Encouraging Songs for the Hurting!

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A couple of encouraging videos by Matthew West:

Having Broken Pieces doesn't mean being hopeless or useless.  

In fact, God is in the business of using broken pieces to make some of His greatest creations.  

And with His help and healing touch, broken becomes Mended!

Most Popular Posts of the Week:

Updated: Alana L. 5M (conflations: cause vs. allow)

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[I redid Point #5 and #6 in the Alana L. series on my other blog (and re-lettered the posts).  But instead of going back and changing the already-posted points on this blog, I'll just add the posts in their own little "series."]    Point #5 still :   M:  "Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign, sovereign."     In  5K  and  5L  (links to my other blog), I looked at Calvinism's incorrect belief that "sovereign" necessarily means that God preplans/causes all things.  In these next few posts, I want to further examine their misunderstanding of "sovereign" related to their erroneous conflations of "cause" and "allow"... and "foreknow" and "foreplan"... and "natural evils" and "moral evils"... and their deceptive use of the word "authors."   [There will be some redundancy in here and some review of things I said in the previous parts.  I tried making it shorter and more concise, but...
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What Real Encouragement Looks Like Sometimes!

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Who would've thought that "encouraging each other in the Lord" would take the form of two hours of telling each other, "Yep, that crap's hard!"? - A text I got from a friend after a long conversation about the trials we've been through, the heartaches we've known, and how difficult life can be sometimes.  It made me smile!
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Another one bites the dust

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[Happy Easter, y'all!] I just found this (sad!) on Reddit Reformed:  What happened to my conviction and love for God? Reformedhabeshagirl  said: Hello brothers and sisters I have always been a Christian and grew up fearing the Lord. I remember being convicted about my sins as young as 7 or 8 years old. I became Reformed around age 17 and I am 23 now. I have always been a repentant believer. My heart used to break when I sinned, and I love the Lord. I studied my Bible a lot, prayed often, and was very interested in theology, sermons, and everything related to faith. The problem is that my heart has lost all desire for the things I used to love. I stopped listening to sermons and I don’t want to study my Bible anymore. Any interest I had in Bible study or discussions about the Lord only came when my ex-boyfriend shared things with me every day or when it came from my pastor every Sunday. Now my heart feels hard. I am not convicted about the things I used to mourn over. I distanc...
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Comments Against Calvinism

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Graceadict (a non-Calvinist) made these comments in a Soteriology 101 post called 5 Reasons Why I Stayed Out of Calvinism (small edits made for clarity): A few things to remember when talking to a Calvinist: First off, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed.  They will take passages out of context and make it sound like something it is not.  Here is a summary statement by a popular Calvinist that sums up much of what they believe and are teaching in Calvinism's TULIP:  “When we say God is Sovereign in the exercise of His Love, we mean that He loves who he chooses and God does NOT love everybody.” (Arthur Pink, Calvinist)  (Notice how Sovereignty trumps God’s moral attribute of Love.  Notice how God is NOT loving all of His own creation, people.  He can choose to ignore His essential nature of Love when He creates most of His image-bearers.  This is key in Calvinism- and it distorts the true nature of GOD.) #1 First of all, “predestination” will ...
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"Why is the Old Testament God so angry?" is the wrong question

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Lately, there seems to be a lot of people asking the question, "Why is the God of the Old Testament so angry?"  And some preachers handle this by telling people to basically ignore the God of the Old Testament and just stick with Jesus. But I say ... we are asking the wrong questions.  And the God of the Old Testament is the same God of today.  And Jesus is God in the flesh, the bodily manifestation of God, one of the three - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - which are all the same in spirit. You can't ignore the God of the Old Testament without seriously harming theology - the truth of who God is and how He acts and how He relates to us and who Jesus is and what He came here to do. Instead of ignoring Him or packing Him away in a little box somewhere, we need to seek to understand Him.  And we need to ask the right questions. Instead of asking "Why is the Old Testament God so angry," we should be asking ...               ...
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What Will The Rapture Be Like? (repost)

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So what will the rapture be like? Answer: I don't know. There is no way to know exactly what the rapture will be like until it happens.  So this is only my opinion, based on Scripture, as best I understand it.   Here are some passages I believe refer to the rapture (though many others believe some of these refer to events during the tribulation) :   "For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.  After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air."   ( 1 Thess. 4:16-17 .  Definitely the rapture.) " Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." ...
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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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Pause, breathe, smile

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(Happy New Year!)  Please, allow me to vent and to listen to myself rant.  And come along, if you want, on a trip through m y mind  (I apologize in advance for how the messy it is😉) : Are you exhausted?  I am.  I am sick and tired of all the craziness out there, all the chaos, fighting, hate, lies, fear-mongering, violence, increasing prices (for less product or services), natural disasters, wars, rumors of wars, AI this-and-that, Big Pharma, social deviance/immorality, efforts to force people to tolerate social deviance/immorality, political posturing and mudslinging and nonsense, etc.   I'm done with it.  I'm just so done with it all.  "You can stop the world now, God.  We wanna get off."   I am sick of both social media and the news - because everyone just wants to fight, scream their opinions, demand their way, calls names, make accusations, and force everyone else to agree with them and do things their way.  E veryt...
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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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White horses and a cup of tea (part 3)

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[I'm working my way through this slowly.  Click here for part 1 and part 2 of this series.]  First, here's The White Horse Parable again (my version): A man and his son owned a field that they farmed for a living.  And one day, they found a white horse in the field. "Oh, what a blessing," said the farmer.  "A free horse." But then the horse started tearing up their plants.   "Oh, this is terrible.  What a curse!" cried the farmer.   But then they caught the horse and tamed it and were able to use it to farm the field. "Oh, what a blessing," said the farmer. But then the son was thrown off the horse, broke both arms, and couldn't farm for months, reducing their sales and income. "Oh, what a curse," said the farmer. "I wish this horse never came to us.  Why, God?  Why!?!" But then a war started, and the army issued a draft.  But because the son had broken arms, he was excused from the draft and didn't have to f...
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