Tagged: message of the day

“But we had to celebrate and rejoice! This brother of yours was dead, and has come back to life. He was lost, and is found.” –Luke 15:32 If someone raped and murdered your daughter and then repented, would you attend the party given by God in honor of the repentant rapist-murderer? If you are a normal human being, you would grow “angry at this and would not go in” (Lk 15:28). By God’s grace, there are many repentant rapists, murderers, blasphemers, persecutors, and men and women formerly filled with arrogance (see 1 Tm 1:13). God the Father is constantly throwing...

“For it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than holocausts.” –Hosea 6:6 We can go to church and spend our time thinking of ourselves rather than of God. We can put down other people rather than lift up the Lord (see Lk 18:11). We can say words in our prayer that are quite wonderful – if we only lived as if we believed in them (see Hos 6:1-3). We can so nauseate God (see Rv 3:16) in our prayers that He asks the question: “What can I do with you?” (Hos 6:4) Because of...

“Return, O Israel, to the Lord, your God; you have collapsed through your guilt. –Hosea 14:2 Because there are such things as good and bad, because we all sin, and because we all have consciences (even if they may be malformed and suppressed), we all have guilt to some degree. We can minimize guilt by either accepting God’s grace to live a good life or by suppressing our consciences and hoping we die before reality reactivates them. However, some guilt is part of being a human being. We can benefit from guilt rather than run away from it. We can...

“They walked in the hardness of their evil hearts.” –Jeremiah 7:24 If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts (see Ps 95:7-8). We can have hardening of our hearts for years, even for generations (Jer 7:26). For centuries, we can ignore God and become progressively worse than our fathers, who were worse than their fathers and grandfathers (see Jer 7:26). The hardening of hearts can be chosen not only by individuals but by nations (see Jer 7:28). Hard and hardening hearts can be generational, epidemic, deteriorating, and international. They can become so hard that we kill God’s prophets,...

“Whoever fulfills and teaches these commands shall be great in the kingdom of God.” –Matthew 5:19 During Lent, we especially try to imitate Jesus when He was led by the Holy Spirit into the desert. There Jesus overcame the temptations of the evil one by using God’s Word. We also should use God’s Word to have victory over temptations. However, to do this, we must deeply believe that the Bible is much more than “the word of men, but…truly is, the word of God at work within [we] who believe” (1 Thes 2:13). We won’t use God’s Word in our...