Update

I lost access to this account. 

I temporarily blogged over at boberlain.blogspot.com. I'll return here now. 

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Listen

  Psalm 143:8 ESV Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. What’s the first thing we do when we wake up? Is it to scroll our phones and check our notifications? Or is it to check in with God through His word, without technological distractions? If we trust in the Lord, we ought to long to hear from Him first thing in the morning. We need daily reminders of His unfailing love. His mercies are new every morning, thankfully. Every day, we need God to direct us. We might be in a groove (or a rut!) of regular practices, yet we should be open to being flexible to whatever life throws at us and what God has for us. He can help us deal with anything that seems to attack us. Morning by morning, we should lift our souls to the Lord. We are to wait in expectancy up Him. He will never fail us. ‘Dear Lord, we come to You this morning expectant of Your goodness to us afresh this day. Please ...
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Love

but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8 (ESV) Cynics question how God loves us. They point out all the wars, famines, plagues and so on in the world and question how God can exist. It could well be questioned how atheists make sense of suffering, because without our Creator, life is meaningless, and therefore who cares about suffering? Thankfully, God demonstrates His love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It's not like we can earn God's salvation. It's only by His grace that we can be saved. The implication of this verse is that if we trust in Christ, we no longer become defined by our sinfulness. Instead, the perfect righteousness of Christ is credited to our bankrupt spiritual accounts. We can be blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. The reformers used to describe us as simultaneously sinful and yet justified. Yet a day will come when we will be like Christ, for we will se...
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Listen

 James 1:19 ESV  Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger;  As the Turkish proverbs goes, if speaking is silver, listening is golden. Speaking is easy; listening is hard. James calls us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. We have two ears and one mouth. This suggests that we should listen about twice as much as we speak! We have a good record of Jesus's words, but he is the ultimate listener too, to respond appropriately to his hearers. James isn't just telling us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, or even to seek to emulate Christ. He reminds us that we're brethren. We're adopted into God's family through faith in Jesus. Anger isn't necessarily wrong. In our anger we're not to sin. We're not to be quick tempered. 'Abba God, we praise you for adopting us into your family. Please help us to display the family characteristics: to be good, temperate listeners. For the glory of your name, a...
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