Roe V Wade was overturned yesterday and my social media feeds have been permeated with Pro-Choicers spewing arguments that are complete nonsense, whether I was a pro-lifer based in Christianity (or any religion) or a pro-lifer based in atheism. I will present those arguments and provide logical and scientific reasons why they are invalid. You may say “there is no absolute truth, truth is subjective.” If you do, you just contradicted yourself already and made a poor argument. To say definitely that no absolute truth exists, you are defining subjective truth as absolute truth…
There is a trend in psychology going around about understanding and healing your inner child. I have never understood it until today. I think a reason seasonal depression hits me, is it brings back feelings and memories that were uncomfortable or negative for younger me. I sat on social media and observed the “memories” that it had for me for today. That only exacerbated my mood. Lost friends, past failures, broken relationships, etc. Nothing changes if nothing changes, so I took action.
Today, I chose to listen to my inner child. I chose to serve my inner child. I chose to embrace my inner child.
Picture this. It is Sunday morning. You are attending your Sunday morning church service, yearning to experience God, working to deepen your knowledge of God, and aiming to deepen your relationship with God. You are in the middle of the musical worship portion of the service when people slam through the sanctuary doors with a ruckus. But it doesn’t stop there. They loudly speak to people throughout the congregation. Would you be distracted? I would be. Would it interrupt your worship? It would for me.
The Stages of Change Model is a key tool in addiction counseling and recovery. We can see the Stages of Change model active in more than just recovery from substances, but instead in any type of change we are endeavoring to make. This model even describes when the Holy Spirit starts convicting us for things in our life that are not of God.
Recently, I have encountered many Christians who say that addiction is not a disease it is purely a matter of choice and self-control. As somebody in recovery and finishing up his Masters in Addiction Counseling, I firmly say that is bologna, and can be a very dangerous and harmful thing to say.
So many people live in the bondage of fear daily for many different reasons whether spiritual or material. They live in fear that they are not good enough. They live in fear that they will relapse. They live in fear that they can’t pay their bills this month. Fear surrounds us. Fear is a liar.
Love and fear cannot coexist. In the same way, worship and sin cannot coexist.
Many know the Church of the Nazarene as the church that believes you can lose your salvation. That is an erroneous oversimplification of a doctrine in the Church of the Nazarene. I think we can all agree that salvation is not like some kind of object that we can misplace or leave somewhere. When you use the phrase “lose your salvation,” you are not understanding the belief that the Church of the Nazarene holds to. In fact, it is a phrase that is not much used in the Church of the Nazarene and other denominations with a Wesleyan theological perspective. The language of “losing” just is not sufficient.
Righteousness changes based on the relationship and expectations. The expectations I have for a relationship with my friends are different than the expectations I have for a relationship with a wife. In any of those relationships, righteousness would be living up to the expectations that is yielded by the relationship. When the Bible talks about being righteous, it is for those who live up to the expectations that God has set for His people. These are found in the Law and then is given to us through relationship with Jesus.
David was anointed the next king, but Samuel just leaves. Although David was anointed, it was not yet in God’s timing for him to take the throne. He still had to prepare himself. God does not call the prepared but prepares the called. David had to wait, maybe even for years. Sometimes God tells us to wait. Waiting is not doing nothing.
Leprosy made a person a social outcast. Leprosy is commonly thought today to be when your body is decaying. In reality, it could be a number of different skin conditions. One of the main reasons leprosy was perceived as “unclean” was that it was typically associated with death since you might be perceived as a sort of “walking corpse” with a skin disease with your skin flaking off. It may not have been “curable,” but it was not necessarily permanent either. One could not be touched in fear of contracting leprosy. Lepers were seen as highly contagious, similar to chicken pox.
