What is Christianity?: What God did about it
In the last post, we spent a good bit of time talking about the weakness of man and how we will inevitably fall short of the righteousness of God. However, I don’t want to just leave us feeling discouraged and helpless. More importantly, God didn’t want to leave us discouraged and helpless. So he sent His son for us and established a way for us to come to Him in grace (Rom 5:6). Before we get into the physical life…
What is Christianity? : Where we all start
Whenever we begin a study of Christianity, it is important to first get the ugly truths out of the way. If we want to talk about redemption and salvation, it is important for us to first address the reason we need to be redeemed and saved. We believe that mankind was created in the image of God (Gen 1:26). Many people have had many different ideas about the inherent state of man’s soul, but every Christian will recognize that man…
What is Christianity? : What we believe and why we believe it
If you’ve seen my other blog posts, you will notice that I am making a jump here. I had been studying “Released from Shame” by Dr. Sandra Wilson. This is an excellent book and I still recommend it, particularly to people who struggle with shame and bad memories. However, I want to broaden my scope a little and, while I will still use Dr. Wilson’s book for counseling purposes, I want to feature posts that are more universally applicable. The…
Turning Backward
As we continue our study of shame, guided by Released From Shame by Dr. Sandra Wilson, we are going to look backwards in order to discuss the origins of shame. First we will briefly discuss Biblical shame. This is relatively straightforward. We recognize that we are weaker, more foolish, and smaller than God. Every person has had this revelation at some point, Paul points this out at the beginning of his letter to the Romans. No one has an excuse…
We Have What We Have
As soon as we recognize that we are caterpillars living in a world full of caterpillars (if that doesn’t make sense, read the introductory post), we will have a tendency to begin to devise a ranking system for all of the caterpillars. We see that some may be more colorful, some may be fuzzier, some may climb higher in the trees, and we begin once again to put ourselves down when we don’t measure up to someone else’s progress. Remember…
Introduction
Do you ever feel like you’re not good enough? Not just that you feel as if you fall short in some area, make a mistake or forget something important, but rather the feeling that you are, in your total and complete being, missing something essential that functional people do have? I’ve had that feeling. I was raised in the church, I was baptized at 10, I know that Jesus loves me and that God is my eternal Father through most…