“Who or what owns your heart?” Is it the world? Do the material things on earth own your heart, or does God own your heart? Those are the kind of questions that Jesus wants us to ask ourselves from time to time. Who or what owns our hearts can be determined by what we truly […]
So far in this great Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has taught us the right and wrong way to pray, and the attitude with which to pray. Now He gives us some examples of the kind of things for which we should pray. Consider with me what the Master now teaches us about prayer. We […]
Prayer is vital to the life of a Christian. The Bible emphasizes that Christians should be engaged in a life of prayer. Jesus said, in Luke 18:1, that we “should always pray and not faint.” Do you have a daily practice of praying? We saw in our previous blog that we should discipline ourselves to […]
In our last blog, I wrote about the wrong way to pray. Now let us see the right way to pray. Jesus said, we are to enter the closet and pray to the Father in secret. But, what does it really mean to enter the closet and pray? I suggest the following: It means to […]
There is a right and wrong way to pray. Here are a couple of wrong ways. We should not pray to be seen of men (ver. 5) This is not a denouncement of public prayer. Jesus and His disciples often prayed publicly (John 11:41, 42; Acts 12:5; 27: 37). What Jesus is denouncing is praying […]
If anyone has ever traveled the second mile for others, it was Jesus. Paul said that Jesus emptied Himself. How did He do this? He did it by giving up the riches of heaven, taking on the form of a servant, and being made in the likeness of men (2 Corinthians 8:9; Philippians 2:5-8). Why […]
In the first eighteen verses of this chapter, Jesus deals with the improper doing of righteousness. If you use the King James Version, you need to realize that the word alms found in verses 1 and 2 of that translation are derived from two different Greek words. The word alms in verse one should be […]
In this fifth chapter of Matthew, we have seen five perversions of the Law by the Jewish leaders, both past and present. They perverted what the Law taught concerning killing, adultery, divorce, swearing and retaliation. Now, we find them at it again, this time in the area of love. Never did they reveal their deficiency […]
“Late one summer evening in Broken Bow, Nebraska, a weary truck driver pulled his rig into an all-night truck stop. He was tired and hungry. The waitress had just served him when three tough looking, leather jacketed motorcyclist decided to give him a hard time. Not only did they verbally abuse him, one grabbed the […]
Someone said, “Looking for people of integrity in our generation could be compared to searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Indeed, it may be easier trying to identify a grain of salt in a snowstorm.” That is a bit of an overstatement, but there is some truth to it. People with integrity are […]