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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…
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Relational Faith: Building Trust With God
Faith, or belief, is a curious thing. We humans in the twenty-first century gravitate towards intellectual knowledge as the only true knowing of a concept. I suspect this may be why we so easily fall into depression and anxiety. We ignore the truths our bodies know and follow after cognitive beliefs, treating the other parts of ourselves as symptoms that need to be treated. Anxiety can be quelled after all with the right medication. The question that goes unaddressed is what is my body so afraid of? Experiential knowledge requires mind and body working together to teach the self what is safe and what is unsafe, or perhaps more accurately,…