Your conscience may be invisible but it is certainly not inactive! Who hasn’t been kept awake by its pleadings? With incredible regularity, an unforgiven conscience can rob us of an appetite, steal our sleep, and drive us to distraction. Do you remember Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”? The main character has committed murder.
Read MoreCategory Archives: Sin
Self-Promotion
As you continue your attentive listening this week, keep your ears open for another kind of offensive, unproductive speech. It might seem like a minor problem, but I assure you, the Scriptures take this seriously. I’m referring to boasting, to speech or activities that assume a place of superiority over others. 4. Boasting
Read MoreYour Greatest Treasure
As we examine Solomon’s counsel on the importance of guarding one’s heart, note that he again directs his words to “my son.” Because the Holy Spirit preserved this passage for us, we now benefit from Solomon’s wise fatherly advice. Observe his comment about inclining your ear to his sayings and keeping them “in the midst of your heart” (v. 21). Very interesting!
Read MoreGod’s Standard of Living
Benjamin Franklin once called David’s Psalm 15 the “Gentleman’s Psalm.” To him, it represented the standard of life after which a gentleman should pattern his walk. As fine a description as that may be, David’s song goes even deeper than that—it is indeed the “Christian’s Psalm.” It sets forth not so much the way a person finds the Lord as the way we are to live after the Lord has entered our life.
Read MoreStinkin’ Thinkin’
Sunday, we examined two reasons why people fail to heed the counsel of wisdom—found either in Scripture or other sources—when making choices. Some stubbornly resist wisdom because they are strong-willed and refuse to surrender. Others simply fail to hear wise counsel due to insensitivity. Today, we encounter two additional factors. Indifference “You neglected all my counsel” (1:25).
Read MoreFailure to Yield
Solomon pleaded with his son—and, by extension, with all of us—to heed the warning voice of wisdom. A good question is, why? Why must Solomon plead? Why do we ignore God’s reproofs, those in Scripture as well as those that come through other means? Looking back at the sayings preserved for us in Proverbs 1, I discover at least four reasons we do not heed reproof.
Read MoreOut of the Mouths of Babes
Divine reproofs aren’t limited to Scripture. While Scripture is God’s primary instrument of communication, He will use any means necessary to get our attention when we’re headed in the wrong direction. On other occasions, reproofs come verbally from those who care about us, including parents, friends, children, mates, employers, neighbors, a policeman, a teacher, a coach . . . any number of people.
Read MoreDanger Signs
Author and pastor Andy Stanley tells of a time when he and a friend drove from Birmingham to Atlanta and, to shave an hour off their trip, decided to use an unfinished section of Interstate 20. Impulsive teenagers, they felt a rush of adrenaline as they eased their car between the words “Road” and “Closed” and then gunned it. They had the entire highway to themselves, so they made great time . . . for a while.
Read MoreReproofs
Let’s face it: we are a wayward flock of sheep! It’s not so much that we are ignorant, but rather that we are disobedient. More often than not, we know what we ought to do. Put plainly, we simply do not put what we know into practice. So we spend our days enduring the irksome and painful consequences of going our own way. The grind of disobedience is neither easy nor new.
Read MoreA Life beyond Compare
The central lesson in Psalm 1 is this: there is not the slightest similarity between the spiritually accelerating life of the righteous and the slowly eroding life of the wicked. Take time to ponder the bold contrasts: Godly: Happiness many times over Ungodly: Not so! Godly: Uncompromised purity Ungodly: Driven by the wind
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