My Crazy Faith

 There are some verses in the Bible that will always be confusing and cause disagreement.  And the "many are called/invited, few are chosen" verse is one of them. Matthew 22:1-14:   "The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son.  He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.... So his servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.  But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes.  'Friend,' he asked, 'how did you get in here without wedding clothes?' The man was speechless.  Then the king told the attendants, 'Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' 'For many are invited, but few are chosen.'" Some people th...

Such a great sermon, one we can all learn a lot from and be encouraged by: "Encountering God's Process"   by Tony Evans (And here's a great 10-minute video from his daughter, Priscilla Shirer:  "We're Desensitized to our Blessings."   It just seemed to speak so well to the crazy world we're living in right now, maybe because now seems like the perfect time to dig through all the distractions around us to find Jesus.)  And it's funny because just the other day, I was updating and typing up a "Bible Study/workbook" thing I wrote years ago, called  "Through the Refining Fire: Your 'Sweetly Broken' Journey,"  and the stuff Dr. Evans was saying in the beginning was almost exactly the stuff I had just typed up, about how God usually has to break us to rebuild us, how it's part of the process of spiritual growth.   I am sending this "Through the Refining Fire" workbook to my relative  who's in jail  because ...

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”    ( Ephesians 2:8-9 ) For the past 30+ years of being a Christian, I have always understood this verse to mean that faith is the gift God gives us.  That faith has to be given to us by God, in order for us to believe in Him.  Of course, I believed this meant that it was a gift He offered to all, but that we had to decide to accept or reject it.  And that is a fine interpretation, in my mind.  Because it's a graceful, reasonable way to mesh God's sovereignty with mankind's free-will. However, Calvinists use this verse to say that God has to be the One to give people faith, and He only gives it to the elect, and if He doesn't give it to you the you were not predestined to heaven and have no chance to believe in Him.  In their theology, faith is a "gift" that is shoved into the elected person, causin...

(For full version of this Bible study lesson, click here .)             No study on the “less clear” things of Scripture would be complete without a look into the End Times.   There are many different ideas about how the world will end.   Of course, most Christians believe that it will end when Christ returns and God makes all things new.   But what isn’t clear is the timing of everything.   And the biggest “unclear” thing: Will there be a rapture?   Will it come before, during, or after the tribulation?             I have studied this really intensely at different times over the years.   Reading every book on the topic that I could find, studying the Bible, checking the original Greek meaning of the words, etc.    To me, it is a huge, complex, wonderfully-frustrating puzzle.   And I could never really understand it . . . until this last time that I studied it.   And I was fi...

(This is a super long post, as it is in the original Bible study lesson , except for some questions I cut in this one.)    In this lesson, I combined parts of several posts from https://myimpressionisticlife.blogspot.com .   This lesson is not really an academic “study” of atheism and world religions, but it’s a very personal account of why I could never give up my faith in Jesus, why those other options are not for me, and how I would explain salvation and faith in Jesus to a non-believer.       Christianity isn’t a squeaky clean, “everything goes smoothly and life is always what I want it to be” kind of faith.   It can be messy and painful and difficult.       Due to many trials which have caused me to struggle deeply with my faith, I’ve become a little less polished and a lot more real over the years.   This is why I included this lesson and the depression one.   Because I really wanted to show the very real, human si...