By Dr. Tony Evans
I was once battling a cold and couldn’t shake it. I called my doctor, told him my symptoms, and he told me I didn’t need to come in. He would call in a prescription for me. He told me what medicine he was prescribing and how he wanted me to take it.
By Dr. Dharius Daniels
Every single area of your life is inevitably impacted by your relationships. Your spiritual, physical, financial, emotional, and professional progress is tied and tethered to who you allow to be a part of and influence your life. Therefore, if you are serious about taking your life to the next level, you should be serious about taking your relationships to the next level.
One of the wisest men to have ever lived, King Solomon, put it this way in Proverbs 13:20: “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.” Solomon suggests that we ultimately become like those we walk with. You may have heard it put another way: “Association breeds assimilation.”
How do you sense God is with you during deep personal struggle? How do you hold onto faith when faith itself seems lost? Whether in struggle, illness, death, or failure, the presence of pain causes us to question the presence of God. We pray and watch the sky, crossing our spiritual fingers for proof of God’s nearness. And in the silence, we sense something more sinister: perceived abandonment.
Bible Gateway interviewed Michele Cushatt (@MicheleCushatt), author of Relentless: The Unshakable Presence of a God Who Never Leaves (Zondervan, 2019).
Describe the hardship you’ve experienced with cancer.
Michele Cushatt: In 2010, two days before Thanksgiving, I received an unexpected phone call from my doctor. Moments before, I’d sent my children off to school and my husband was about to leave for work. Then the phone rang. And in the span of a few moments, I found out I had Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Tongue. Cancer.
I was a 39-year-old mama and wife who ran half-marathons, ate healthy, and never smoked a day in her life. In addition, I made my living as a communicator. The doctor’s words devastated me in every way.
By Dr. Tony Evans
Has God ever said something to you, or asked you to do something, that you didn’t like or didn’t want to do? You knew you heard him clearly, but you also knew that you weren’t really into his request, demand, or expectation. In fact, to you it seemed like God was making a request that revealed that he had lost his mind. Of course you would never come right out and say that, but the thought crossed your own.
Evangelist Jack Van Impe (@Jack_Van_Impe), known as “the Walking Bible,” died at the age of 88, his ministry announced January 18.
According to his ministry website, throughout his life Dr. Van Impe “spent about 80,000 hours in memorizing more than 18,000 [Bible] verses. And that time was all invested for the glory of God. There were no contests to win. No awards to receive. No one challenged him to a memory marathon. His service for Christ here was just as real to him as preaching or leading a soul to Christ. The Scripture memory time was a sacred rendezvous. There were few memory gimmicks used to achieve his goal. The important dimension to this accomplishment was, and is, dedication.”
By Dr. Tony Evans
Have you ever watched The Price is Right? There is a particular game on that show called Plinko. Contestants drop giant chips down a slanted board covered in wooden spikes. At its bottom are nine slots, each labeled with a different cash prize amount, ranging in value. The goal is to get one of your chips to land in the $10,000 slot in the middle. But as a chip slides down the board, it will hit many of the spikes as it falls, causing it to move erratically downward. Therefore, though a contestant will start out aiming his or her chip for the middle slot, the chip often veers way off course in its travels. It might land in the big money slot, or it might land in the end slot, earning the player a whole dollar. The point for us is that even when we aim straight for the big prize, our journeys to it seldom go as we plan.
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How does the Bible place value on names? What’s the difference between divinely appointed names and hurtful labels bestowed by circumstances? How can a God-given name for you boldly declare freedom from your past and hope for your future? Do you let the truth of who you are be overshadowed by your relationship status, your job title, or what others say about you?
Bible Gateway interviewed Esther Fleece Allen (@EstherFleece), author of Your New Name: Saying Goodbye to the Labels That Limit (Zondervan, 2020).
Why are names so important?
Esther Fleece Allen: The word label hardly ever shows up in the Bible’s original languages, and when it does, it’s similar to the word called: he or she was “called” something. Naming is more significant than labeling, perhaps because labeling only speaks to the titles others put on us, while naming speaks to our very core. Labels are about what’s on the outside. Naming goes so much deeper.
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, No More Faking Fine: An Interview with Esther Fleece]
This is the eighty-eighth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.
See Mel Lawrenz’s book, How to Understand the Bible.
Here’s a word from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount that we would do well to ponder within the first waking hour of every day: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.” It doesn’t get any more practical than that.
By Nona Jones
The Bible says that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, meaning we were crafted with loving care and precision by the hands of God. But when people we look to for affirmation of our worth treat us as though we’re expendable to them, it crushes our soul and fractures our identity.
I didn’t have the language for it then, but looking back on the day my mom put me out, I now realize that the sickness I felt in my heart was the pain of being disposable. Although I had a relationship with Jesus by that time and had been under enough teaching to know God loved and cared for me, there was something deeply painful about having the one who brought me into the world tell me to my face that she didn’t want me. She had said it many times before, but when she said it that day and told me to get out of the house, it broke me yet again.
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