“Therefore, confess your sins to one another,” James 5:16 Confess – The essence of the Greek word for confess (exomologeo) is “to speak out the same word”. Confession is not saying, “I’m sorry.” An apology carries no lasting commitment. Confession is a binding agreement, like a legal contract, in which I acknowledge that what you…
“Your judgments are like a great deep” Psalm 36:6 Judgment – The Bible is absolutely consistent on the matter: God is just. This is not a statement about what He does. It is a statement about who He is. Justice is one of the principle characteristics of God. It is simply impossible for God to…
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” Genesis 18:25 Judge – Modern Western culture is a society governed by law. As fickle and malleable as the law seems to be, it is nevertheless the basis of our social interactions. A judge is supposed to be the one who interprets the law. In…
“without consulting Me” Isaiah 30:2 Consulting – Have you asked? Don’t be so quick to answer. Consider (Jesus liked that word). The prophet Isaiah speaks God’s words in the first few verses of chapter 30. What is God’s complaint? You haven’t asked. How does He know? Because you “execute a plan, but it is not…
“you shall love your neighbor as yourself” Leviticus 19:18 Neighbor – When Jesus spoke these words to the lawyer, he did not make them up. He simply quoted Scripture (a rather good decision when confronted with an opponent). What you wouldn’t know (but what the lawyer should have known) is that this word translated “neighbor”…
“The Lord is my shepherd” Psalm 23:1 Shepherd – One of the most ancient words in the Bible is this Hebrew word, ro’eh. It is an extremely important word because it tells us something about the role of the leader that we absolutely must know. Since 2300 BC this word has described what a leader…
“but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works; that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me,” John 10:38 Know and Understand – Greek is very precise about time and action. When a Greek sentence wishes to convey two different temporal circumstances in the same phrase,…
“but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works; that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me,” John 10:38 Works – Yesterday we discovered that the Hebrew word abad has the sense of both work and worship. In the divinely ordered world, what we do as…
“and there was no man to cultivate the ground” Genesis 2:5 Cultivate – You probably knew that work is divinely ordained. God didn’t create the world in order to have a pristine paradise of perfect precision. Paradise wasn’t lost when Man arrived. It was completed. Long before sin, Man had work to do. God intended…
“For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life?” Ecclesiastes 6:12 Futile – Life is too short and you only get one shot at it. You rarely get the chance to start all over. You never get to undo the mistakes you made. Learning…
