Daily Meditations on the Bible
I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory.
Summary: There is a relationship between our suffering and our faith. As we look at Paul’s suffering and his attitude towards it, we can learn a lot about what it means to walk in faith.
Continue reading “Ephesians 3:13 – The Glory of Suffering”I became a servant of this gospel …
Summary: Being a servant is not a glorious occupation. In fact, it can be downright degrading and physically painful. Yet, being in the service of the gospel is serving the Lord, and isn’t that what we really need to be about?
Continue reading “Ephesians 3:7a (II) – Serving the Lord”
… after you have suffered a little while …
Summary: Peter uses the word “suffering” throughout his letter. What the context of this letter tells us is that choosing to serve God rather than our flesh creates tension with the flesh. We call this tension ”suffering.“
Continue reading “1 Peter 5:10 (c) — Thorns”
Brothers and sisters, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.
James, remember, is talking to fellow Jews. Jews, by nature, are innately historical. I know of no other race or tribe that has such an extensive, detailed and authentic written history of their existence. They also seem to have a perverse inclination to record their most embarrassing moments and worst impulses.
God has impressed on them a need to know who they are, and so even Jews who do not believe in a judgment or an afterlife still know their history. It is a long history of failure. Failure to listen to God.
Continue reading “James 5: 10 — A History of Pain”
That person [the one who delights in the law of the Lord] is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
Good Soil
There is something you may have heard about called the “prosperity gospel.*” I acknowledge this because it is a hot topic for many Bible-believing Christians. In the study of James that we just started James dives right in by talking about “trials of many kinds.” Paul, in his letter to the Romans (Chapter 5) starts with a discussion of sufferings and how believers are to “glory in our sufferings” (vs 3). So there is a potential for confusion. Some verses, like today’s, offer the hope of prospering while others talk about the reality of suffering. Yet I firmly believe that “all scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16).
So what do we make of this?
Continue reading “Psalm Sunday – Psalm 1: 3”