Thinking Aloud

            What is a blessing?   Christians often confuse prosperity with blessing. Success, fame, power, knowledge, authority, and wealth are not necessarily blessings. Misfortune, misery, poverty, and failure can be blessings in disguise. The word “b lessing” in the Bible means many things. Sometimes it means the form of words used in invoking the grant of good, as in Deuteronomy 33:1; Joshua 8:34; and James 3:10. Sometimes it means the good or the benefit itself which has been conferred on the believer, as in Genesis 27:36, “Oh, haven’t you saved even one blessing for me?” and Proverbs 10:22, “The blessing of the Lord makes a person rich…” in 1Corinth 10:16 the word is used in a special meaning “When we bless the cup at the Lord’s Table, aren’t we sharing in the blood of Christ?”.   Here we are blessing the Lord!             The book of Reve...

        In the well-known passage in John 3 where Jesus is discussing spiritual matters with Nicodemus, He tells the Pharisee: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God (John 3:3 KJV). Some versions translate the word for “born again” as “born anew” or “born from above”. In 3:5 Jesus Himself explains “… Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be ‘born of water and of the Spirit’, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God ”. Thus we see there are multiple synonyms for “born again” and it is quite legitimate to use any one of them to mean regeneration .       Now there are two aspects Jesus brings about in His discourse:       (1)   Even the most zealous practitioners of the Mosaic Law is spiritually “dead” and is unable to live up to God’s expectation. Only He who gave life at the beginning can give man the (spiritual) life necessary to do ...

Isaiah 55:6 Seek the  Lord  while you can find him. Call on him now while he is near. God came near to us by revealing Himself through Jesus Christ, but in order for this revelation to be effective, there is something we must do. We must look for the Lord. Hebrews 11:6 says that we should "sincerely try to find Him." Through Jeremiah 29:13 God assures us "when you search for me with all your heart, you will find me." It is our sin that has alienated us from God and it is necessary therefore, that we turn from our sin and look for God. ( Isaiah 59:2 But your iniquities have come between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, from hearing.) We should turn from looking anywhere and everywhere else and look for Him . Psalms 32:6 says “… let every godly one pray to You, in a time when You may be found”. We are told that we should turn to God and look for Him before it is too late ( while you can find Him) . The most obviou...