Worthy Words

When the Bible references the heart, it is referring to the center of your emotions, the center of your desires. In fact, you could say that when the Bible refers to your heart, it is referring to your deepest motives. The Bible teaches that when it comes to your heart — when it comes to the very essence of your motives — you are a complex and complicated being. Jeremiah describes it this way, “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” The answer to Jeremiah's question is God, and only God. The next verse says that God knows our hearts and judges us accordingly. “I, the Lord, search all hearts and examine secret motives.” (Jeremiah 17:9-10) The truth of Jeremiah’s words is that you cannot know your own heart. And, I should also say, you can't know the heart of anyone else. So don't waste time trying to judge your heart, or the hearts of others. It's a call that you simply aren't equipped to make....

One of the biggest obstacles you will face is discouragement. Once you get discouraged it's hard to keep going — it's hard to find the will to keep going. Discouragement is caused by unmet expectations. When you don't meet them, or when life doesn't meet them, or when others don't meet them, or when God doesn't meet them, you get discouraged. You will act as though you live in a cause-and-effect world, and that things are supposed to turn out a certain way. You believe that if you always do "A", it will always result in "B" — but life simply doesn't work that way. When Jesus was arrested and put to death, his disciples were overcome with discouragement Peter experienced discouragement when Jesus died. He was discouraged because the death of Christ destroyed his expectations of how Jesus should establish His earthly kingdom. Peter was also discouraged because during the process he failed to meet his own expectations. Notice what P...

This past week another tragedy has befallen our country. A lone gunman selectively positioned in a window on the 32nd floor of a hotel room in Las Vegas rained down volley after volley of machine gun fire killing and wounding innocent people who were enjoying an open air country music concert. All Americans are once again asking why. How can something like this happen (again)? Answers will be slow to come and some may never surface. Officials are at a loss but searching, trying to uncover the motive of this man. One thing is certain his actions were evil. When we base our questions on the idea that a human’s heart is basically good we will have struggles in these situations. However, if we use a biblical truth based on the idea that the human heart is basically depraved, we will still be overwhelmed with grief at these massacres but we will have a platform on which to gain understanding and strength moving forward. Simply put you can’t know the heart of someone else. To be blunt, you...

Your relationship with God is based solely upon mercy, and always will be. And it will never be based on anything else. “He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy” (Titus 3:5). You are saved by grace and you live by grace — grace is synonymous with mercy. You will never get to the point where you don’t need God’s grace and you don’t need God’s mercy. If you are a Christian who doesn’t rely exclusively on God’s grace to sustain you then you are a Christian that doesn’t really take sin seriously. You may take some sins seriously—the big sins, the visible sins, the sins that other people commit—but you often lapse into a pattern in which you don’t take seriously your own sin, because you have determined that your sin is rather small in comparison and you think you can deal with your sin all on your own. You eventually get to the place where you believe you are living at a high enough spiritual level that begging for mercy is no longer necess...