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Why the Teacher and the Exhorter Need Each Other
My primary gift is exhorter. One of the giveaways is that I write a blog in which I give people simple steps towards inner healing. That is what we exhorters do. We try to motivate everyone around us to get to know Jesus with these five simple steps! And we know it will work because it worked for us. When it comes to believing in others, we tend to be a bit gullible. But hey, that’s what makes us effective. We believe what we preach. But the free-spirited exhorter runs into issues pretty easily. We tell a lot of stories and we don’t mind using a verse or so out…
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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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Laziness Three Ways and How to Move Forward
First up. Could laziness be the original sin? A lot of theories surround what exactly constitutes original sin. Those in the literary fields usually attribute the original sin to the discovery of sexuality, pointing to the serpent as a phallic symbol, but then, those in literary fields usually think everything is Freudian. More ancient commentary on original sin tends towards the idea of concupiscence. That word means lust or desire, encompassing the literary idea and adding a generalized greed for power, knowledge, wealth, or whatever. However, as I amble along Scott Peck’s classic, The Road Less Travelled, I recently came across this notion of laziness as the original sin. He…
Healing Through Art & Words
