Christmas in July #2

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Just found this one!  Oh my goodness, it's amazing!  This has always been one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs:


Most Popular Posts of the Week:

List of Calvinist Preachers, Authors, Theologians, Websites, etc.

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I  found a lot more names to add to my list of known Calvinists (found in my various  "How to Tell if a Church, Pastor, or Website is Calvinist"  posts).  But instead of adding this huge list to all those posts, I am going to put it here, and I'll just provide a link on those posts to this one.  [FYI: I added a note at the bottom of this post on May 5, 2021.] So here it is, a "master list" of known Calvinists to help you be careful and discerning about who you listen to and where you get your theology from.  There are plenty more Calvinists out there, but these are just the names that I ran across the most.   These are either definite, self-professed Calvinists or "most likely Calvinist," in my estimation.  (I haven't heard of most of them, but it's good to know their theology before I do.)   After finding these names in various places online, I looked up each person to see if they are Calvinist.  If they did not self-identify ...
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I So Needed This Today - "Strength In Your Struggles"

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I desperately needed this sermon today: Tony Evans Speaks on Strength in Your Struggles .  Such a great one!  [Update 8/11/2026: That video has been removed, so here are some other options from Dr. Evans' YouTube channel .] Last week sometime, I made a very deliberate effort to decide to not believe that everything goes wrong all the time, to have hope that things were going to be okay and that I'd make it through the crushing trials .  Generally, I wake up with a feeling of anxiety (and I have for over 3 years now), but that morning I had decided "No more!  I can't keep living like this.  I'm just going to trust that God's got it in His hands and that it's going to be okay.  I am just too tired to be anxious anymore."  And I felt rather relaxed for the day, in a way I hadn't in a long time.  And it felt good! And then ... that very night ... the night I felt like I had finally turned a new leaf ... one of my young sons comes to me sobbin...
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Problems in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion

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I have been studying and confronting the problems of Calvinism for a little while now.  (In fact, I have a whole other blog about it: The Anti-Calvinist Rant. )  But now I want to go right to the source, to John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion .  This is a long, rambling, confusing book about Calvin's theological views, written when he was about 27 years old.  And I think it's full of problems.  (O f course, there will be some correct things in there, some wise things.  But don't let that blind you to his errors.) I am going to do my best to, well, understand his writing, for starters.  It's really confusing writing.  It sounds more like philosophical ramblings than inspired doctrine.  And I am going to do my best to point out some of what I think are Calvin's biggest theological blunders, the things that make his theology wrong from the very start. I'm not going to look at everything, just mainly at his teachings of prede...
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Pre-Chosen People? Is God's Call Irresistible?

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(Part of the "Predestination vs. Free-Will" series) John 6:37 :   “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.”              This one confused me for awhile.   It sounded like Jesus is saying that all the people that God has pre-chosen to be believers are destined to come to faith in Him.   And that only those who are chosen by God will come to faith.              But I’m not sure if that’s what this is really saying.  
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I'd Rather Have Manna

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Many of us struggle at times with trying to make God answer our prayers our way.   We try to get the life we want or make things happen as we want them to happen.   I know I have over the years.   And while He has been very good to us and answered many prayers as I hoped He would, there are still many that He hasn’t.   For His own reasons.   And for many of us, it’s hard to learn to accept “less” than we want, to learn to go without, and to have to live with long-term problems or issues that we wish we didn’t have.   And this can mess with our faith and our self-image.   There have been times when I desperately wanted an answer from Him that wasn’t coming and when I wanted to feel His presence yet I felt nothing.   And it brought up doubts and fears inside of me.   And in frustration with His silence and in exhaustion with the long wait, I found myself wanting to give up on God.   To take matters into my own hands or walk...
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Why Is It So Hard For Calvinists To Get Free From Calvinism?

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This was originally on the end of my post "If Calvinism is true, then God is a liar."   But I think it deserves its own post (I recently updated it a little bit, March 2021): I read something once about how very few people end up freeing themselves from the clutches of Calvinism because of the strong hold it has on people.  I think this is partly because ... 1.   We (I am talking as if I were a Calvinist here) would have to admit that we were misunderstanding Scripture this whole time, and no one wants to admit they could be wrong. 2.   Calvinism appeals to us prideful intellectuals.  (And prideful intellectuals have the greatest aversion to admitting we could be wrong.)  It makes us feel special, like we alone understand the "deeper, hidden meanings of Scripture," while the simple-minded Christians can't understand it.  Calvinism (with all of its contradictions, word play, round-about reasoning, and multiple layers of meaning for verses) gives u...
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Getting through the "broken" times

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Practical Advice for Getting Through the Broken Times (in no particular order) 1.   Be gracious toward yourself!             You make sense.   You are not a hopeless mess.   You are human.   And humans hurt.   Humans break sometimes.   And we all need compassion and grace and understanding and love and forgiveness – for ourselves and for others.   So do not feel abnormal, like there is something wrong with you.   We are all broken in some way.   (It’s just that some people don’t know it yet.)   None of us really knows what we are doing in life.   (Although some won’t admit it.)   We are all just trying to make it through as best we can.   So you are in good company – in the company of many other hurting, broken, clueless, weak, needy people.   The very kind of people that God holds closest.   2.   Simplify!   And go slow!   And learn to ...
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Is God Drawing Lines in the Sand?

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(reposted from a few years ago, updated slightly) It’s amazing and disturbing how brazen our society is in attacking everything about God and everything He created:  marriage, monogamy, sex, family, sexuality, the scientific reality of gender, morality, modesty, the value of a person, the right to life, the existence of "right and wrong," the Bible, Jesus, and Absolute Truth.  Not to mention God Himself, His very existence. We are destroying everything associated with Him (except nature – we worship that), and then we call ourselves "progressive." But you know what I think about it all?   I think that God is letting it happen because He is drawing lines in the sand.  Through all these divisive issues and all the immorality, God is saying “Pick a side!  I am forcing you to decide which side you want to be on ... because I am coming back soon to take My people out of here.  So I need you all to decide:  Me or the world?  Which do ...
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Isn't that how life goes sometimes!

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Three weeks ago, I found a hummingbird live-cam online - https://www.bellahummingbird.com/ .  The same day I found it, the hummingbird mama - Bella - laid her first egg of the season.  And then a second.   And I thought, "How cool!  I get to see these babies from the very start."   Eager to see the babies hatch, I checked on the live-cam every couple days.  And then, just a few days ago, the first baby hatched, followed shortly by the second. Two tiny new baby hummingbirds.  I called my boys over to show them off.   I guess this camera has been running since 2013.  It's been going for 6 years, but this is the first time I noticed it.  And I was excited about checking on the baby birds every day, watching them grow. What an honor! And then yesterday ... three weeks after I started watching the hummingbird live-cam that I missed for the last 6 years ... the mama bird was possibly killed, they suspect by a praying mantis (???),...
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