The Love Of God

Not just Valentine cards that come from mankind's common understanding, but the Bible itself has much to say about the heart. Jeremiah tells us that the "heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." David, in Psalm 139, says, "Search me, O God, and know my heart." Proverbs commands, "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart...;" Luke 8:15 tells us, "On the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep [it], and bring forth fruit with patience"; and Luke writes in Acts 2:37 "Now when they heard [this], they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men [and] brethren, what shall we do?"

To answer the question, "What is true love?" the last place we should look is to psychologists. They are very good at explaining love away by giving us a psychological definition but very short on what we need to know. We need rather to consult God's Word. True love comes only from God, as we yield to Him and allow Him to pour His love through us to others. "We love him, because he first loved us," (1 Jn 4:19); "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son [to be] the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10).

None of us is the wellspring of love. We are at best empty vessels that He can fill with His love and make us conduits of that love to others. Many of us are too full of ourselves to have any room left for loving God or genuinely loving others. It doesn't have to be this way. We can make it a continual prayer: "Lord, help me to love You with all of my heart, mind, and soul. Then pour Your love through me to others."

True love is God's love and is described like this:

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love [is] strong as death; jealousy [is] cruel as the grave: the coals thereof [are] coals of fire, [which hath a] most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if [a] man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned [rejected with disdain]. (Song 8:6-7)

Dave Hunt, TRUE LOVE - PART ONE

Avoid Having Your Conscience Seared With A Hot iron

It is important to note that no Christian becomes worldly all of a sudden. Worldliness creeps up on a believer; it is a gradual process. First is the friendship of the world (James 4:4). By nature, the world and the Christian are enemies (“Marvel not, my brethren, it the world hate you,” 1 John 3:13). A Christian who is a friend of the world is an enemy of God.

Next, the Christian becomes “spotted by the world” (James 1:27). The world leave its dirty marks on one or two areas of his life. This means that gradually the believer accepts and adopts the ways of the world.

When this happens, the world ceases to hate the Christian and starts to love him! So John warns us, “Love not the world!”—but too often our friendship with the world leads to love. As a result, the believer becomes conformed to the world (Rom. 12:2) and you can hardly tell the two apart.

Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Real [commentary on 1 John], pg. 73-74

Ultimate Questions Of Life

In his book, Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), which is a history of Western philosophy told through his own intellectual journey, Magee offers what could be a partial answer to these questions when he describes how in his late thirties, despite having a passionate attachment to life, he was driven to the edge of mental illness, even suicide, by metaphysical terror. He learned to control his terror, which, though he did not say so, recalled Blaise Pascal’s fear of “immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me”, through reading the writings of others, notably Arthur Schopenhauer. “I think the feeling of meaninglessness is worst of all, worse than the fear of death itself,” Magee said. “The feeling that nothing matters, that there’s no point to anything. Certainly, I have experiences, in the forms of extreme existential terror, states of mind that bordered on the intolerable.” He also published a novel in which he explored his existential terror, Facing Death (1977).

The final paragraph of Ultimate Questions, in which Magee speculates on how he might feel at the point of death, is especially haunting. “I can only hope that,” he writes, “when it is my turn, my curiosity will overcome my fear – though I may then be in the position of a man whose candle goes out and plunges him into pitch darkness at the very instant when he thought he was about to find what he was looking for."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/04/even-old-age-philosopher-bryan-magee-remains-wonder-struck-ultimate-questions

Is It Wise To Gamble?

For today's article we will be looking at a few bible verses in order to conclude whether or not Christians should gamble. Let's begin.