Three things are here said to be with God, which phrase, with God, he again and again chooseth to express the grounds of his hope in God by...
According to John Bunyan in The Acceptable Sacrifice: The Excellency of a Broken Heart (p.2-3), there “are four things that are very acceptable to God...
Psalm 119:83 states, “For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.” “What an affecting picture of misery...
While doing a study on the life of the apostle Paul, I began to wonder if he was actually named Saul after the 1st king of Israel. I began to make comparisons between the two and found several things that they had in common. The name Saul means "desired" while the name Paul means "little". It's interesting to think that Paul started off as Saul, or the one to be desired, but when God got a hold of him, he became Paul the little one. Sounds like the words of John the Baptist when he said of Christ, "He must increase, but I must decrease." John 3:30
Last night, Paul Grady, one of the young men of God in our church, preached a powerful message from 1Samuel 28 on "Doing a Good Thing Instead of the Right Thing." He showed how King Saul had done a good thing by putting away the witches and wizards out of the land of Israel (1Samuel 28:3). However, he had not done the right thing in obeying the law by putting the witches and warlocks to death (Exodus 22:18). As a result, he eventually went to the witch of Endor himself (1Samuel 28:7-8). Using, the witch as a type of the flesh, Brother Grady showed how we will eventually be conquered by the flesh if we will not put it to death. We must do the right thing; not just a good thing.
"Honor: A History," a new book written by James Bunting, deals with the importance of honor as a concept in the past and the loss of that sense of honor today. The Bible commonly uses honor (spelled "honour") in the sense of giving honor to someone else (as to God) or receiving honor from others (as in honoring our father and mother). The closest Bible word for what is meant by a sense of honor is the word honourable. To be honourable is to receive honor or to be worthy of receiving honor. Samuel was introduced to Saul as a man of God and "an honourable man" (1Samuel 9:6). Jabez, who prayed and received answer to his prayer, was "more honourable than his brethren" (1Chronicles 4:9). Joseph of Arimathaea was "an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God" (Mark 15:43). Honor is the opposite of shame in the Bible. Therefore, a sense of honor involves living in such a way as to avoid shameful acts and associations. The emphasis in the Bible on having a "good name" (Proverbs 22:1; Ecclesiastes 7:1) embodies the idea of that sense of honor; that determination to act in an honourable way. George Washington was famous for the importance he placed on his reputation and honor. We long to see such honor today.
