The Other 167

As I grow closer to the Lord, the more I am marveled by His creation around us. I love to point out nice sunsets to the kids, or find a good place to go for a walk away from the man made stuff. 

But it can be easy to forget that of all of God's creation, we are His most precious. He created the world around us to show us His power, but He created us to show us His love. 

How can we be a ...

Serving God isn't an obligation. It's a priviledge, one given by Him and Him alone. God doesn't take church attendance. He doesn't count Hail Mary's. We aren't credited with righteousness based on mission trips or Sunday school. We are credited by grace alone, through faith alone. 

We are natually born scorekeepers. We appreciate that Jesus wiped out the bad that we've done. But we still...

Have you ever gone out to eat and filled up so much on the bread that you didn't have room for the entree? How frustrating is that!? Load up so much on the free bread that you only have room for 3 bites of the main course. Worst of all, the bread only lasts about 2 hours. Then you're hungry again and settling for a $40 microwaved steak. 

The same thing can happen in our spiritual lives. ...

I'm the world's worst for keeping my car on empty. My theory is that I get better gas milage by keeping my fuel load light. $10 bucks at a time, every day or so, that's my game plan. 

But apparently the shelf life on a 4-runner's fuel sensor is about 213,000 miles. So I recently started playing the old odometer game. Fill up, reset the odometer, and keep the odometer below 400. Now I'm n...

Awesome to have Brandon Goss join us this week. This was a lot of fun and we hope he'll come back whenever he can. (And the Monster diet does seem to work, by the way.)

How much fear, worry, and doubt to we carry around with us? These aren't fun, and they aren't what God intends or wants for our life. He wants us to trust in Him completely. 

When we follow Him with our whole heart, there...

God desires truth in our inner most parts. That sure is inconvenient isn't it? None of us want to admit our struggles, maybe even to ourselves. 

Kenny said people might be shocked to know who I really am, and you might be. So, brace yourself...

I cuss a lot. Not as much as I used to, and I'm working on it. But I say a lot of things I'm glad y'all don't hear. I also like Miller Lite more ...

I've had a lot of opportunities on this podcast to say some things I'd later regret. But of all of them, I think the line I regret the most came from the very first episode. I said "As long as I know I'm where God wants me, I don't care what the purpose of that is."

I don't regret it because it was wrong. Honestly, it sounds pretty righteous to me. I regret it because it turns out it was...

Sometimes life happens. This episode was recorded just before Christmas. Also 2 days before my computer crashed taking all of my files down with it.

Fortunately, the recording was already uploaded to YouTube, so I was able to get my hands back on it. It comes in handy to have some extra episodes laying around when vacation...

Every hour of every day, we face the decision of doing things our way, or God’s way. With so many opportunities to make the wrong decision, we are inevitably going to miss a few steps. But the more we practice walking with the Lord, the more instinctive it is to choose His way over ours. His Word teaches us, His Spirit guides us, and when we forget to rely on those, His Grace sustai...

There’s a great quote from one of my favorite movies: “Good judgement is the result of experience, and a lot of experience comes from bad judgement.”

Certainly, God wants us to develop good judgement. But we get frustrated that He allows us to have bad judgement along the way. Free will isn’t always convenient, but it is pa...

Jesus bought our freedom with His blood. Before the Cross, we were bound by our sin, but now we have a choice. But it still our choice. We decide how to use this freedom. Unfortunately, part of having freedom is being free to make the wrong choices, too.

But we are not free from the earthly consequences of sin. And freedom...

One of the threats to our walk with God is becoming so hard-headed and rigid that we forget there are two sides of every coin. Work needs to be done, but we also need rest. We show patience and grace to others, but there’s a time for discipline and hard truth. The joy of God’s love should never leave us, but neither should the fear and awe of His power.

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We tend to use the fruits of the Spirit as a guide for our own behavior and actions, but they also give us insight into God’s character. His power and perfection can make it easy for us to paint Him as a tyrant in our minds. But if God’s Spirit is manifested by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, then...

It’s easy to forget that God can hear the subtext of our prayers. We can pray “not my will but Yours be done” until we are blue in the face, but if we really mean “God, I think this would be great so please give it to me”, He hears that part too. So, it does us no good to say the “right prayers” that we don’t really mean (I wouldn’t suggest praying “God, ...

The W.W.J.D. bracelets give us some words to live by, but I agree with Ben’s take on this; it is a tough question to try to answer. The fact is, we are not Jesus, and we cannot possibly expect to know how He would handle every situation we encounter in our lives. For one, we create scenarios He didn’t face because we sin, He didn’t.

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