sarai’s desire (21:12).

According to a study by Rutgers University, living together before marriage increases the risk of breaking up after marriage. It increases the risk of domestic violence for women and the risk of physical and sexual abuse for children. Unmarried couples have lower levels of happiness and well-being than married couples. Pray for people you know who have chosen to live together.

The church will really change society for the better only when individual believers make their chief concern their own spiritual maturity, which means living in a way that honors God’s commands and glorifies His name. Such a concern inherently includes a firm grasp on Scripture and an understanding that its primary mandate to us is to know Christ and proclaim His gospel. A godly attitude coupled with godly living makes the saving message of the gospel credible to the unsaved.

I’d attend church meetings on Sunday and hang out with my Christian friends. I’d go to a Bible study on Tuesday night and hang out with my Christian friends — again. Then, I’d go out Friday night and hang out—once again—with my Christian friends. This new world of Churchland was sort of like a retreat into some sort of cozy Christian cocoon. We did good things for other people sometimes, like an annual trip to Mexico to build homes for needy families. A couple of times each year, we helped out at the local homeless shelter, serving meals and cleaning and painting the facility. We were also involved in getting help for local families each Christmas, providing meals and gifts for the parents to give to their children. But after we had finished these projects, we headed back to the suburbs to hang out with our Christian friends again. It happened so subtly, but the more I was immersed in Churchland, the more disconnected I felt from the world around me.

It’s wonderful to think of the fact that God can turn around a whole nation, a whole world, by using us. God uses simple things, you know that. He uses simple, mundane, everyday, routine, common things for the most amazing purposes. When He made man in the Garden, He didn’t use gold, silver, or even iron; He used dirt. That ought to give you an idea of how He works right from the start. When He called David to deliver Israel from the Philistines, He didn’t want Saul, the great king, and He didn’t want Saul’s massive armor. He used a shepherd and a couple of stones, that’s all. When He came into the world, He didn’t enter the family of the wealthy and noble, He didn’t find Himself born in a castle; He simply chose a peasant girl and a stable. When He chose the Twelve, He didn’t choose the elite, educated, and affluent. He just chose a group of ignorant Galileans. The Bible says, ‘Not many mighty, and not many noble.’ That’s the way it always has been, because God gets the greater glory in the humbleness of the one that He uses. So He uses us, grains of sand, to influence a corrupting world. (Pastor John MacArthur)   When did I start expecting to outgrow child-like reliance? At what age did I think I’d lose the desperation? When did I expect to be mighty and noble? Prestigious? Competent?   God uses the weak, the base, the foolish.   And praise God, I still qualify.

Korie: When I was a student at Ouachita Christian School, my senior-year Bible teacher, David Matthews, adopted a little five-year-old boy. In class that year, we talked a lot about how important it was for Christians families to adopt and that children should never be left without a home and loving parents. The idea always stuck with me. James 1:27 says: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” When we were dating, like most couples, Willie and I talked about how many kids we wanted to have. I told Willie about my desire to adopt and he was all for it. We both grew up with big families so we decided we wanted to have four kids, with at least one of them through adoption. We never knew how that would happen. We didn’t know if we would adopt a boy or a girl or a newborn baby or older child. We decided we would remain open, and if God wanted it to happen, it would happen. There were several families at White’s Ferry Road Church that adopted children, including one couple that had adopted biracial twins. Their lawyer came to them and asked if they were interested in adopting another biracial child who was about to be born. They told her they couldn’t do it at the time, but they remembered that we had expressed an interest in adopting a child. Their lawyer called Willie and me and told us how difficult it was to place biracial children in homes in the South. We were shocked. It was the twenty-first century. We committed to being a part of changing that in our society. Skin color should not make a difference.

The Monday night after Halloween, I made myself go to the college Bible study Willie was teaching. There were about six or seven other guys, and we met in the gym. Brian, the guy I’d seen at the party, was there too. I wasn’t too worried. Since he was at the party, he probably wasn’t too proud of himself and wouldn’t be telling my brother about it. But Willie got up in front of us and said, “I know some of you guys are struggling, and struggling hard.” That got my attention. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said, but I remember thinking, He’s never said anything like that before. A couple nights later, I got drunk and went to the movies. When I came out to the parking lot, I saw a note on the windshield of my truck. I picked it up and unfolded it. “I know what you’ve been up to. We need to talk.” It was from Willie.

Mom was very warm and loving. My favorite moments with her were spent in the kitchen, helping her make biscuits or chicken and dumplings. She would use our time together to share life lessons or talk about the Bible. She always had time for me. She used to take me with her to deliver food to some of the hungry people around our part of the river. “We’re all just people,” Mom would say. “Every race, every color, we all have the same blood.” We used to take garden vegetables to a woman who lived nearby. She’d had eighteen children but was older now and very poor. Mom knew I was still young, and she was worried about what I might say, so she tried to prepare me in advance. “Look, her stuff’s going to be different, so don’t make a big to-do about it.” When I walked into the older woman’s rickety house for the first time, I noticed she had a bed sheet hanging in the kitchen doorway instead of a door. “That’s pretty,” I said, pointing to the sheet-curtain. Mom looked at me, raising her eyebrows. I ran through it a couple of times, pretending I was a superhero busting through a wall. Next, I noticed her old-fashioned rotary dial phone. “I never saw a phone that color before,” I said. Mom held her breath, nervous. “That’s pretty,” I added. Mom gave the woman the food we had brought, and as we left, I didn’t want her to think we were going to forget her. “My mom’s going to bring more stuff. She’s got lots of it,” I volunteered. I think I made my mama proud and didn’t embarrass her too much. She always says I have a tender heart and that my oldest brother, Alan, and I are most like her.

Where the fuck is the universe? Well, you asked the right question, but I’m sorry to tell you that there is no universe in the Bible. Go stand on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Draw a circle around you a couple thousand miles in diameter. That big flat circle is the biblical “earth.” Now, place the solid blue dome of the heaven (the sky) over this “earth” and you have the biblical “world.” The Bible thinks we live in a goddamned terrarium!

some believed they could determine who God is simply by means of using their reasoning powers alone. The Bible could be set aside for good; reason was enough. As time passed, it became evident that the Enlightenment experiment had failed. War, for example, exposed the fact that humanity is not morally neutral but corrupt. The ill use of reason demonstrated that humanity was desperately in need of special revelation after all. Autonomous reason was not so autonomous, as it turned out. In fact, it was idolatrous, attempting to remove God from his throne and replace the Creator’s authority with the creature’s intellect instead. The follies of the Enlightenment should forever remind us that attempting to scale the ladder of heaven to pull God down is the height of human hubris. It is the tower of Babel all over again. A much better approach couples the quest for knowledge with humility, a humility that looks to God’s revelation of himself for understanding. It is the approach of faith seeking understanding.

What is “HOLINESS”? 1 Peter 1: 15 -16 “But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.” Holiness is an experience that we go through after salvation. I also like to think of holiness as a person, the trinity all three equally working together for are best interest. Yes, holiness is a doctrine that is well documented in the Holy Bible both in the New and Old Testament. Holiness is reserved for the saints who are growing daily to please God. A separated or peculiar people. Holiness is a closer accountable interaction with Jesus through and through. To those who are sanctified another word meaning holiness. Early Methodist named it dying out, the death route, both are great words to describe that holiness is, a departure from the old man or women we used to be. A sacrificial time as we aspire to set aside those things that hinder our spiritual progress. For when we move higher in our daily walk with God we draw closer to our final departure to heaven a permanent holy place. Bought for us at the hand of Jesus Christ our mighty Lord. The architect of all that is HOLY! This is a quote that is going to be in the upcoming devotional. (Reflecting Jesus Devotional), on Amazon in a couple months.

The books of what is now the Old Testament thus probably came into existence between the ninth and the second centuries BCE. This does not necessarily mean that the records of earlier ages are pure fiction, but it makes it hard to press their details as solid historical evidence. Many readers of the Bible would recognize that the stories of the early history of the world – Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel – are mythical or legendary, but it may be more challenging to think that the stories of Abraham or Jacob or Moses are also essentially legends, even though people bearing those names may well have existed. No one is in a position to say they are definitely untrue, but there is no reasonable evidence that would substantiate them. This is also the case with the early kings, Saul, David and Solomon, even though the stories about them do make sense within a period (the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE) about which we know something, from the archaeological record. With the later, eighth- and seventh-century kings (for example, Hezekiah and Jehoiachin) there is definite corroboration from Assyrian and Babylonian records, and we are less in the dark. But even some of the stories of life after the exile, in the Persian period, may be fictional: most biblical scholars think that the book of Esther, for example, is a kind of novella rather than a piece of historical writing. A later date does not of itself mean that a given book is more likely to be accurate: much depends on its genre, as we shall see in the next chapter. The biblical books of the Old Testament thus probably span a period of about eight centuries, though they may incorporate older written material – ancient poems, for example – and may in some cases rest on older, orally transmitted folk-memories. But the bulk of written records in ancient Israel seem to come from a core period of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, with heavy concentrations in some particular ages: most think, for example, that the period of the exile was particularly rich in generating written texts, as was perhaps the early Persian age, even though we know so little about the political events of the time. The flowering of Israelite literature thus came a couple of centuries earlier than the classical age in Greece. The Old Testament, taken by and large, is thus older than much Greek literature, but not enormously so. Compared with the literature of ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt, however, Israelite texts are a late arrival.

The holders of twenty hundred million dollars’ worth of property in human chattels procured the means of influencing press, pulpit, and politician, and through these instrumentalities they belittled our virtues and magnified our vices, and have made us odious in the eyes of the world. Slavery had the power at one time to make and unmake Presidents, to construe the law, dictate the policy, set the fashion in national manners and customs, interpret the Bible, and control the church; and, naturally enough, the old masters set themselves up as much too high as they set the manhood of the negro too low. Out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions today. In reply to this argument it will perhaps be said that the negro has no slavery now to contend with, and that having been free during the last sixteen years, he ought by this time to have contradicted the degrading qualities which slavery formerly ascribed to him. All very true as to the letter, but utterly false as to the spirit. Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic. The office of the color line is a very plain and subordinate one. It simply advertises the objects of oppression, insult, and persecution. It is not the maddening liquor, but the black letters on the sign telling the world where it may be had. . . . The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “The Color Line,” North American Review, June 1881

Abolitionists declared their first major victory in 1772 with the Somerset case, which was popularly interpreted as outlawing slavery in England. In ruling on the case, Lord Mansfield consulted with the great legal theorist William Blackstone, whose four‐volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) was required reading for students of law in England and America and “ranked second only to the Bible as a literary and intellectual influence on the history of American institutions.” Blackstone's understanding of slavery was richly ambiguous. On the one hand, he argued that only a positive law sanctioning slavery could override the natural law of freedom. On the other hand, he suggested that in certain circumstances natural law could trump positive law. Although Lord Mansfield based his decision in the Somerset case primarily on the precedent of villeinage, arguing that slaves could not be treated worse than villeins and thus could not forcibly be removed from England, Blackstone nevertheless contributed to its antislavery interpretation. British lawyers defending the slave James Somerset relied on Blackstone to argue that slavery was contrary to natural law; and Lord Mansfield acknowledged this while ruling in their favor. Somewhat inadvertently, Lord Mansfield established a precedent for Blackstone's theory that slavery could be sanctioned only by positive law. According to the legal scholar Robert Cover, the Somerset decision “gave institutional recognition to antislavery morality.” It influenced the gradual abolition of America's northern states, including Vermont's Constitution of 1777 (the first constitution in history to outlaw slavery), and the Quock Walker case of 1783, which effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts. Blackstone's Commentaries, coupled with the Somerset decision, would contribute to the antislavery platforms and ideologies of the Liberty, Free‐Soil, and Republican parties.

Here’s a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and disciple them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle. You don’t have to be a fertility maximalist to recognize that children are always lauded as a blessing in the Bible… [I]n the not-too-distant future, the only couples replacing themselves in America will be religious couples. Although there are many good reasons to have a baby, at the end of the day, as Jonathan Last maintains, “there’s only one good reason to go through the trouble a second time: Because you believe, in some sense, that God wants you to.” The basic reason countries stop having children is because they’ve come to see offspring as a liability rather than a source of hope. As Christians, we know better. Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15)? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children. And once we have those children, there is almost nothing more important than catechizing them in the faith, developing their moral framework, and preparing them to be deeply compassionate lovers of God and lovers of people and relentlessly biblical lovers of truth... I understand that many couples will be unable to have all the children they want to have. We have to allow for God to work in mysterious ways that we would not have planned. And yet, in so far as we are able, let us welcome new life... Presidents and Supreme Court justices will come and go. A child’s soul will last forever. The future belongs to the fecund. It’s time for happy warriors who seek to “renew the city” and “win the culture war” by investing in their local church, focusing on the family, and bringing the kingdom to bear on the world, one baby at a time.

We figured there were probably a couple of charity cases, or at least a sliding scale. David, a techie who dearly missed his advanced computer setup back home, had let slip that his parents rented. Received a demerit for that. Not for the lack of home ownership—we hated money snobs—but for getting soft and confessional over a purloined bottle of Jäger. Drink their liquor? Sure, yes, and by all means. Act like they acted when they drank it? Receive a demerit. For it was under the influence, when parents got sloppy, that they shed their protective shells. Without which they were slugs. They left a trail of slime.

Hey!” It was Sukey, at the base of the tree. Others. Umbrellas and hooded ponchos and raincoats. Upturned faces. Rafe, Terry, Dee, Low, Juicy. “We’re moving out here!” shouted Sukey. “You don’t want to,” I called down. “It’s cold and wet!” “Don’t care!” yelled Low. “It’s vile in there!” THEY STRAPPED UP the tarps from the beach to extend our roof cover. They found a stash of paint-spattered groundsheets and swarmed over the canopy, lashing the bright-blue vinyl to the treehouse posts. They stretched them between platforms, over nets and ladders. I felt restless. If they didn’t want to go back to the house, whatever, but I did. I wanted the fireplace and the cabinets packed with snack cakes and miniature powdered donuts. The indoor plumbing. I asked Dee, then Terry, then Rafe what the deal was, but they refused to talk about it. It was only when Sukey finished setting up her sleeping bag, weighing it down with rocks, that I got a straight answer: during the night the older generation had dosed itself with Ecstasy. No one knew if it had been a plan or covert action, but they’d promptly ascended new heights of repulsive. It was true Juicy and Terry had watched them fool around from behind slatted doors at the beginning—even Low had done it. Out of a sense of desperate boredom, soon after the phones were taken away. Also vengeance. And scorn. Now they regretted it. Maybe they’d had had stronger stomachs, back then. “Plus that was just like, normal old-people sex,” said Juicy. “How would you know?” said Rafe. “Like, couples,” said Juicy. “This is . . . like, everything.” “They’re walking around butt naked,” said Low. “I saw two fathers and Dee’s mother in a three—” started Juicy.

A man may not be a vocational theologian, but in his home he must the resident theologian. The apostle Paul, when he is urging women to keep silent in church, tells them that "if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home" (1 Corinthians 14:35). The tragedy is that many modern women have to wonder why the Bible says they should have to ask their husbands. "He doesn't know." But a husband must be prepared to answer his wife's doctrinal questions, and if he cannot, then he must be prepared to study so that he can remedy the deficiency. This famous passage is not such a restriction for wives as it is a requirement for husbands. If he doesn't know, he must find out.

The Bible teaches us that lovemaking is to be honoured among Christians; to honour something means to esteem it highly. Those Christians who have reacted to public immorality by retreating into blue-nosed prudishness in their own bedrooms are very much part of the problem

During my tenure at Bradford College, located in Haverhill Massachusetts - Assemblies of God, and Northpoint Bible College had not yet taken over. The school was very prestigious and expensive, but was worth every penny spent, and left me with an experience of which I shall indeed never forget. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, my degree major was in creative arts (creative writing) and psychology as my minor. Later in life, I was able to use my degree to become an award-winning, and best-selling horror author, and producer. Something by the way for which I am very proud of today. I truly owe this all from what I learned at this remarkable school." "So indeed I have great things to speak of when harping back to my Bradford college days. In addition, I was also able to make wonderful connections with many famous people who's sons and daughters attended this school. One of my roommates was David Charles who is Bob Charle's son. Bob Charles was a famous professional golfer." "To date, pondering on my college days spent at Bradford College has given me an appreciation for which I am very grateful for. I wanted to say, "thank you" for being part of the reason why I have prospered." "I am a proud graduate of Bradford, and all others whom also attended should also be more than proud of their attendance there. Thank you again, and God Bless you. one of my other roommates was Japanese chap, and his father was some kind of high political ruler of the country at the time. Thinking back on all this makes me proud of having been affiliated with Bradford College. Thank you.

Wise couples build their houses on the rock of God’s Word. They’ve seen what sand can do. They know how it feels when their footing gets soft and the foundation gives way. That’s why you must determine to build your life and marriage on the solid rock of the Bible, and then you can plan on a stronger future—no matter how bad the storms get.

The Hebrew Bible, speaking of the first sexual encounter between Adam and Eve, says that “Adam knew” his mate. Remarkably, the Hebrew word l-da’at, “to know,” means also to love or to make love. Sex, on the deepest level, transcends the physical and connotes spiritual union. A seemingly carnal act is invested with dignity and sanctity. The ideal of lovemaking is true intimacy—not merely of intertwining bodies but of mutually understanding souls. To be intimate on this level is to “know” the other person’s essence—his or her divine image—which is but another way of gaining greater kinship with God. Viewed in this light, lovemaking is meant not just for the single objective of procreation, as the Church then taught, but also to foster this ultimate sense of knowing. As the Kabbalah daringly puts it, when a couple “know” each other in a complete sexual-romantic-spiritual act, they actually unite heaven as well.

The Hebrew Bible, speaking of the first sexual encounter between Adam and Eve, says that “Adam knew” his mate. Remarkably, the Hebrew word l-da’at, “to know,” means also to love or to make love. Sex, on the deepest level, transcends the physical and connotes spiritual union. A seemingly carnal act is invested with dignity and sanctity. The ideal of lovemaking is true intimacy—not merely of intertwining bodies but of mutually understanding souls. To be intimate on this level is to “know” the other person’s essence—his or her divine image—which is but another way of gaining greater kinship with God. Viewed in this light, lovemaking is meant not just for the single objective of procreation, as the Church then taught, but also to foster this ultimate sense of knowing. As the Kabbalah daringly puts it, when a couple “know” each other in a complete sexual-romantic-spiritual act, they actually unite heaven as well. Ficino preached this concept to his circle as “Platonic love,” a love that is not only body-to-body but also soul-to-soul. It was only later in history that “platonic” love came to mean a deep relationship devoid of sexual content.

pledged to be married. The betrothal period was often a year, and Jewish tradition suggests that couples in Galilee were not left unchaperoned during that time. Betrothal involved a financial agreement between families, and it could be ended only by divorce or death. It concluded with the wedding night, at which point the marriage could finally be consummated sexually.

Greek men, on average, were more than ten years older than their brides, because Greeks had a shortage of marriageable women (sources suggest that girl babies were discarded more often than boys). Jewish men, however, were usually only a few years older than their wives; both genders assumed some adult responsibilities at puberty, but men would often work a few years so they could provide financial stability for marriage. Betrothal involved a financial agreement between families. It often lasted about a year; in conservative Galilean families the couple could not be together alone before the wedding, so Joseph may not have known Mary very well.

I can’t believe I almost forgot about this one.” Gran pointed to a galvanized steel trash can in the corner. The lid was sealed with conductive tape. “Gramps made it. It’s a homemade Faraday cage. The lid is super tight. He lined it with cardboard and extra aluminum foil on the inside for extra protection.” The Faraday cage would have protected the electronics inside from the EMP. It took a few minutes for Quinn to get it open. She set the lid aside and pulled out a hand-crank radio, a pair of walkie talkies, a couple of LED flashlights, and a Kindle e-reader. “That e-reader is full of reference and survival books. Medicinal herbs, edible plants, wilderness first aid, how to survive nuclear fallout, how to build a spring house and a latrine. And the Bible, of course. The usual beach read fare.

Over the past couple of weeks I have noticed that some of your lady callers have had questions on a wife’s submission to her husband and how it deals with their Christian faith when faced with a moral problem. Nowhere in the Bible is a woman told to blindly submit to the will of her husband. In fact, the first act of submission is on the husband’s part! The husband is to submit himself to Christ and the will of God. When he does this he is not setting himself up as master, but rather as servant of the Lord. Only then is the wife to submit to the will of her husband—because the will of her husband will be obedience to the Lord. So the wife is not submitting to the husband, but to God. As soon as the husband steps outside this and acts contrary to scripture, the woman is under no moral obligation whatsoever to her husband to transgress the moral law! Women are not, and were never meant to be, set up as servants to men in the kingdom of God. A man is supposed to love his wife as Christ loves the church. That means that a husband is required to love, care for, nurture, protect, comfort, and even be willing to die for his wife. That is love.

During school recess when I was in second grade, I was swinging on the monkey bars with a couple of girlfriends, and one of the girls said to me, “You’re too fat to swing like me.” It hurt at the time, but I kept playing and forgot about her comment. It didn’t really affect me, and it wasn’t something I shared with my mom when I got home that day. Twenty years later, as I was writing a Bible study on finding freedom from body-image issues and telling my story of a six-year battle with anorexia, I remembered that moment on the monkey bars. And I realized that she was the voice I’d heard for years. It was her words that had started my doubts and fears and worries about my body, and one of her words that I shaped my identity around—fat. Now, it was my choice to believe her words, and I was the one who wrapped myself in those lies for so long. However, it amazed me how such a simple sentence, spoken when I was very young, dramatically affected my life. Words matter.

Reminds me of a joke. A cowboy lost his Bible in the desert. A couple of months later a cow wanders over with a book in its mouth. The cowboy takes the book—it’s his lost Bible. ‘What a miracle; praise the Lord!’ the cowboy exclaims. ‘Not really,’ says the cow. ‘Your name is on the inside cover.

Ever wonder where addictions are in the Bible? Check out Genesis 3! The first couple exploited the things God intended to be used for pleasure (trees, leaves, the garden and each other) and used them to hide, cover shame, and then blamed others for the problem. Things haven’t changed much in many thousands of years!

Pride speaks lies like, “I have the all the answers,” or “I don’t need you,” or “I can do it on my own,” or “My way is the right way.” These postures of the heart make it impossible to experience intimacy with others. Rather, it has a polarizing effect, pushing people away.

Corie Mae knelt beside him to get a good look. “Oh lordy, looks like you got the chickenpox.” Maggie nodded. “You know, Mama, Charlie Haskins got chickenpox during Bible School, and Johnny Ray sat by him on the church bus. I guess that’s where he got them.” “This explains why you complained of feeling poorly the last couple days. Do you feel like eating some breakfast?” Johnny Ray nodded and took his usual place on the bench at the back side of the table. “Now I guess Jay and Junior’ll get them too.  I’m glad the rest of you kids done had chicken pox.

This is not a book I could have imagined writing a dozen years ago. When an older couple from another town attempted to set up and lead a Bible club at my daughter's public elementary school in Southern California in 2009, they might as well have been alien visitors showing up at a beach party. The purpose of the club was to convince children as young as five that they would burn for an eternity if they failed to conform to a strict interpretation of the Christian faith. The club's organizers were offered free and better space in the evangelical church next door to our school, but they refused it; they insisted on holding the club in the public school because they knew the kids would think the message was coming from the school. They referred to our public school as their "mission field" and our children as "the harvest." ... As I researched the group behind these kindergarten missionaries, I saw that they were part of a national network of clubs. I soon discovered that this network was itself just one of many initiatives to insert reactionary religion into public schools across the country. Then I realized that these initiatives were the fruit of a nationally coordinated effort not merely to convert other people's children in the classroom but to undermine public education altogether. Belatedly, I understood that the conflict they provoked in our local community- -I was hardly the only parent who found their presence in the public school alarming was not an unintended consequence of their activity. It was of a piece with their plan to destroy confidence in our system of education and make way for a system of religious education more to their liking.

The Success to the Successful dynamic was spotted long before Monopoly and Sugarscape came along. Two thousand years ago, the notion that ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ was noted in the Bible and hence came to be known as ‘the Matthew Effect’. Its tell-tale pattern of accumulative advantage, coupled with spiralling disadvantage, can be seen in children’s educational outcomes, in adults’ employment opportunities, and of course in terms of income and wealth. And that financial dynamic is certainly alive today. Between 1988 and 2008, the majority of countries worldwide saw rising inequality within their borders, resulting in a hollowing out of their middle classes. Over those same 20 years, global inequality fell slightly overall (mostly thanks to falling poverty rates in China), but it increased significantly at the extremes. More than 50 percent of the total increase in global income over that period was captured by just the richest 5 percent of the world’s population, while the poorest 50 percent of people gained only 11 percent of it.38

Again, let’s take the Push Up, a standard exercise that works your chest, shoulders, triceps, abs, obliques, and lower back (unlike benching which only works half of these). If you do Push Ups standing up with your hands against a wall a couple of feet in front of you, the exercise is pretty easy. Then try them with your hands on an elevated surface, like the edge of a bureau or windowsill. The lower the surface you use–a desk, a couch, a coffee table, telephone books–the harder it gets. Putting your hands on the floor, like a standard Push Up, is harder. If we put our feet on the coffee table and our hands on the ground, the exercise becomes significantly more difficult. This is using leverage to increase the exercise’s difficulty. To make the exercise still harder we could place our hands on one or two balls, like a basketball. Now we’re using an unstable surface. Still harder would be to do basketball Push Ups with pauses at the bottom. Still not hard enough? Try doing them one-handed on the floor. Then one-handed with your feet on the couch. Then on an unstable surface. Then with pauses … You get the idea. And this is only a simple example that can be repeated with many of my exercises. You’ll see the possibilities are endless. So there you have it: We’ve gone from one variation of an exercise, that probably everyone reading this book can do, to a more difficult variation that probably no one reading this book can do right off the bat. The difficulty of bodyweight exercises can be tailored to suit the needs of virtually anyone. You have total control of the resistance.

Any couple can become caught in the trap of doubt. Like the Israelites, when we let our fears take over, we lose sight of the goodness that’s all around us. We forget about God’s promise to walk with us through life’s ups and downs. Thankfully, we have a God who cares for us and loves us despite our sins and shortcomings, and One to whom we can turn to help us overcome our greatest fears.

EATING IN AND OUT Going hungry to a restaurant or party is a common pitfall that can lead to some major overeating, especially since it’s these places where you typically consume the most unhealthy food. Unlike when you prepare your meals yourself, you can’t control your food’s content when you’re out on the town. Even if you try to eat the healthiest thing on the menu, you’d be amazed by the amount of butter and oil they throw on just about everything in the kitchen. A great secret to not overeating at restaurants and parties is to simply eat a small meal right before you leave home. That way, when you get there, you’re focused on having fun, instead of waiting for food to fill your belly. Focus on enjoying yourself, the company you’re with, and the party or restaurant—not on dieting or gorging yourself. You order less, save more money, and tend to really enjoy what you eat because you’re eating to satisfy your taste buds, not your empty stomach. So don’t sweat it if you go out a couple of times a week to eat. Just try to eat as balanced of a meal as you can comfortably, and don’t stuff yourself. All it takes is a small meal beforehand. Just remember, between traveling to the restaurant, being seated, getting menus, ordering and having your food cooked, chances are you’re not going to actually be served food for another hour at the very earliest. So think ahead. Don’t ever leave your house hungry. Eat a little beforehand, order less, and have more fun.

Jack tapped his walking stick on the soft earth as a young couple floated by on an evening punt ride. "Believing in its importance and believing its facts are not the same. Myth conveys power. Myth gives import to the story. Myth guides us. Myths strike and strike deep. Myths have deep power over our human psyche. But that is not the same as being factually true. We all know that. We've all studied the Norse myths and the Celts and the Bible." This particular discussion among these gentlemen had been going on for quite some time. The men were debating the truth of Christ's story, the actual story of Christianity. Jack was an atheist, as his teacher Mr. Kirkpatrick had been, and he argued with this two dear friends. Jack knew of their solid Catholic beliefs, but their friendship did not require his agreement with them.

literary study with little or no interest in diachronic development (coupled with a de-emphasis on ancient langages apart from Hebrew) has tended to minimize the significance of ancient Near Eastern contexts of Israelite culture, not to mention Israelite history in general and the history of Israelite religion specifically. To name only a handful of subdisciplines applied to the Hebrew Bible, structuralism, reader-response theory, ideological criticism, and postmodern readings have contributed to a devaluation of diachronic research, including the history of the religion of Israel.

The Hebrew word owph, that we normally translate as “bird” in Genesis 1 and Genesis 7, means creatures with wings. This obviously includes birds (the predominant type here) but also other winged creatures — such as bats, flightless birds, flying reptiles, etc. For example, ostriches and bats are included under this word owph in Leviticus 11. Most commentators recognize that Genesis 7:3 (see above), “seven each of the birds of the air,” is tied to the backdrop of clean creatures in Genesis 7:2 (see above). Verse 2 lists all animals coming onboard the ark in two categories — clean and unclean — and how many of each. When verse 3 immediately after that lists 7, it is discussing a subgroup of the clean animals, otherwise, verse 2 is in error. However, contextually, this doesn’t mean all winged/flying creatures came by 7 but instead limited to 7 of the clean ones. Pteranodons and pterodactyls are not among the clean creatures defined per the Bible (Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14). For instance, Leupold writes: In v. 3 the idea of “the birds of the heavens” must, of course, be supplemented by the adjective “clean,” according to the principle laid down in v. 2.24 Likewise, Dr. John Gill, who agrees when discussing the birds, writes: That is, of such as were clean; seven couple of these were to be brought into the ark, for the like use as of the clean beasts, and those under the law.

Hi Celestials Here is a Topic Why do some guys derive joy in spending huge amount of money buying free drinks, for their friends, but can't help or support them? A very sensitive question I couldn't ignore. I've seen this questions in couple of places and now it has been directed specifically to me. I 'm sure you must have come across this scenario or probably been a victim. Someone you've known for long, a childhood friend or colleague hits the jackpot. He excitedly called for celebration, spending a fortune on foods and drinks. Intact he's ready to close down the restaurant that night, but behind close doors, you've been asking him for a little financial assistance to boost your business or start up something, but he keeps giving excuses. After having so much thoughts about this, I only came up with one conclusion. And that is the fact life is partly competition, at least that is how some folks views it. The bitter truth is that Nobody wants you to be greater than they are except your parents. Everybody wants to be ahead. I call them dream wreckers. They would rather watch your dream die, than assist you. They prefer receiving accolades in public for feeding the whole community with foods and beer, than changing someone's destiny. Because it boost their Ego. Depend on them at your own peril. That's why bible said that you need to be pitied if you still put your hopes on mere mortal. You will be shocked by the high level of disappointment. Just be focused, persistent, and do the little you within your reach, then pray for grace. When the time comes, your destiny helper will locate you, and you will know he's the one because he won't feel burdened assisting you.

It’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing metaphor. Like a man I know who portrays himself to be a godly, bible-believing, married man, who leaves that church every Sunday, holding his wife’s hand, knowing that the night before they’d been to a nightclub where they watched other couples having sex on stage. Or the man who prays before every meal, but uses every profane word known to man when disciplining (demeaning) his children. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Well, does it say anything in there about the words you use? Or, like another man I know who blathers on about the Bible, going to church, and often quotes scripture on social media. Yet, I know the truth. He has made sexual advances toward several women whom I also know, some of them recently, yet he continues pretending to be a good Christian man who goes to church with his wife and kids. And, should someone tell his wife? Maybe. But no one tells her. We all just sit back and silently watch as she blindly and happily lives a lie–with a wolf.

This institution of marriage was intended to be long term, until death. During which period, there will be transitions and evolution of those individuals. What satisfied or pleased them when they exchanged vows won’t exactly be what holds their attention five to ten years later. People change and so do their desires and tastes. Married couples should keep their minds open to sexual evolution, so long as it excludes other individuals and animals. I believe God wanted to set those boundaries during creation, which is what the Bible references

Ron Nash has suggested that “a worldview deals with at least five major topics: what we believe about God, the universe, knowledge, right and wrong, and the nature of human beings.”5 The lack of unity that characterizes many couples is not surprising when we listen to their differing views on the topics suggested by Nash. Each element in the partners’ worldview should be carefully assessed, then, before marriage counseling begins. The problems couples experience are frequently rooted in a worldview that’s riddled with error and markedly deficient to that advanced by Scripture. People who hold to such errors are awash in a sea of subjectivity and relativism. Unless this deficiency is remedied, all attempts at counseling are like putting a Band-aid on a mortal bullet wound.

When the Bible mentions righteous couples suffering from infertility, a conception is not far behind.

Empathy calls upon you to exercise active listening, and emotionally switch places with your spouse, to better understand their position. It's a privilege to listen and carry their troubles as if they were your own, and it communicates your desire to see your partner comforted and at peace.

But Genesis covers more time than any other book of the Bible—more time than the remainder of the Old Testament combined. Within the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we will cover a couple of millennia and a couple of thousand miles before slowing things down and focusing on several specific generations of people who fundamentally shape the rest of the Bible and influence our world today.

A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

Why would the Bible equate stubbornness with the sin of idolatry? Because it is the worship of our own opinion. Stubborn people are hard to deal with because they are filled with pride and can’t acknowledge any thinking that doesn’t align with their own.

Did you know when the Bible commands us to love each other that we don’t possess that ability? We only have the ability to love when we rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to fill us. Human love is weak and frail. It comes and goes on a whim and is completely undependable. But God’s love is the most powerful force on earth. With it comes supernatural joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The Holy Spirit is the oil the engine of our emotions is designed to run on. With a daily, dependent relationship with the Holy Spirit to empower us to love our spouses, we have the capacity for true love and can overcome any obstacle in our paths.