What does your spending reveal about your heart? It’s easy to look at the lives of idolaters like the grandmother we’ll talk about today and see how their idolatry corrupted their hearts. But idolatry didn’t end with the Old Testament. And it isn’t exclusive to pagan people. The New Testament constantly warns believers about the idolatry in our own hearts.
And one revealer can be our spending. If we’re willing to pay $4 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, $25 to go to the movies, or $80 or $100 for a pair of tennis shoes, but give grudgingly or not at all to the work of God, what does it say about our hearts and what we truly worship?
We’ll also look at:
How God protected the Messianic line of David and kept His covenant promise to him.
The value of godly counsel in the life of a leader.
And how God was able to use a brilliant and eloquent man who was willing to humble himself and receive truth from a couple of tentmakers.
It happens to us all. Maybe it’s someone standing on the street corner with a cardboard sign, maybe it’s a friend or a co-worker or maybe it’s a grown son or daughter. They need a loan. Or another loan. Or just a little help. Maybe it doesn’t seem right, but there’s the guilt. You wonder … what is the right thing to do?
God has a lot to say about generosity. In today’s post, we’ll talk about a woman whose faith and generosity were commended by Jesus and talked about for over two thousand years. We’ll, also, look at others who had the wrong heart attitude about giving.
In our Old Testament reading, we’ll look at one of the most interesting stories in the book of Numbers where God used a talking donkey to get his point across to a greedy, ungodly man.
We are all counseling. If you’re like most people, friends and family members talk to you all the time. They share struggles and hurts and they are looking to you for input. “How did you handle a similar situation?” or “What would you do?” are the questions that they’re often asking.
And if you’re a parent, you are constantly advising your children. You may find yourself talking to your daughter about that mean girl at school, the pain of not being invited to the party, or to your son about the first love who broke his heart.
The question is, “What is the source of your answers?”
What does God say about counseling? If we’re all counseling all the time, how can we be better equipped to do it well? We’ll look at those and other questions today.
We’ll, also, talk about the seasons of ministry, our priorities in ministry and how God is not surprised by our failures.
While adultery is not the unforgivable sin, the effects of adultery are devastating. Whether someone is the perpetrator or the victim, lives are turned upside-down. Maybe it’s happened to you. If you’re the one who was sinned against, you know those things to be true. But what if you’re the one who committed adultery? Or what if you’re struggling with the temptation now?
