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Rejection vs Abandonment: Soul and Spirit Wounds
Over the course of my prayer ministry, I have noticed a thing or two about rejection and abandonment. Both are immensely painful, but the struggles that surround each differ somewhat. I have noticed that while rejection is a wound in the soul, abandonment is a wound of the spirit. As I look at Jesus’ road to Calvary, I find that He had to encounter both. However, while He endured rejection with a certain amount of stoicism, abandonment caused Him to cry out. He died immediately after. In case you are not completely sure about the difference between the two; the spirit is our power source. When we die, our spirits…
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Four Uncomfortable Truths about Peace
Peace is an essential component of a fulfilling life. Constant conflict spends our energies, wastes our strength, and distracts us from the really good things in life. But we often settle for an imitation of peace rather than the real thing. I often settled for a harmony that was not real because instinctively I knew that real peace would require me to make some real sacrifices. In fact, I have faced quite a few situations in which a genuine accord seemed impossible so I accepted something far less in order to avoid a reality that I did not want to admit to. The real deception, of course, was that I…
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How Testimony is Power in the Bible
What makes the testimony of the disciples so believable in the days after the resurrection of Jesus is that their experience of God left them transformed. In the three days preceding Christ’s rising from the dead, the eleven sat cowering in their homes, sure of their imminent arrest. A little over a month later, and they were proclaiming Christ’s resurrection from the streets of Jerusalem in tongues they did not know. Thousands of Jews came to know their Messiah through the power of their testimony. And their testimony had power because it was not merely intellectual assent but transformative body, soul, and spirit. We live in a world that values…