Reconciling God’s Sovereignty and Our Free Will

From time to time, everyone misses the point. This happens in marriage, in the workplace, and even as we approach the Bible.

One place this happens is in the opening verses of the book of Ephesians. I would guess that more theological energy has been poured into this passage extolling or refuting concepts of free-will and predestination than energy poured into understanding what the text is intended to teach.

Unless we lay aside the consternation some have concerning the free-will / sovereignty debate we will miss the point regarding the blessings God has given those who’ve turned from their sins and placed their trust in Christ’s death to pay for their sins.

Scam Email from Amazon?

This morning I awoke with this in my inbox:

Dear Customer,

Your order has been successfully canceled. For your reference, here’s a summary of your order:

You just canceled order 167-6577-88322 placed on May 6, 2012.

Status: CANCELED

_____________________________________

1 “Wincing”; 2008, Second Edition
By: James Morris

Sold by: Amazon.com LLC

_____________________________________

Thank you for visiting Amazon.com!

———————————————————-
Amazon.com
Earth’s Biggest Selection
http://www.amazon.com
———————————————————-

This was puzzling, because I had placed no order.

You guessed it. The links did not take me to Amazon, but to a scammer’s site.

Be careful out there.

~Steve

Oh Be Careful Little Fingers What You Text…

Today I listened to Blaine Workman’s podcast: Learning to Speak TOBOG. He was speaking about our speaking — the words we say. He noted that if Paul were writing to the Ephesians today, he might say words like this:

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouth or flow from your fingers. Texting, twitter, facebook, blogs — they are all helpful tools for communicating in our digital age, none of them good or bad in and of themselves. But the rotting verbal garbage that some Christians are willing to post in texts or online is just appalling. It has no place among God s people. In some weird inexplicable way, talking to their electronic device somehow frees people to spew the most vile and corrupting talk in ways they’d be ashamed to do, speaking face to face with the real person. And brothers and sisters, the anonymity of cyberspace is no license for corrupting talk. If your brother sins against you, Jesus says, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. Today, we go tell the whole world in an anonymous post in a blog somewhere… ~Pastor Blaine Workman

That’s a bold thing for a pastor to say. It’s especially bold today, because it’s a quick way to be unfriended in social media.

Take a listen to Pastor Blaine yourself. Maybe you could post it on your own facebook or other social media page.

I dare you.