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The Pharisees’ Argument: Five Logical Fallacies
The fruitless argument surrounds us these days, permeating all forms of media, the classroom, and even the dinner table. As I was reading in John 9 where Jesus comes into conflict with the Pharisees because He healed a blind man on the Sabbath, I found the arguments hauntingly familiar. Rife with logical fallacies, the arguments of the Pharisees have one goal only: to maintain power at any cost. The story begins with Jesus rubbing clay on the eyes of a blind man and instructing him to wash it off in the Pool of Siloam. Instantly his sight is restored. The Pharisees perceive that given this ability to heal, Jesus could…
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How to Hear What God is Saying to You
Adam and Eve, besides Jesus, could hear God more clearly than the rest of us. After all, they took walks with Him in the garden He made especially for them. But like most of us, they were only passive listeners. Have you ever wondered we can read our obligatory section of the Bible (from our Read through the Bible in a Year iPhone app) and promptly forget what we have read? It is because, like Adam and Eve, we hear the words spoken but we do not store them in our hearts. The truth is God is speaking to us all the time, through His Word, through others, through the…
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What Your Metaphors Reveal About You
One of my favorite metaphors is in Alice Walker’s essay, Beauty, When the Other Dancer is the Self. In it, she writes about her blind eye resulting from a BB gun injury from one of her brothers. She charts her relationship with her blind, scarred eye, from painful adolescence to the moment when her little girl first notices it. “You have a world in your eye,“ says her daughter, carefully observing what is left of the scar tissue. All at once, her eye becomes a metaphor for the internal worlds inside Walker that have grown because of the injury. I have posted a link at the end so you can…