Help and more help for Bible memorization

A veritable smorgasbord of ideas right here!

Will you start memorizing God’s Word today?

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The right treasure for women

Christine Hoover reminds women that Christ should be their treasure, not their homes.

The home exists for Christ. Our marriages, our children, our physical spaces — all these are means of joyful response to Him. Through the home, we treasure Christ and show others how to treasure Him also (Titus 2:3–5; Proverbs 31:10–31).

Too often, however, we treasure the home more than we treasure Christ. As a result, what He has given as a blessing and an avenue of sanctification becomes a means of achievement or accomplishment, where our well-behaved children or our organizational abilities are an indication of our value and our righteousness. Our homes become a matter of pride, self-elevation, or comparison. And we cling to our treasure, thinking that the home is under our control, that it’s ours to possess, that we have somehow created and cultivated something special.

In “Christ is Our Treasure, Not Our Homes” she goes on to talk about when treasuring one’s home more than Christ is most likely to occur as well as what happens when we make our homes our treasure rather than Christ.

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What’s the problem with unconditional forgiveness?

Chris Brauns, pastor and author,  discusses several problems with “unconditional forgiveness”–a popular concept among many Christians today.  He begins:

Many teach that Christians should unconditionally forgive grave offenses regardless of whether or not the offender is repentant. Yet, as I argued in Unpacking Forgiveness, this is not biblical.

To be sure, Christians should unconditionally adopt an attitude of forgiveness. We ought always to “wrap the package” of forgiveness. But if the other party refuses to open the present, then forgiveness has not taken place in its fullest sense.  (See others on conditional forgiveness).

While automatic forgiveness sounds like an antidote to bitterness, this is not the case. Those who try and simply dismiss grave offenses, apart from resting in the justice of God, often encounter emotional and theological problems. Here is an incomplete list of problems that sometimes arise from unconditional forgiveness.

Keep reading this post where Chris elaborates on five problems with unconditional forgiveness.

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What does this Latin phrase mean?

Simul justus et peccator is an important phrase to describe what a person is once he is born from above and becomes a new creature in Jesus Christ.

What’s it mean?  R. C. Sproul explains in this short lesson.

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How is your confidence in the gospel?

Last night our church family viewed a message “Will Your Gospel Transform a Terrorist?” by Thabiti Anyabwile. In this sermon, he challenged us, “Is there any obvious, compelling marks in your life revealing a deep and unshakeable confidence in the power of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ? More specifically, do you have confidence that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is enough to transform the people who seem to you the farthest away, with the hardest heart toward the Lord?”

He goes on to preach from 1 Timothy 1:12-17, a passage dealing with Paul’s rehearsal of the gospel in his life.  Among other things he challenged us to think about what we lose when we no longer employ important biblical phrases and words like “lost.”  The messsage ends with nine marks of what confidence in the gospel looks like.

Here are the notes to this message from Justin Taylor.

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