When You're Discouraged By The Hard Days

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For an encouraging reminder that we don't always know why things happen or how they will work out, but we can trust that God is always working all things for good:  
The White Horse Maxim by Ann Voskamp.

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We Left Our Church Because of Calvinism (Things My Calvinist Pastor Said)

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[Yes, I know this is sarcastic, a little spicy and snarky, but I'm okay with that.  Someone's gotta say it.  For the text-only version, no memes,  click here .   For the memes only,  click here .  For the links only,  click here .  Also,  I broke this long post down into smaller posts, so click here for all the links to the individual posts in the  "Things My Calvinist Pastor Said" series .  All memes were created with  imgflip .  (This was updated in July 2020 , and it's being updated again in late 2025, early 2026.)] The inevitable has finally happened, the day we hoped would never come: The day we officially resigned from our church because of our pastor's dogmatic Calvinist preaching (May 20, 2019).   (From now on, I will try to call him our "ex-pastor."  And for the record, it was an Evangelical Free Church, which are being  taken over by Calvinism  all over the place.  So be wary an...
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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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Why I signed the petition asking Disney to re-hire James Gunn

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Neither my husband nor I like to put our names on things or share our email addresses easily.  But both of us signed the petition asking Disney to re-hire James Gunn as director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies (warning: the petition contains cussing).  And here's why: First off, please understand that I do not support the jokes he made which got him fired, nor am I looking at his political views or anything else he stands for nowadays.  I am only considering the issue at hand: the jokes he made that got him fired!  (And I'm assuming that he didn't live out those jokes and isn't currently doing anything like the things he joked about.)  Of course, no one should make jokes like those, not when people have undergone serious abuse in those kinds of situations.  I think those jokes are terrible.    But ... so does he !   Disney said they fired him because his jokes are inconsistent with their values.  But he himself says that ...
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Is Calvinism's TULIP Biblical? (Perseverance of the Saints)

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This is part three of three.  ( Click here for the whole one. ) 5.  Perseverance of the Saints I agree with Calvinists in principle on this point, but not for the reasons they say.    This point - this TULIP petal - basically boils down to “you can’t lose your salvation” (the only part I agree with), b ut where I  stop agreeing with them is their belief that the reason the elect can't lose their salvation is because God predestined them for heaven, causes them to believe, and will cause them to persevere in the faith all the way to the end of their lives.    This  sounds  good (if not for the fact that its foundation is an unbiblical view of predestination) and it brings Calvinists a lot of comfort in their “eternal security,” that if God predestined them for heaven and caused them to believe then they can never lose their faith/salvation. But there’s a problem: This is only  if  they are truly one of the elect, and Calvinists canno...
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Support for Jesus and the Bible

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Although almost every other major religion out there acknowledges that Jesus really did live, there are still people who insist He is a fairy tale, like a mythological legend from ancient history.  Or they believe that He was a real man but never claimed to be God, that His followers made it up after He died.  And many believe that the Bible, though a good book, was written just from men’s minds and wasn’t really God-inspired. When trying to reason with people like this, many Christians quote Bible verses to try to win the argument, thinking it should convince everyone of God’s Truth.  But since many people, including atheists, don’t believe the Bible is true, they don’t want to hear the Bible being used to try to prove the validity of the Bible.  That’s “circular reasoning,” using the Bible to validate the Bible.  This is why it’s important to have sources outside the Bible that confirm that Jesus really did live and that Scripture is really reli...
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Though they have eyes, they will not see

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[I originally posted this on one of my other blogs , Oct. 2021] So   according to this article , it appears that scientists have found evidence of the type of biblical destruction that happened to Sodom.  They say they found a town that was destroyed by a blast of heat so hot that it pretty much melted everything.  They say that there's no earthly natural heat source that could do this, so they speculate that it must have been an asteroid that exploded over the town, melting everything.  Oh, and they speculate that the reason no one lived there afterward was that the asteroid impact might have brought over so much salt from the nearby Dead Sea that nothing could grow.  This, they say, must be what inspired people to make up the story of Sodom in the Bible. But I say that here's your "asteroid," scientists: "The Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah - from the Lord out of the heavens.  Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, incl...
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Songs to Encourage

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I woke up this morning with that sinking feeling of "Everything's going wrong in the world.  Everything is falling apart." Falling apart? Or falling into place? I truly think we are headed towards the end times.  In fact, I have been sure for years that it's almost here, whatever "almost" meant.  And so none of what's going wrong in the world surprises me.  I would actually be more surprised if the rapture doesn't happen by the end of the year than I would be if it did.  But that's just me. Anyway, these songs were on my mind this morning, a comfort in troubling times (godly music, along with prayer and immersing yourself in God's Word, is one of the best ways to fill your heart with hope when the world offers none): Lord (I Don't Know) by Newsboys  [We don't have to know what's going on or where it's all headed ... because it's enough that  He  knows!] Fell Apart by The City Harmonic  [One of my favorite ope...
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A Tale of Two Gospels

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  In my post  "A Tale of Two Sermons" , I shared something the Calvinist pastor at my ex-church preached, which was...  "The key verse in Jonah - the one that the rest of the book of Jonah hinges on - is 'Salvation belongs to our God.'  Tim Keller  [Calvinist!]  says this: 'If someone is saved, it is wholly God's doing.  It is not a matter of God saving you partly and you partly saving yourself.  No!  God saves us.  We do not and cannot save ourselves.  That is the gospel.'   And that is the message of Jonah: Only God elects.  Only God sovereignly draws.  Only God sovereignly convicts us of sin.  Only God sovereignly opens blinded eyes." And here's a segment from that post sharing my comments about it, with a few edits and additions (I think this should get its own post because it's a crucial point): 1.  W e all agree that God saves us, that we cannot save ourselves.  But what Keller - and all Calv...
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