“Fiery trials,” said Spurgeon, “make golden Christians.”  Perhaps this is what Job had in mind when he pronounced, “But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job 23:10).  Fire authenticates, it refines, it makes palatable. It produces a better product. The fire of faith is not the most hospitable of circumstances to endure, but I assure you, like the three Hebrew boys, you are always better off for having gone through it.

Consider what James said about this truth in his epistle, “Knowing this, that the trying of …

Job 14:1 states, “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.” In short, life is the quickest of quandaries. A year, a decade, a century, and it’s gone.  Life is a gift, be sure, but it requires guts, grit, and a lot of grace to get through it.  Adversity is part of the journey, and adversity for the believer is often how God chooses to manifest His grace.  As Jerry Bridges said, “God uses adversity to loosen our grip on those things that are not true fruit.”  Loosening the grip leads to joy and …

According to Webster’s dictionary, the definition of the word Cannibal is as follows: a person who eats the flesh of human beings or an animal that eats its own kind.* “Eating your own kind” may seem like a good survival strategy in dire circumstances, but over the long haul, such an approach to living results in extinction. In the cannibalistic culture, eventually there is no one left to devour but yourself.

Devour.  It is a word used by the apostle Paul to describe the legalism that infiltrated the churches of Galatia.  He said it like this, “But if ye bite …

In his book, Paths to Power, A.W. Tozer commented on the spiritual condition of the church, “To any casual observer of the religious scene today, two things will at once be evident: one, that there is very little sense of sin among the unsaved, and two, that the average professed Christian lives a life so worldly and careless that it is difficult to distinguish him from the unconverted man.” This statement was published in the 1940’s…I wonder what Tozer would think of the church in this new millennium?

The truth is, what really matters is what God thinks. I …