Some believers in God’s Messiah become enraptured with Bible study and/or prophecy to understand “hidden” meaning and timelines for the Day of the Lord. In Luke 12 and Matthew 6, Yeshua continued a parable-filled teaching on how God wants one to be truly prepared for that day: preparing one’s heart and mind then doing God-ordained tasks in the real world.
God instructs His people to open their hands and share the abundance of God’s blessings with those who need help. Yeshua weaved together teachings on greed, charity and wealth.
Prayer is one of the ways we communicate with God and this communication is a two-way street. We check what we hear from God and what we say to God via what He’s already said to us through His recorded words in Scripture.
In the secular world, when we send emails to each other, the servers that route these messages around the world have error-checking methods to make sure that the pieces of information received make up the same message that was sent.
On other hand, we are to be persistent in humility, asking the Lord to give us good things and not treating Him like a safe with a stubborn lock to be picked.
Effective communication requires attentive listening and confirmation a message is received, perhaps via a reply or acting on the information delivered. The passages in Luke 10:38–11:13 and Matthew 6 contain lessons in effectively listening to God and talking with Him.
Building on our first discussion of lessons in communicating with God, we will explore the second lesson: Get the will-ies when asking for God’s will to be done in forgiveness and ways God is re-establishing dominion on Earth.
Effective communication requires attentive listening and confirmation a message is received, perhaps via a reply or acting on the information delivered. The passages in Luke 10:38-11:13 and Matthew 6 contain lessons in effectively listening to God and talking with Him.
The first lesson is in the account of Yeshua’s visit to the home of Marta and Miriam in Bethany. This is not just a little biographical story. It’s a lesson, starting with the names of the women themselves.
“What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” “Who is my neighbor?” At first these questions seem contradictory. Some even accuse the questioners of attempting to entrap Yeshua. However, honest seekers of truth regularly challenged rabbis with tough questions, as did Abraham, Moses and others.
The trustworthiness of the Bible has been under attack in earnest by skeptical scholars for more than 200 years. In recent times, there have been popularist attacks that use morality arguments to argue against the morality of the Bible.
Dan Savage, homosexual rights activist, columnist and founder of the It Gets Better antibullying campaign, spoke to a large national conference for high school journalists hosted by the National Scholastic Press Association and the Journalism Education Association in April 2012. In a profanity-laden address, he attacked those who quote the Bible as a reason for opposing acceptance of homosexuality.
Given incomplete knowledge of the Torah time period, we can either trust God’s prescription for the situation or feign complete knowledge that the remedy was worse than the condition. Compared with the secular view of existence, God’s view of existence presented in the Bible is a better representation of reality.